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Mallison’ “You shouldn't dream of breeding at all. Your current offspring requires every ounce of guidance if she is to walk beside you.”\n\nThe eevee replied with a presumptuous roll of the eyes.\n\nCress loaded a lecture in his mind, ready to fire upon his pet project for the insolent display, but purged the thought as the call connected with a loud, metallic CLACK and the camera on the other side came into focus.\n\n“Gah… Givvit here, Atlas.” The microphone shuffled as the images smeared with motion blurs.\n\n“Thanks.” Lieutenant Keenan Steele’s dexnav lens followed him with an awkward, upward angle. “Aaah, good evening, Doctor! Strange getting a call from you in the hexing hours.” He was bare from the belt up, sweat dripping from a chest of shredded crevices cut from granite slabs.\n\n“I am loathe to hassle you so late, but I assure you that the matter is quite urgent.”\n\n“Ah, not a problem, big guy. Lemme put you right up here…” The view panned out as his dex was perched upon an empty, barbell rack. Steele slapped his knees, crashing back upon a pressing bench in some dim-lit, precinct gym. It was crowded, surrounded by equally-ripped Lucario quietly pumping iron as they eyed Cress with suspicion.\n\n“Strange time for anaerobic exercise, isn’t it?” Cress asked with an eyebrow raised as he scanned those pokemon in the background of his live feed.\n\nAll male. Seasoned, dog-tagged combatants well beyond adult maturity, wrought with bodies grizzled in ghoulish scars. One-by-one, they returned to staring at the ends of their empty, gossamer eyes as their interest slowly faded away.\n\nSteele nodded up at a monstrous, six-foot-five, spotting ‘mon with bulging, cornerstone shoulders, and laid down with his palms up. “Only time the boys get the gym all to themselves.”\n\n“I don’t suppose you’ve considered setting such a diligent example when your officers are actually around?”\n\nSteele dusted his palms in chalk and grunted as Atlas brought the barbell down with round, cast-iron wheels reading ‘150 lbs’ on each side. “Hooo. Hng, alright. Nah, not-a one of them’s ready for my regiment.” He shoved the weights up with ease, again and again, breathing in steady time.\n\n“One might think the missus is lonely in bed,” Indoles cooed as his attention was drawn away from his live, extra access, league battle broadcast.\n\nSteele chuckled and groaned as a couple ‘carios added two-more identical weights to his set. “Kgghah, yeaaah! C’mon, you and I both know that was never in the cards.”\n\n“I suppose,” Cress replied. “I can see you’re busy, so I’ll cut to the chase. I just read through your report on Mallison and I had some concerns I’d like cleared up.”\n\n“Fffnnnggg. Mmm, aaah, that fool?” Steel ground his teeth, clattering the metal back up with a sharp pop of the arms. “What of him?”\n\nCress cleared his throat. “I’m a bit shocked to find the words ‘suspected homicide’ littering this affidavit you’ve submitted to Mauville Hall of Justice. Quite the story you’ve written up.”\n\n“Aaah, yeah, don’t… ghkah! …real piece of work, that one. I’d steer clear, Doc. He’s heading nowhere in a hurry.” His arms were starting to slow, his breathing building in intensity as his face ran with slobbering beads of sweat. “I personally guarantee it.”\n\nIndoles crept over to the edge of the bed, listening in with a delighted look on his face. “Oooh, Richard’s wallflowers’ got corpses in their closet, huh? That complicates things.”\n\n“Shush!” Cress snapped up at his pet.\n\nSteele smiled. “Whoa, hey Indie! Been a while, still setting records up in Frankenstein's lab?”\n\n“Salute, chief.” Indoles waved and let his paws hang over the edge. “Every single day.”\n\n“Hell yeah, convince your curmudgeon there to let ya jam one of these nights, aight?”\n\nCress grunted at the disruption. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you a favor.”\n\nSteele strained, face turning pink as he filled and purged his lungs on repeat. “Hit me.”\n\nHis spotter cocked his head. “Caa, lara?” he asked with uneasiness in his tone.\n\nSteele nodded with his elbows at a powerful, shallow bend.\n\nAtlas shrugged, and a pair of ‘50’s were clipped on.\n\nCress paid close attention to the man’s physique as it started to shake with the strain. “Ahem, shift that one-inch right, you want to be perfectly centered at that sort of intensity.”\n\nThe old lucario nodded, helping him with the adjustment, then gave Cress a pawsy, thumbs-up.\n\n“Hnnnggg, gaaah. Thanks, Doc.”\n\nDr. Cress nodded, abandoning his pleasantries. “I’d like Mallison’s case shelved.”\n\nAll activity in the gym came to a sudden, unsettling stop as the ‘carios went right back to staring.\n\nSteele, however, didn’t stop. His jaw clenched as he curled his legs back with every single, flesh rending rep. “Fuuuck-errr… Sh- Nnnaaa!” he roared as the bar made its way back up. “Hit me!”\n\nThe police-chief's partners nodded, grunting in approval as Steele chose to push on, and slipped another hundred pounds to Steele’s impressive, dead-iron stack. This left Cress looking on with rapt, analytical observation as the weight slowly lowered to his chest and Atlas kept his paws ready to snatch the bar at a moment’s notice. \n\n“Haah… Haah… No can do. Not with a gaggle of rebel pod people playing dead-weight. Warrants’ on my desk, and an old, cold case is worth its weight in gold.” He turned to the camera and winked. “I’ve got my own suspicions about little-old ‘Emmi’ I wanna look into.”\n\n“Of course you do.” Cress groused, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I find it puzzling that a man with your background hasn’t an ounce of clemency to spare for cases like this one.”\n\n“I… guugh, ngggrrraaah!” Keenan growled low and slow, like a challenger was fast approaching. “Haah, haah… I cleaned my act up a [b]long [/b]time ago,” he said as his body quivered and twitched with those long, herculean lifts ripping the muscles of his chest apart.\n\n“Hit… me…”\n\nAtlas’ face washed with serious concern. “Aaah… Ra-la cara lo?”\n\n“D-did I st-tutter, fucker?” he asked with a furious, jaw-gnashing look of disgust. “Hit. Me.”\n\nIseas Samuel Cress sat like a researcher scribbling notes in a hidden ducklett-blind as another couple fifties barely clinged to the solid-steel rod. Nine-hundred pounds warped and bowed the bar in his grip and the skin of his wrists split open, threatening to crush the man’s torso as threads of blood trickled down his arms and stained his sweaty puddles red. “Fascinating.”\n\nThe darkness in the gymnasium lit with excitement as he writhed around, piping and puffing with every half-shredded strand of fiber pushing like a skitty laying wailord eggs.\n\n“Nnnggg…” his arms started wiggling with his face turning red, and his spotter lunged.\n\n“BACK OFF!” Steele barked with his teeth bared, slamming his feet down for support, and his muscles slid right back into place as he conjured up some feral, superhuman burst of strength.\n\nLieutenant Steele screamed and sent the weights wobbling up into the air, only permitting the enemy to escape his blood-soaked clutches when [b]he[/b] was good and done with them.\n\nThe room rumbled with the applause of heavy, steel-type paws as he was helped up to a hazy sit, and slumped his elbows into his knees as a couple ‘mon wrapped his hands in gauze.\n\n“Bravo,” Cress finally permitted himself to speak aloud. He waited a moment, giving Steele time to let the ringing in his ears subside and suck down a couple bottles of water. “I don’t suppose a department-wide, J-series [b]recalibration[/b] would be considerable to the department’s needs?”\n\nSteele snatched the dexnav up, glaring down into Cress’ insentient, room-temperature face. “Come again?”\n\n“I’ll make Father’s language plain,” Indoles cut in. “Factory reset.”\n\nSteele’s nerves chilled and he murmured a disturbed, braindead chuckle. “You can do that?”\n\nCress nodded with a single blink. “A clean slate should rehabilitate your conscious capital, yes.”\n\nSteele fought to contain an arm-twisted look of pain as his inner demons battled with the cold, hard demands of modern life. He thought to mumble some incriminating questions up, but the conditions were clear as ethylene gas, smelled just as foul, and stained the open air with risk.\n\nVerbally or not, Cress knew that this was the moment to say nothing at all.\n\nFinally, after a full ten minutes of sour-faced deliberation, he sighed and closed his eyes. “Y’know, maybe I [b]will [/b]keep my eye on him. Just a little longer…”\n\n“You know what they say.” Indoles’s mouth twisted into a cool, malicious smirk as he read the empty, sixth slot in Horace Slate’s competition roster. “A hasty chase spoils the case.”\n\n\n\n\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/\n\n\n\n“[b]GO![/b]”\n\n\nRichard smirked, snapping his fingers with confidence and command. “Macham, Bind!” he shouted, to Emil’s astonishment. “Make me some [b]Macramé[/b]!”\n\nVaporeon smiled and clapped her paws. “Ooh, fancy words!”\n\n“SO MUCH FUN!” Bianca cheered, pushing play-calloused knuckles into her cheeks with glee.\n\nRich’s face went slack. “Huh?”\n\nShe punched at the air, grinding the balls of her boots against the ground. “Get’m baby, that's [u]your[/u] jam he’s playing!”\n\nEmil’s mind whip-snapped into action as Mienshao’s aerodyne body circled her prey. “Wait, hold up!”\n\nMachamp’s veteran-battlers’ mind had leapt right into action long before any thought came to consider alternatives. Some ‘mon could come up with better reactions on their own, if they felt their trainer had made a mistake or missed something, or if they simply didn’t trust them, but ol’ Machamp had long cast his Stone-cold doubts aside.\n\nThe caped gladiator leapt forward with all four hands clutching at the air, flapping like a flag in a storm. “Chaaaaamp!”\n\nMienshao grinned and chirped with a snap of the vermillion ropes wrapped around her paws. “{You want [b][u]me[/u][/b], huh?}”\n\nMachamp felt that strange, niggling sensation rushing up his back again as he caught the tiniest, alluring glimpse of her gazing eyes. “{Huh, ah!}” he choked as she slipped past his fists and up into his ‘comfort zone’, suddenly remembering that he even [b]had[/b] one in the middle of combat.\n\nWith a twitch of the cheek she let his arms wrap around her back, then slid her chest, neck, and face up his body, from thigh, to hip, to abs, to pecs, ending with her cold little nose tickling at his neck. “{Show me what you got!.}”\n\nMachamp’s instincts leapt him away, suddenly short of breath as he worked on whatever distorted thing that was wrong with him. “{G-gah. Hold still, I’ll be gentle!}” he shouted out, trying to keep his grip on the bravado he’d shown up with.\n\n“{Awww…}” Mienshao chittered with a long, husky, effeminate cackle. “{That’s suuuch a shame,}” she lamented with her face half-hidden behind the flaps of her arms, and then suddenly fell to all fours and swept the [b]other[/b] pair of lines clutched in her hind-paws behind her with the force of her entire body.\n\nThe muffled screams of Emil, Richard, the Crowd, and even that sensation of something curling around his ankles came roaring back like a tunnel flushed with water. Machamp gasped, yelling in surprise as his feet smashed together like a pair of super-attracted magnets and were pulled out from under him, crashing onto his back with an wrecked-paver crack. \n\n“{I didn’t come all this way for a [b]snuggle[/b], big boy.}” The audience gasped as Mienshao scurried atop his shoulders and raked her razor sharp claws all the way down his chest. “{[b]Give it to me[/b][b]![/b]}”\n\nBianca brought a thumbed fist to her lips in thought. “Huh, well, that works I guess, but it'd be alot easier with a GRIP CLAW, ya silly noodle!”\n\nEmil clawed at his cheeks, tugging at his face. “The blazing bannettes is going on?! It’s like he’s deaf or something!”\n\n“Ey! ‘Champ! Snap out of it, buddy!” \n\nRichard was starting to feel the pressure now. The batshit witch was shuffling some serious nasties around in that old bag of tricks. Maylene must’ve been slim pickens in Bianca’s mind to get put out with such a straight-forward punch to the gut.\n\n“Close Combat!” he commanded, pressing the ball’s command switch.\n\nThe Royal exhibition box was equally aroused as the Bourbon nobility leaned on the tips of their toes, barely clinging to their seats.\n\nMachamp snapped back to his senses as a bloody pair of three-lined tracks were laid into his flesh, and his knuckles popped as all his fists balled up with ochre light. “{You asked for it!}”\n\nEveryone watching winced as Machamp’s strikes made their mark: from neck, to side, to temple, to toe. She whimpered and cried as he did so, practically winding her body around his limbs from the force, but only Team Stone's finest, femboy support ‘mon could see the elated smile she was hiding from the crowd.\n\nSpinel, who’d taken his place on the sidelines to pep and pamper his new teammates, tilted his head with interest at Machamp’s bewitched reactions. “{What the-?}”\n\nMachamp finished his barrage by yanking his feet apart, breaking the single loop of rope holding them fast (but not the two stringing him to her paws) and grabbed her by the nape of her neck and the scruff of her hips. “{You’re going dooown!}” he roared, hefting her above his head.\n\n“Oh [b]yeah[/b], Seismic Toss!” Rich called her number, pointing across the field. “Hope you’re ready to dig her out, lady!”\n\nBianca gasped in horror. “Mienshao! DO SOMETHING!” she screeched, dancing on her heels as if she had[b] zero[/b] control of the situation.\n\nMienshao nodded back and giggled, barely hiding the shiner forming over her right eye as she slipped between his fingers like a bar of prison soap.\n\nHe shuddered as the wings dangling from her arms stroked his cheek and she spun around his back, coiling his cape around his head.\n\nMienshao, body visible in her glorious, battered-blue state, tugged at a pair of lines she’d managed to tie around his upper-biceps during the assault. Machamp’s screams were muffled up in his own wound-up regalia as the ropes tightened, his upper-arms snapped into wriggling torchic-wings and his towering body rolled along her back.\n\n“{Oooh yeah!}” Mienshao moaned with exhausted pleasure, nuzzling Machamp’s face through the cloth. “{That’s the stuff!}”\n\nBianca cackled again. “Nice Focus Sash, sneaky boy! You buy that from the Poke Libre folks?”\n\n“Maybe!” Richard grunted, scratching at his cheek. “VITAL THROW!”\n\nBianca’s palm slapped her lips. “OH NO!” she cried as the audience murmured alongside her.\n\nMienshao rolled Machamp around her lithe, powerhouse body and bucked him away with her shoulders. “{Down we– Gah!}”\n\nMachamp snatched her skull in his upper hands and nabbed her flaps in his bottom grip, wrapping them around [b]her [/b]head instead.\n\nShe squeaked with manic, cackling laughs as her back claws playfully scraped across his skin and felt herself lifted back into the air.\n\nMachamp growled, winding his face up like a furious cloth of fresh-pressed cheese, buckled his elbows in, slid his feet past her stance, and howled with all his might as he was forced to maneuver the debacle back into his own favor. “HUHR HUHHRRR!”\n\nOnlookers popped up off their feet as the virgin, concrete pad laid early in the morning shattered into a twenty-foot scab of shale centered where her body was swung up, and over, and down into the ground with a wave of amber light.\n\nMachamp’s head ripped free as his cape was torn apart from the force, grumbling with muscles bulging around his restraints.\n\nMienshao laid in the dirt, eyes wide with shock as she finally managed to suck the wind back into her punch-stunned lungs through a glowing, gourgeist grin.\n\n“You ok, honey?” Bianca called out. “Need to switch?!”\n\nRichard snickered and sneered, “she’s gettin’ real tore up, granny!”\n\nWhen Mienshao returned the worried call with an emphatic shake of the head, Bianca pumped her fist and nodded back. “Awww well, you know what they say…” she began, her expression mirroring her ‘mon’s.\n\nRichard seized on the sudden turn-turn-turn around. “Bulldoze!” he yelled as Machamp snapped the knots holding his wrists up inside his armpits.\n\n“PIT HAPPENS!” Bianca screamed, swinging one arm around like a windmill, then stabbed her finger down, straight to Groudon’s den.\n\nMienshao flipped and slithered down into the earth like a fish ducking Machamp’s billowing, pelipper scoop of eye-watering, dust-colored swirls.\n\nRichard shook his head with a smirk. “You think I’m gonna fall for that trick twice, lady? Earthquake!”\n\nThe command interrupted Machamp from fighting against the scarlet bracelets Mienshao left on his ankles and wrists. Biceps, triceps, glutes, and abs all came together to bring his leg up for a single, glorious stomp, his head fronds glowing with a power that only came with decades of work. “CHAAAAMP!”\n\nHis foot struck the ground and the tile floor turned to concrete soup, showering the front-seats in a dusty, pebble hailstorm.\n\nThere was silence for a while as Bianca waited with bated breath, a lip’s breadth from chewing her nails in anticipation. “C’mon. C’mon. C’mon,” she silently mouthed, practically in prayer.\n\nSuddenly a diglett mound burrowed its way around Machamp’s flank, like a predator circling a boat stranded at sea. \n\nMachamp didn’t wait, he knew exactly what Richard and his grandfather would do. He curled his arms up in a defensive stance, closed his eyes with a faint, iridescent halo around his body. \n\n“Run!” Emil shouted.\n\nRichard shook his head. “Machamp, don’t fall for it. Get out of there!”\n\nMachamp looked back in shock, but trusted Richard’s judgement. This looked exactly like the thing Lucario fell for in Maylene’s match, after all.\n\nHe bolted, maintaining his Counter focus, blasting a pair of craters into the earth as his feet pushed off, and booked it to safe, sturdy–\n\n“Machamp, WATCH YOUR STEP!” Bianca screamed.\n\n“{Huh?!}” One of Machamps two-toed feet snagged on a red booby-trap snare hid beneath a fine sheet of powder. “{DAMMIT!}” he managed to scream just before he dined on premium, gourmet shit practically excavating dirt with his wailing gob. \n\nEmil and Vaporeon’s heads cocked, brows tight, mirrored with confusion.\n\nRichard made a bewildered guffaw. “You sneaky hex!”\n\nBianca’s ecstatic bouncing at her mon turning the tide stopped with a record scratch and a dumbfounded tilt of the head. “Huh? He really was in danger, though!”\n\nMienshao burst up from the rubble and somersaulted back, untangling the lines with fine, godling grace. “{Where do you think [b]you’re[/b] going?}” she jeered, and reeled him back to shore.\n\nMachamp reached for the rope, spewing muddy mouthfuls of cud as he was drawn and quartered towards her. “{You knock that off!}” he coughed, and—\n\n“{Ah-ah-ah!}” Mienshao tisked and sent a volley of machine-gun swirls sliding down the line with blurry snaps of the wrist.\n\nThe old ‘mon growled in frustration as his forearm was wrapped, again and again, until a skin-swelling cuff of rope bit into him. “{Fight me like a mon!}”\n\nMienshao sang that amorous, husky pang again. “{[u]You’re[/u] the one running, sugar,}” she barked, and unearthed another cord from the crumble with an ear-splitting whip-crack.\n\n[i]Oh yeah, well [/i][i][b]two [/b][/i][i]can play at that game.[/i] Richard balled up his fist. “Yo, Mienshao, you better get in close while you can. Machamp’s got a mean focus blast he’s just itching to throw!”\n\nShe curled her back and crouched like a hunter in the brush. “{My pleasure.}”\n\nMachamp had barely enough time to bring his arms up for a hasty, defensive crunch. “CHA MAPA!” he shouted back across his shoulder.\n\nRichard didn’t need to be a pokeglott to know when he was being called out as a traitor.\n\nVaporeon nibbled at her lover’s ear. “{What is the idiot doing right now?}” she hissed.\n\nEmil gave Richard the side-eye, but thought it best to keep his protests to himself.\n\n“Watch the rope’s, Machamp! She’s a bindmaster ‘mon!” Bianca flailed her arms around. “Low Sweep!” she instructed as Mienshao fired herself fangs-first, right for the abdomen.\n\nMachamp felt just about as willing to let a weavile watch an egg, but saw the opening in Mienshao’s defenses plain as day. What distorted thing was the old bag up to?\n\n[i]Ah, well, never look a gift-bray in the mouth,[/i] he thought, and fell to all-sixes, swirling his legs around.\n\nMienshao’s stubby legs were hooked at the thigh, swept aside with a glowing, orange ankle and spun like a flung-off wheel.\n\nHer body skipped across a pond of broken stone and tumbled to a stop. She rolled her joints around with a crepitus crunch and smiled back at her trainer, rubbing her paw across the smoking bruise on her leg, nursing some unseen damage he’d done to her aura.\n\n“Nice job, now you’ve slowed her down. Go for it! Close Combat!” Bianca shouted as if she’d been infected with that youthful, first-time excitement a child got watching the masters at work.\n\nRichard was starting to wonder if he was on the wrong side of the ring, desperate to turn that strange, ever-revolving table Bianca had them playing on back around.\n\n[i]Gotta earn her trust first.[/i] “Go for the solar plexus!”\n\n“PACHAAA?!” Machamp decried as his weakness was laid plain for Arceus and everyone to see.\n\nMienshao blasted forward in a flash and they collided with a thud that struck those closest to the ring like a board against their chests.\n\nThough she was a full head smaller than Machamp, and stumbling from the sweep, Mienshao was formidable and unyielding in her assault. She danced around his lumbering arms and plunged her claws into the rubble, snagging his limbs in snares she’d laid with care,\n\nMachamp snarled as she tugged him towards her by his ankles and wrists, and smashed her across his shin with a bony smack that made the audience shift with sympathetic suffering. \n\nMienshao practically wrapped around his leg in flow with the force, but she clenched her claws, flipped to her feet, and prepared to stand her ground against the coming storm.\n\nEach battered the other here-and-there-and-everywhere, trading tortures with bare-knuckle scourges in a whipping blizzard of blows.\n\n“Aaah, um, err…” Richard tried shouting random, idiot suggestions to the enemy, but either she couldn’t hear him or the girl simply didn’t care if he was there. [i]Long shot, but worth a try.[/i]\n\nMienshao side-stepped a wild, haymaker swing and shoved his sneaky, sucker’s jabs away with ropes pulled tight in her claws. The maneuvers left her opponent teetering at the edge of his toes and she lassoed him to the ground with a catty loop thrown around his head.\n\n“{That’s ENOUGH!}” Machamp slammed his fists into the earth with fury and cracked her across the skull with a high-flying, hand-stand kick. “{Taste it!}”\n\nMienshao’s knees buckled and she tumbled to her ass, then kipped back up to her feet just in time to collect a meteoric, overhand strike square in the eye.\n\nShe shuffled with her muzzle shaking as her senses made it back around. “[b]Mrrrooowwwlll![/b]” she growled, wobbling around with her face draped in traumatized hide.\n\nBianca whooped and socked the air with balled-up fists. “GIT WHAT’S COMIN TO YA!”\n\nFist-shaped marks all over Mienshao’s body glowed red with pent-up stores of power. She tagged his jaw in a jumping, upper-Comeuppance punch that lifted Machamp off his feet with fat, flubbering cheeks.\n\nMachamp’s body shuddered with a warmth he found difficult to describe as her claws made contact again. He felt sluggish and stupid, like a childhood bully feeling pangs of guilt for hitting the wimpy kid with glasses or the fairest schoolyard maiden of the class.\n\nHad she poisoned him? Was he paralyzed? No, the old slugger was well acquainted with those feelings; but what was it, then? “{What is your deal, woman, jeez!}”\n\nSpinel finally realized what he was seeing and trilled so loud that people in the stands actually noticed, to his immediate, humiliated dismay. He ruffled his fluff and his hackles raised as he practically felt Mienshao’s fur stroking Machamp’s skin from afar. He was a pokemon evolved from love, adoration, and affection. How could he NOT see it, hear it, feel it? For Gods’ sake he could [b]taste [/b]her seduction from space.\n\n“{Richie!}” he chirped, wanting so, sooo badly to reach out to his man and tell him with his tendrils. He nearly did it too, barely stopping himself as his teammates on the bench told him off with their eyes. Regulation forbade anyone but the battlers and their trainers from entering the square. He hated it, so fucking much!\n\n“{You guys, she has Cute Charm!}” he squeaked to Vaporeon and Emil, hoping, praying the message would be relayed in time.\n\nVaporeon’s head snapped away from the fight. “{Come again?}”\n\n“{I don’t know how, but that ‘mon was born with Cute Charm. I bet he hasn’t had a good spoink in [u][b]ages[/b][/u] and she’s rustling his jimmies up something [u]fierce[/u]!}”\n\nEmil choked on an exasperated laugh. “Oh for– Rich, switch him out, he’s[b] [/b][b]infatuate[/b][b]d[/b]!”\n\nRichard gawked and thrust his pokeball out. “Hoopa’s Loops! I’ll take the penalty, Machamp, ret–”\n\nMienshao gave Richard the nastiest, most viscerally hostile glare he’d ever seen from a caught mon. “{MINE!}” she screeched, flipped one foot up, and snagged Machamp's thigh in a swirling dervish of rope.\n\nVaporeon recognized [u]that[/u] energy like a reflection in the mirror. “{Oh…}”\n\nThe light from Richard’s pokeball struck Machamp’s body, but his contact and energy proximity with his opponent left his pokeball error-ing out with an aggravating buzz. “Oh shit!”\n\n“{C’mon!}” Ropes creaked and crackled from the force of her battle-augmented body mooring him in place, grunting in a titanic, egotistical tug-of-war. Then her body went slack and he unwittingly slung her into his chest. “{Tussle like you [b]mean[/b] it!}” she crooned and wound her wings around his neck.\n\nMienshao spun on her heels, cinching flesh to fur, and threw him over her shoulder, straight into a stone-shattering, earth-shaking, machamp-handling Bind, the likes of which few had ever bore witness. \n\nMeanwhile, the royal viewing platform exploded with spat drinks and breathless laughter.\n\nEven-more meanwhile, Mr. Gyarados' private family stands were dominated by the incomprehensible hoot-hooting and mon-speech hollering of two very intoxicated pokephiles. \n\nBianca stomped her boots, hot with embarrassment. “[b]Mienshao!” [/b]she groused as she finally realized what was going on. “Now is [u]not[/u] the time! Gods!”\n\nIncineroar and Vaporeon both slowly breathed to keep their tempers in check, ready to leap in at a moment’s notice and put the nutcase down if Machamp couldn’t somehow get it together.\n\nYou would think that four fully-functioning arms would give you an advantage over a smaller, two-armed opponent. But on that teeny-tiny ladder leading up to the Master’s League, nothing should be taken for granted.\n\nMienshao slid his limbs around like they laid atop a bed of ice, striking his body, belly, and cheeks with crushing elbow, after paralyzing jab, after razor, stabbing claw. She didn’t go unscathed though, squinting through watery eyes at the rows of fractured ribs behind her breast.\n\nHe was running out of gas. So was she. Both their gazes hardened; it was time to bring this close-quarter catastrophe to its rightful conclusion.\n\nMachamp made a snapping jab at Mienshao’s throat and her flaps whipped his wrist behind his back. She tied his arms together with all four paws, one by one, and cinched the ropes tight with her foot jammed against his calf.\n \n“{Gaah, this is… Aaaaaa!}” Machamp grumbled and yelled in mortified surprise.\n\nHe wouldn’t stand for this pitiful sort of defeat. “Mrrrraaaaaa!” he gritted his teeth, pushing through the seductive fog clouding his mind, and split the fibers free in an explosion of silk confetti.\n\nTeam Stone’s starter swung himself around, spinning on his tied-together toes, and windmill-smacked a look of astonishment from Mienshao’s face with the cleanest quadruple Dizzy Punch he’d ever mustered.\n\nOne! Two! Three! Four! She stood fast until the final backhand blow and crashed to the earth, splitting a cement slab with her shoulder at the arena’s edge.\n\nMachamp ripped the lasso from his legs and screamed, unable to form any sort of intelligible utterance worth half a distorted damn. He was so overwhelmed with raw, primal frustration he was starting to look a lot like Rhydon with the way his eyes went red with rage and his ashen skin flushed pecha-pink. \n\nAmidst the trickling, bloody channels and the holes in his flesh, his anger concealed the pressure building from just how hot and bothered his body was.\n\nMienshao’s swollen, one-eyed gaze fixed to Machamp’s big, beautiful face as his shadow blocked out that fated, amber, afternoon sun. She spat a gory mouthful of shattered fangs and wiped her mouth dry, saddling back up for one more brutal round. “{In-credible!}” she gargled, favoring her un-swept leg.\n\n“Machapamachaka!” he babbled in a wrathful fit of tongues, crushing stones to powder beneath his seething stampede. He clamped his fingers down around Mienshao’s arms and thighs, hoisted her up above his head, and worked her into what the audience was sure must have been the single most painfully-compliant ball of muscle-wound bone ever contorted on camera. \n\nMienshao just… let him, gasping with what sounded to the innocent ear like harrowing, tortured howls as he twisted her like a floppy, laundry doll. She moaned and cried aloud as her body was bent and gnashed into one, grievous, gargling knot. Her limbs wound up and over her head, around her body, and back behind her hips in what appeared to be soul-crushing suffering.\n\nTo the non-breeder’s ear, she was in absolute misery.\n\nIt was anything but agony to Mienshao de Bell.\n\nMachamp sputtered and yawped as every single one of Mienshao’s joints snapped and crackled around, popping free from their sockets with strings attached. “{WHAT!?}” he cried in despair, trading those supple layers of gray slithering from his grip for a set of rosey, silken cuffs.\n\nHe’d slipped right into that crazy little jill’s trap, like a tailor-made, seel-suede glove.\n\nThe flexy femme fatale crumpled to the ground, wracked her hips back into place, unfolded her spine, and crunched her shoulders right, reassembling like a collapsing puppet toy.\n\n“{My–krgh!–turn!}” she coughed through the swelling in her throat with all four paws brandishing the fragments of her Destiny Knot rope.\n\nMachamp knocked his knuckles together. His fists sparkled and boomed alight, suddenly wreathed in Fire Punch flames. “{[b]BRING IT![/b]}” he screamed, lunging with reckless abandon.\n\nMienshao stood like a bombed-out tower, silently sucking the sky in through her crumbled, blood soaked nose. She closed her eyes, whiskers twitching as he entered the fray, and breathed all her pains away. This was the place she wished she could stay, that most pivotal crux of combat, where victory met defeat along the thin, gray line separating pain from pleasure.\n\nShifting through a sea of slow-motion strikes, she traced those rippling muscles he’d stacked like stucco bricks with her claws, admiring his flesh as it did its level-best to set her soul to rest.\n\nShe sighed, satisfied with her time at the edge, and deflected the fisted quartet with her vermillion lines in one cool, fluid, calculated swirl.\n\nBoth boys in the opposite trainers’ square stood dumbfounded as she whipped around, pushed her back into that tattered, rock-hard body, and hunched him over, tangled in a web of blood-red snares.\n\nMienshao’s mouth curled into a smile full of missing teeth. “{Since you like playing [u][b]rough[/b][/u] [u]this[/u] much…}” she purred, grinding her butt against the writhing hiker’s pack strapped to her back.\n\n“Aaauuugh!” Machamp wrought and fought with all his might, ripping and twitching his muscles from the strain. “{What… are you doing?!}”\n\nShe wrapped a single, luxuriant flap across his cheek and licked the arteries throbbing through the tree-trunk neck hunched across her shoulder. “{I’m taking [b][u]you[/u][/b] with [u]me[/u]!}”\n\nThen she bit him there, in broad daylight, licking the blood from her lips as she launched them both up into the air and out of the ring.\n\nMachamp’s jaw fell and his face went bright red as his gums started flapping without his consent. “{Yyyeeesssnononono!}” he cried, flying out of bounds on a humiliated, hog-tied arc.\n\nThe entire colosseum was silent as a snover runt as the combatants crashed with a puffy thud, Mienshao finishing on top, both desperately gasping for air.\n\nThe Judge Drone didn’t waste a single, solitary second. “[b]DOUBLE OUT OF BOUNDS![/b]”\n\nRichard had long succumbed to the laughter plaguing the stands, slapping his knees at the sight. “Haaa hahaha! Oh, hoo, oh gods, what distorted thing was– HEY! Where are you going?” he shouted as Mienshao grabbed Machamp by the ankle and started dragging him away. “Get back here with my ‘mon!”\n\n“[b][i]She, uh, appears to be taking Machamp… prisoner?[/i][/b]” Muttering echoed through the speakers as Rotom consulted the judges in their observation booth. “[b][i]Is that legal?[/i][/b]”\n\nBianca stood with her fist pressed into her hips and her foot tapping as her cheeks puffed out. “WHAT in TARNATION were–”\n\nMienshao waggled a broken-clawed digit, beckoning her trainer’s ear down to her level.\n\nBianca’s face shifted from anger, to confusion, to shock, and then turned that frown upside down as she bent back, cackling like she stood above a cauldron full of brew.\n\n“Care to share with the class, teach?” Richard shouted, more demanding than asking.\n\n“Mienshao wants to ‘go for a walk’, if ya catch my meaning.” Bianca gave him that glowing, enamorous grin so unbecoming of her age. “My ‘certs are up to date. You down?”\n\nRich couldn’t believe what he was hearing for a second, then slapped his palm against his head, laughing into the air. “Shoot, if Machamp wants to go for a stroll, why should I step in?”\n\n“Oooh, a little mienfoo. I just lovelovelove them!” Bianca gushed with her cheeks in her palm, then gave a fingertip wave to the thoroughly-tenderized couple beside her. “Stay on site, honey!”\n\nMienshao nodded, bowed to her master with genuine respect, then eagerly slunk away with a sobbing sack of whipped champion sliding in the dirt behind her. “Shao!”\n\nEmil scoffed. “Uh, hey Rich, um… can we take her team seriously now?”\n\nRichard sighed and scratched at his cheek. “Yyyeeeaaahhh… Alright, get your next starter ready, madam! Count that as your senior-citizen handicap!”\n\n“[b]One moment, contestants![/b]” the announcer boomed through the speakers. “[b]With this lul in the fighting, we have the perfect opportunity to unveil our happy little surprise![/b]”\n\nA portcullis clacked and clicked a hundred feet away behind the front seat freaks.\n\n“[b]Miss de Bell, it seems you just can’t escape your schoolhouse duties![/b]” the league voice said in jest. “[b]Say hello, everyone, and give a luminous welcome to Nuvema Primary School’s finest! Permission to enter the square is granted. Go get her, kids![/b]”\n\nBianca pressed her fingers to her lips as a horde of unfinished humans dressed in white, waving red-ring flags mobbed Bianca’s square. An exhausted vice-principle waved to her colleague in a cream-colored suit beside a long procession of adult chaperones. The crowd swelled with wholesome vibes, cheering for Miss de Bell and her gang of adopted youth.\n\nBianca thanked Jirachi that Mienshao’s shenanigans were out of the way as she and her team were trampled with affection. “Oh my Gods, when did–”\n\n“Miss B, Miss B!” they squealed in a haphazard, dissonant chorus.\n\nDewott, who clung to Bianca’s thigh, dashed out from his safe place and leapt into the arms of an exuberant, dandelion-haired, eight-year-old girl.\n\n“I missed you Dewott,” she whimpered, rubbing her face into his bushy, hydrophobic fluff. “Has Miss B been really nice?”\n\nDewott’s eyes melted, dripping down her dress. “Dewowowot!” He shoved his muzzle through her hair, nodding as he took a hock of it up in his mouth in some kind of infantile, nervous tic. \n\nBianca was overcome with the wonderfulness of it all and watered her field of schoolhouse flowers in a glistening rain of tears. “I missed you all too, my little chestnuts.”\n\n“[b]Daaawww, don’t you love to see it folks? But don’t think we’ve forgotten about you, Mr. Stone![/b]” the announcers said, and another gate cranked open.\n\nRichard’s father, Stanley Stone, walked onto the sun-baked cement in an untucked, button up shirt with the collar set loose. Behind him, Richard’s grandmother followed her son in that antique, floral dress, looking him up and down with a pride that was visible from the other side of the universe.\n\nDiantha caught Richard’s gaze as the pseudo-thing Eeveeon leapt into her arms and winked.\n\n“[b]Here on lay-away, jet-lagged with the finest five-o-clock shadow money can buy, Stanley Steven Stone![/b]”\n\nEvery pair of shoulders on Team Stone’s side of the isle drooped in unison as Stanley gave them a tired wave, his Gimmigoul flailing a tiny, dynamo-badge flag from the top of his head.\n\n“[b]Alright everyone, please take your seats in the landed reservation stands, generously donated for this occasion by Aqua Royale Research Center.[/b]”\n\n“Say what, old man?!” Valorie squawked and spilled her beer in surprise.\n\nFenny clapped his paws together, dancing in place with excitement as an army of children stormed the wall. “{[b]Human [/b]hatchlings! And so very many, yes yes! I want to scratch them [u]all[/u] behind the ears.}”\n\nEmil gave a wry, appreciative smile, tossing a grateful glance up at gilded seats where he was sure François was writhing in pain with each and every blow landed in the ring. \n\nMr. Gyarados caught the look with a smile, and shrugged as Valorie groaned in protest. “How could I possibly not bring them here to see their teacher’s glorious moment first-hand?”\n\nVal rolled her eyes and slumped into her seat as the Unova Circus paraded up the stairs. “Easy. Y’don’t.”\n\nRichard waved to his dad and around the elated faces in the crowd, but something bothered him. “Hey, don’t forget– ah” he started, but stopped with a hiccup in his throat as he looked back again and his Grandmother was no longer there. “Damn she packs up fast. Hah, guess she doesn’t miss being in the spotlight these days.”\n\nSpinel snuck behind Torterra’s shell, watching Richard’s father loom by with a hung-over gait. But the old executive caught the Pokemon’s sight and wandered over.\n\nRichard thought to stop the interaction and coax him up into the primo-seats, but convincing his dad to walk off when he had ‘that’ look on his face was next to impossible. Stupid as it was, he looked on and accepted the consequences, ready to deal with them in the wake of Bianca’s defeat.\n\n“So you’re that little fae who’s won my son over, huh?” he hummed with one hand stuck in his checkbook pocket. \n\nGimmigoul smiled and blew the sylveon a kiss like they thought it was some sort of traditional, Kalosian greeting.\n\nHe looked left and right, then poked at himself with a jittering paw. “...vvveee?”\n\n“See any other pink, ribbony things that cook around here?” he said with a jocular smirk.\n\nSpinel reached for his flank-bags and scribbled a shaky, red-inked note.\n\n\n[center][b][i]“So… you know?”[/i][/b][/center]\n\n\nRichard’s Father reached out and brushed his keyboard-softened hands through the Eeveelution’s fluff. Normally such a gesture would have left Spinel with a sour, infantilized taste in his mouth, but the way Stanley did it seemed more soothing, fatherly even, which contrasted with his torn-up, businessman chic.\n\n“Yeah, Richard let me know the whole story. Says you’re really something special.”\n\nSpinel’s body went cold and numb, staring up at Stanley in petrified terror, and he nearly dropped his pen as he scrawled,\n\n\n[center][b][i]“You’re not upset?”[/i][/b][/center]\n\n\nStanley chuckled and slipped Gimmigoul into his breast pocket. “Nah, now I can see what my boys’ carrying on about, I’m invested. Don’t normally take on spare tires, we run this ship lean, but I’ll bleed the coffers a bit if ya promise to work hard and keep things in order.”\n\nSpinel’s anxiety left him as swiftly as it arrived, filling his chest with warm life like a drowning swimmer brought ashore. [i]Oh, thank the Gods it’s not what I thought.[/i]\n\n\n[center][b][i]“Of course, sir. I won’t let you down.[/i][/b]\n\n[i][b]Merci beaucoup!”[/b][/i][/center]\n\n\nStanley raised his brow at the tiny, bilingual display. “Welcome aboard, little guy,” he replied, and unlike all the other humans he wrote with, Stanley slipped the notes into his wallet.\n\nSpinel wasn’t sure whether to be concerned or flattered, but gave Richard’s father-figure a puff-chested salute all the same. He kept that stiff back until Stanley was far enough away that the guy couldn’t spot him laid out and hyperventilating on the grass coating Torterra’s shell.\n\n“{It’s ok…}” Torterra croaked. “{Mr. Dad is only scary on tax day!}”\n\nSpinel couldn’t shake another, very dissonant feeling. [i]He thinks I’m something special,[/i] he swooned inside as a warmth spread in his tummy and that put a dopey smile across his face. “{Thanks Torterra, I’ll remember that.}”\n\nBoth Richard and Emil waited for their hearts to start up again as the exchange between Daddy Stone and Spinel came to a close.\n\nIncineroar watched with a passive, side-eyed glance, but blew a ring of disinterested smoke as she kept her eyes on the field where a pink-puffed, mocha-colored smudge caught her eye.\n\nStanding in a shadowy, portcullis arch was Opal and her whacked-out, alcoholic trainer. Opal waved with a cheerful buoyancy that could have kept everyone afloat at sea, and though Incineroar was the least sentimental mon ever hatched, she waved back and gave her master a slow, respectful nod.\n\nBianca wiped the moisture from her face, hugging Dewott, who looked distraught at having to let what must have been his real human walk off without him. “Ok, youngster, enough boob’n. Let’s scrap.”\n\nRichard nodded and then leaned to his partner in crime. “Who you think?”\n\nEmil squinted. “We need an edge, she left Serperior out…”\n\nRich caught that hint like a backyard pitch. “Torterra!”\n\nThe gentle, shelled giant gawked, swaying her head towards the noise that sounded like her master. “Huuuh?” she said as she lurched up, leaving behind a thousand scattered leaves and one squeaking Sylveon abandoning ship. “Yeah!”\n\n“[b]Wasting no time AT ALL, Richard sends Torterra as his tie starter. Who will Bianca select next?[/b]”\n\nThe old soldier eyed her team, who looked up at her with an absolute intention to succeed, whether they were the right choice or not.\n\n“You’re all so wonderful, but I can only pick one! Haaahhh, I miss doubles. Don’t you?”\n\nAll of her ‘mon nodded with a zealous approval.\n\nShe nodded and clenched her fists with pride. “Well, we’ll just have to crash that roster for old-times sake when we’re done showing’ this upstart what-for.” She pointed straight at Richard. “Musharna, let’s go!”\n\nEmil felt an uneasy shuddering in his chest. “Not a lot of solid info about that species on the Dexnet. They’re real psychoactive, crazy to train. Might wanna switcheroo at some point.”\n\nVaporeon closed her eyes with a curt nod. “I can handle it,” she decreed, giving it her level-best to pronounce the words in her best, royal-human accent she’d been studying from all the Kalosian nobility.\n\n“Patience, Your Majesty.” “{Patience, Your Majesty.}” Richard and Incineroar said in unison, staring Dewott down across the field.\n\nThe pastel fetus of a pokemon blimped its way into the ring, staring back at her trainer and around at the crowd as she stumbled into a round of applause. The strange thing seemed uncomfortable with the attention, even a little distracted as the enthusiasm from the crowd grew.\n\nTorterra watched, head empty, ready for anything and nothing all at once. “Ooohhh…” she sighed, watching Musharna float. “{What do you taste like?}”\n\nMusharna slowly turned and glared at Torterra with a lifeless, albino eye. “[i]Whaaat dooo yooou thiiink III taaaste liiike?[/i]” she etched the words onto Torterra’s blunt, dense, stone-slab of a mind.\n\nTorterra brought an elephantine foot up to her beak. “{Cotton candy!}”\n\nMusharna hovered there for a moment, considering the response, “[i]Clooose, clooose…[/i]”\n\nTorterra smiled as her belly rumbled like those mountains of fruit gelatin she sometimes got to taste at Daddy Stone’s big, business parties. “{Well, I’mma bite ya then!}”\n\nMusharna floated up and fell into a slumbering, cradle sway. “[i]Dooo yooour beeest, biiig sheeell![/i]”\n\n“[b]Contestants, are you ready?[/b]”\n\nRichard and Bianca locked eyes, “Ready!”\n\n“[b]Three… two… one… GO![/b]”\n\n“Grassy Terrain!” Richard shouted out. “Make this place a fuck’n jungle, girl!”\n\n“Language!” Bianca snapped, pointing to the guest seating above.\n\nRichard rubbed the back of his head, chuckling nervously. “Aaaw, yeah… right.”\n\nBianca smirked and chuckled as Torterra erupted into verdant light, glowing like an exploding, green star on the field. Palms, fronds, and the knuckles of a bajillion buttress roots beat the cement into a shattered cadaver of its former self, choked in miles of strangling vines.\n\nEveryone gawked in awe at the display as the entire arena exploded with iron-dense, tropical rainforest, but Richard was overcome with disappointment at the old-woman’s response pictured for him on the massive, jumbotron-screens.\n\nBianca gasped at the display, clapping in amazement like a kid on a blanket watching fireworks in the twilight hour. “Oooh! Good job, Torterra, you laid that thicket like a brick-knit house!”\n\nRich did his level best to maintain a poker-face as he searched for some sort of meaning in the thick, innocent fog surrounding her. “Yeah? Glad ya like it. Wouldn’t wanna be trapped in it, especially with Torterra romping around.”\n\nBianca laughed like she was hit by the punchline of a sit-com played on the kitchen-table T.V. “Trapped? Awww, now don’t go worrying about little-old-me…”\n\nThen Richard watched in a cold sweat as a calm, reminiscing smile haunted her face, “Ain’t our first deployment in the bush.”\n\nRich bit his tongue and moved on. “Torterra, start a Leaf Storm!”\n\n“[b]Uh oh, I hope you splash-zone folks are ready, because it looks like this is gonna get messy again![/b]”\n\nThe leaves of the forest swelled with a rustling sound like an angered swarm, and a fine mist of razor leaves filled the empty space between boundaries in a swirling column that climbed to the regulation flying limit. Though she lay unseen in the sea of green she spilled, deadly slivers of leaf litter sparked against her armored hide, saving the tortoise from her own attacks.\n\nBianca held her hat down and batted leaves out of her eyes. “Real sh–poop storm you’re brewing there, wooo!” she whooped out, careful to stay the best example for kids, then stomped a boot down with a shrill, sharp whistle. “Mix em up a glass of MIME LIGHT, hup hup!”\n\nMusharna crept uncomfortably close to the laser-sensored upper-edge of the battle zone as the angry, botanical fog nipped at her plump, bushy tuckus. The instant Bianca’s order hit her pokemon’s ears, she sucked her own swirling mists in, inflating to three-times her normal size.\n\nThen she burst into a soupy flood of pastel fog that swallowed the jungle whole.\n\nBianca cheered like a parent watching her child at a tiny talent show. “That was sooo goood, Musharna! Amazing! Not a single spot of rust on your edges!”\n\nEmil blinked. “What.”\n\n“Now hit her with the good stuff!”\n\nVaporen and Emil both turned to Richard. “Get her [b]out of there[/b]!”\n\nStone’s lead strategist was starting to think it was time to skip the type-advantage song-and-ponyta dance and go straight to improv. In retrospect, he realized that’s how he should have played it from the start. “RET–”\n\n“LOCK IT DOWN!” Bianca cut him off in a ferocious, commandeering bark. “NO ESCAPE!”\n\nMusharna’s living-mist coalesced on a single point in the woods as Torterra’s ball buzzed.\n\nRichard’s heart raced and panic began to set in as he was forced to commit to the idiot bit. “AMNESIA! AMNESIA!” he cried, knowing for sure that some awful, psychic strike was coming.\n\nTorterra heard and obeyed. She had record reaction time with this move, due mostly in part to the fact that she hardly had anything upstairs to purge at any one given time. She hummed, glowing purple and white as her thoughts left her ears in a rippling warp. \n\nBianca tapped her foot, face straight as their plan made contact with the enemy.\n\nThe space inside flipped on itself; what was green was now red, up was down, and (most importantly) hard was suddenly soft. Her body became a blubbering, squishy mass while in the same snap her psychic fortress became steel-tight in ways Torterra couldn’t even conceive.\n\nTorterra’s mind was clear as purified ether, able only to experience the unavoidable moment as it came to her, which made the feeling of her own Leaf Storm grating her body into a mound of deep, oozing wounds all the more horrifying to endure.\n\nBianca punched the air left and right, her team of pokemon cheering beside her. “Yeah, yeah, YEAH! Get her like a ghetsy, baby!”\n\n“TaaaAAAAAAHHH!” Torterra roared with agony, eyes closed tight to keep from gushing like sliced grapes, and her precious little mind shattered like a pane of window glass.\n\nEveryone in the arena, Richard most of all, felt something in their guts wind up as Torterra’s cries came to a sudden, heart-skipping stop.\n\nBianca wiped her nose, staring through the brush. “Let her go! Whirlwind!” \n\nTorterra's half-dead corpse spat from the trees with a blowgun puff, spraying Team Stone in freckles of hot, red ichor as she crashed down beside them.\n\nSpinel wiped a cheek and froze, gawking at his own paws.\n\nBianca popped at the sight and lobbed an explosive, morbidly blithe laugh over the canopy that landed dead center in the Stone Team trenches. “Like a cherry from a window pie!” She bent with what seemed like pain on her face that had been twisted into hysterical bouts of merriment.\n\nMauville’s Monsters felt a collective chill walk across their skins.\n\n“GET THAT GIRL A MEDIC!” Bianca screamed, wiping genuine tears of laughter from her eyes.\n\nVaporeon rumbled in wide-eyed shock and displeasure. “{Fire, we need [b]fire[/b]!}”\n\nRichard recalled Torterra to her ball and turned to Incineroar, but a lavender flash leapt the device in his hand and struck Rhydon in the stomach. Everyone in the Stone square was blinded by a dusty devil of left-over leaves as the great, horned menace was forcibly launched out into the war-zone.\n\nThe Rotom drones surveying the fight flicked their ocular lenses and pinged with approval. “[b]WHIRLWIND, FORCED SWITCH! I hope Rhydon's ready to rumble in the jungle!”[/b]\n\nEmil ground his teeth around, unsure of Musharna’s natural moveset but absolutely certain Team de Bell’s aural flexibility plotted well beyond the norm. “This is crazy!”\n\nRhydon collided with a great big kapok tree, screaming with bewildered anger as it split at the trunk and flattened a line of lesser plants.\n\nRichard coughed and rolled his shoulders. “Rhydon, RETALIATE!”\n\nThe order was received, and Rhydon needed no cajoling to run rampage through the woods and destroy anyone making the mistake of having a face. “{Where are ya?!}” he roared, destroying anything that resembled a hiding place.\n\nBianca leaned forward, just as blind to the action as her opponent, confused at his choosing to keep the berserker in. “Uhhh, YOU REALLY SHOULD SWITCH HIM OUT, HONEY!”\n\nRich scoffed. “THANKS, GRANDMA, BUT I’M A REBEL!”\n\nRhydon yanked a curtain of trees down and was met with Musharna’s bottomless, emotionless eyes looming through a wall of ferns.\n\nThe eerie, expressionless thing shivered and rang in that way Rhydon knew from experience had to be a sleep-inducing technique.\n\n“RRRAAAHHH!” he screamed as the air around his fist burst into white, air rippling flames. \n\nHis balled-up claws made purchase right between Musharna’s eyes, and she bounced around a group of rubber trees, flubbering to the ground with a tired wheeze.\n\nEveryone in Richard’s corner rattled with excitement as a shockwave of pure, unsplit energy washed across them. “That sounds like it hurt, old lady! I could hear that hypnosis ringing from here!” He pointed into the trees with his eyes on the prize. “No nightmare bites for you! Rhydon, Uproar!”\n\nBianca giggled like a child hit with the best kind of playground joke. “Well, that’s alright!”\n\nRhydon marched his way over Musharna’s deflated body as her breathing slowly came to a stop and she fell into a cold, dead sleep.\n\nThen he stared at his fist glowing purple in the hazy, canopy shade, and his body went numb with the phantom clacking of a movie reel ringing in his ears.\n\nBianca made a thin, calm, contented smile, the kind that finds you as you’re sipping spiced tea on a bitter, winter morning. “The real nightmares are there when you’re awake.”\n\nRhydon looked up, and Musharna was gone. The trees were gone, the sky was gone, the crowd was gone, all replaced with a humid, muddy replica shaking with the staccato of gunfire, distant booms, and the howling of bloodthirsty monsters in the air.\n\n“Haah!” [i]He wobbled around, feeling a horrible pain in his stomach, and saw his massive, rock-hard claws were replaced with weak, miserable, broken human fingers coated in curtains of spilled viscera. [/i]“Whaa?!”\n\n“Now don’t say I didn’t warn you, buddy boy.” Bianca raised her teacher’s finger, leaning over with a wink. “DREAM FEED!”\n\nMusharna’s body flashed and smoked like a magnesium bulb. “[i]Goood… Niiight…”[/i]\n\n“{I… I need help!}” [i]Rhydon cried into a radio with a voice that wasn’t his.[/i] “{I’m…} hurt…”\n\nEmilio felt the frightened prickles of a child seeing something shift around the closet at night.\n\nRichard swallowed and choked on his own throat. “Rhydon, hit her again.[i] FLAMETHROWER![/i]”\n\n[i]The charred, crinkling crust of his skin flaked away in gooey chunks as he grasped at his arms, trying to catch and kill the source of his awful, all-consuming pain.[/i] “GgrrraaaAAAAAA!” [i]He flopped to the ground, dropping a heavy, hand-stamped, bolt-action rifle into the mud as his still sizzling meat sank in a soup of standing water.[/i]\n\n[i]An empty, camo-pattern ball rolled out of his grip; the gravestone of a friend lost in a wall of fire.[/i]\n\n“Medic!” he screamed in an unmistakable, old Unovan accent.\n\n[i]His arms were yanked from the radio, snagged with a crack of vine-whip lines, dozens of them reaching out from the underbrush as he reached for a knife he never knew he had.[/i]\n\n[i]He slashed them loose from his limbs, spilling sappy smelling juice across his wounds. But they finally broke his guard and the knife dropped with a crunchy twist as his wrist was milled into a meaty sack of gravel. Looking down in horror, he watched himself speadspearow across the ground with tendrils that burrowed in and out of his mud-soaked uniform, threading through his flesh to wrench napalm-baked pieces free.[/i]\n\n[i]He heaved a gutful of blood, lifted by the ankles, and stared down into the insatiable maw of an ungodly sized victreebel sloshing with the stinking stew of decomposed flesh, dog tags, and melting human bones.” [/i]\n\n“Grrk,” Rhydon’s real body painted the ground in that-day’s breakfast.\n\n[i]Vicreebell shoved him in, face-first, glazing his body in warm, wet, tingling, stringy ooze riddled with bits of corpse. He bruised his knuckles and broke his nails clawing at the inner stomach wall. It burned: in his lungs as he held his breath, in his eyes as the fluid slipped through the gaps, casually consumed like a burmy swallowed in the bush.[/i]\n\n[i]…[/i]\n\n[i]“We’re coming honey!” Pop! Pop! [/i][i]Pop! Pop![/i][i] [/i][i]Pop! Pop![/i][i] Pop![/i][i] “[/i][i][b]Ice Fang![/b][/i][i]”[/i]\n\n[i]The world came rushing back as the victreebel's side was split, spilling him out in a ruddy flood of half-digested guts. He didn’t want to open his eyes, but they were pried apart anyway with the gentle but demanding fingers of a much younger, much angrier Bianca de Bell.[/i]\n\n[i]She rolled him onto his back and slid him to safety, away from the screeching creature busy being freeze-mauled to death in a stoutland’s jaws. “He’s still alive!” She shouted and fed the forest a pack of lead pills from her SMG as a team of their comrades-in-arms circled the area. [/i]\n\n[i]“It’s ok, you’re gonna make it,” she soothed him, unrolling a wicked arsenal of work-worn chrome clamps, sutures, salves, and an empty jar of meds. “I’m sorry, this is gonna hurt.”[/i]\n\n\nSilence.\n\n\n“AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”\n\nNobody moved a muscle as a screaming spot in the forest rustled all the way back to Richard’s side of the ring. Rhydon burst out from the brush, scrambled in a crawl, and crumpled beside Spinel in a whimpering heap. “Rhy… Rhy… Rhy…” he gargled with terror, unable to summon the will to even cry.\n\n“Gods…” Emil stepped back as Spinel leapt into action, pillowing Rhydon’s head, covering his eyes, and wrapping his ears in a headset full of cushy, lo-fi jazz.\n\n“[b]RING OUT! Penalty, Team Stone. Release your next pokemon!”[/b]\n\n“What the fuck was that…” Richard hissed.\n\n“Rich, this is bad. We need to turn things around fast…” Emil uttered, and thumbed an ochre capsule up between his lips. \n\nHe looked at Em like he’d snapped back from a nap. “I got just the thing. Ah… what’s that?” Richard asked with a suspicious twist of the face.\n\n“Caffeine,” he said, glaring out into the jungle, thoroughly done with that line of questioning.\n\nRichard shrugged. “Fair enough. Now…” he murmured in strained deliberation.\n\nWithout a doubt, Bianca’s mon were less than no joke, they took the unfunny reality of battle and folded it back around into hysterical, laughing madness. Everything he’d prepared had failed in spectacular fashion. Anything he tried was turned on its head. \n\nThe basics were pointless, strategy was too slow, even his subconscious instincts came up short, having been forged from tens of thousands of [b]reasonably conventional[/b] fights. \n\nHe needed to get her on the back foot, and knew exactly how, but the idea filled him with dread.\n\nHe was gonna have to get [b]creative[/b]...\n\nVaporeon growled and snapped the air with her tail. “I’ll fix it,” she barked, leaping for the field from Emmi's shoulders.\n\n“Na-ah, Princess!” Rich recalled her before those manicured paws crossed the rubicon, and then the rest of his active pokemon too. He pocketed their balls, mixing them around, and pulled one out. His thumb pressed the command switch, his lips whispering into the microphone buried within, and he hurled whoever-it-was out to face the music.\n\nRichard mouthed a silent prayer as it hit the distorted, green pit swallowing his family whole.\n\n“[b]Silent switch![/b]” the megaphones boomed, “[b]Miss B had better act carefully![/b]”\n\nBianca’s head tracked a shimmering ufo floating up and out of the canopy with eyes smothered in blackened flames and cloaked in uncanny, backwards shadows.\n\n“Kkkkkkrrrrrrbzzz!” Metagross shredded the air with garbled, biotechnical noise, then the flames went out, and she stayed in unmoving suspension as the drones orbited her around the field. Scanning, searching, sensing the trees with their advanced, extrahuman sight. “[i][b]DONE![/b][/i]” she thundered against the minds of any that dared to look upon her.\n\nThe judge drones snapped evidentiary pictures of the readings on their scopes. “[b]Musharna is unable to continue![/b]”\n\nBianca gasped, set aback grinning at the impressive, hard-switch riposte. “Oooh really,” she said, recalling her mon.\n\nRichard punched the air as Bianca’s wild momentum finally started chipping away. “Yeah! That’s what you GET!”\n\n“What was that, Rich?” Emil asked with droll, hyperfixated eyes stuck to the field.\n\nTo-be master trainer Richard Stone stuck both thumbs his way with a proud, toothy grin. “Nightshade! Ha haaa, worked with Metagross for[b]ever[/b] getting that worked out.”\n\nNow [u]that[/u] got Emil’s attention. “How did you teach her that? She hates you!”\n\n“That’s the neat part, I didn’t!” Rich perched his hands on his hips like a rum-barreled pirate. “She taught [b]herself[/b] when we weren’t look’n and I caught her practicing behind our backs. Aaanyway, I made a deal…”\n\n“And that deal was?”\n\n“If I treated her better, she’d use it in battle.”\n\nEmil hummed with his chin in his fist. “Good thing you kept that promise then.”\n\nRichard gave a low, anxious groan. “Yeaaahhh… well, it all worked out, so yeah SUCK IT MISS B!”\n\nBianca waved to Metagross as a misty line of energy was drawn back into Musharna’s pokeball for a snuggle against her cheek “Wowee! Look. At. You.” She adjusted her glasses, squinting up into that dead-steel gaze. “Your auras’ the combee’s knees, girlie; no doubt about it. Richard, you should be mighty proud!”\n\nMetagross looked Bianca’s way for a fraction of a second, exhaled a sweltering column of steam, and submerged herself back down into the depths of the jungle.\n\n“That’s not the only ace you snuck under the table, is it?” Emil whispered over his shoulder.\n\nRich smirked and thumbed at his nose. “Just you watch.”\n\nA pokeball popping cracked in the forest. Before the announcer could narrate the scene, everybody but the hard of hearing buckled over, burying their heads in their hands to hide from a squealing, nincada call that stabbed their eardrums.\n\nMetagross fell a few feet and went blind and deaf and almost dumb. She groaned and growled, shaking the air with her own mechanical ruckus; destructive interference she hoped would cancel out the wailing, mind-churning, psychic noise.\n\nSeconds passed, and the audience slumped over in relief as the waves blasted each other into oblivion. As long as Metagross could maintain it, she could see and hear and think. Easier said than done, as whoever it was slinking around kept wobbling the frequency, pitch, and shape of the waves.\n\nThen another cloud of sparkling, pink haze flooded the field, choking Metagross’ senses, and her lungs. She tried to shift and search with infrared, but the Misty Terrain blackened her sight.\n\nThe announcer chimed. “[b]Audino has been deployed! Go get her, soldier![/b]” \n\n“[i]You are sneaky,” [/i]Metagross projected out for all to hear.[i] “Dodge this.”[/i]\n\nHer body fired up, glowing red to orange to yellow hot, then burst with a flame that incinerated the closest trees to ash in an instant. This was not a move, It was radar. \n\nThe shockwave rocked the forest, and she bolted left as a blob of biped-shaped flesh touched her mind. However, a lapse in concentration made Stones’ Steel Monolith slip and the brain-wracking noise returned. She worked her focus back into shape as the shuffling, snapping, burrowing noises in the fairy fog made abundantly clear that her opponent was preparing to make her life very, very difficult.\n\nMetagross brushed against a loose, hanging vine and a smart, snappy switch smacked her in the face with a strategically-placed gob of clay. She barked like a backfired car, cooked ten meters of undergrowth again as she burst the air apart, and growled as she sensed three identical shapes dashing through the fog of war. If those were substitutes, they were good ones, each having the exact body temperature and distribution of a genuine, living body. \n\nHer brows furrowed and she stopped everything, closed her eyes, and set her brain alight. This pokemon was worth drafting up a [b]real [/b]fight.\n\nTrillions of possibilities battered her mind in multifaceted waves as she crunched the probabilities for each and every possible outcome, stacking the chaos of the unknown up against the variables of the day in neat little lines.\n\nHow polite of her opponent not to seize on her seconds of still, silent contemplation. She fully expected to perform those calculations while dodging accosting shots from below, but no. Audino was amping herself up, it was the most logical choice, reinforcing herself for the moment she’d have to test herself against Metagross’ mental might. Exactly as planned.\n\nBianca nodded with cheer as she passed packs of fruit snacks around to her team. “Eat up!”\n\nDewott tugged at her skirt as he watched, listening to the chorus of chaos crashing through the trees. “Deww?” \n\nShe kissed the tips of her fingers and planted it right between his ears. “Don’t you worry, pecha pie.”\n\nMetagross’ Future Sight was one of the best, but this opponent had proved contrary to statistical expectations. Indeed, she’d need to consider a greater depth of possibilities if the correct solution was to be selected. She just needed a liiitle more data…\n\nThe air broke again, in a blast that nearly sent both trainers tumbling from their squares, and Metagross whipped around at one of the figures that had leapt up and was following her from the trees.\n\n[i]Outcome selected. Execute.[/i]\n\nShe fired a hot, atomizing ray of pure, silvery light at the enemy; fast, just a little pulse, a distraction for the real threat hiding below…\n\nHer brain shook at having to put up with the noise again, it took every ounce of her power to focus the second beam as quickly as she did, but she overcame the pain andshot another capital-grade, death laser that carved a molten, thirty-foot-long grave deep in the soil.\n\nAudino flipped on her palm and dodged with a spinning somersault. She crouched, wiggled her antenna around, and vanished in a blurry, blinking cloud. \n\nMissed, damn, but the noise was finally gone. Now she could truly work.\n\nMetagross was surprised at the speed Bianca’s medical assistant moved at, but it still sat within acceptable tolerances. \n\nThe squealing, psychic barrage returned that eye-watering intensity as a tree branch cracked and she obliterated the canopy in a flash of superheated wind. “[i][b]No more tricks![/b][/i]” she boomed, scanning the land for prey scurrying for safety through a storm of smoke and burning leaves.\n\nAudino popped out from the bushes to dodge a sheet of flaming foliage falling down. She brought her claws around a pair of old-school iron knuckles, wiped her whiskers clean, and scraped the knuckledusters together to charge up for another electrical attack.\n\nMetagross knew she had the edge and Audino was running out of places to hide. The sky cracked, her body glowed with violet light, and she raised a technique she was happy to say her master had earned the right to see. After all, she’d nearly died learning how.\n\nA well of energy formed in front of her, warping space and time as the air was crushed in, then the little sparks around Audino’s wrists were sucked right up. Metagross’ own emanations couldn’t escape either, and her purple, psychic glow ended up sucked into a tiny pin-prick light that swirled like a dying star.\n\nShe didn’t know what to call this thing, anything accurate lacked creative punch, but it would hoover up any raw projection not held to a pokemon’s core with an iron-tight weld.\n\nA Static bolt flash from Audino’s hands and she hissed as it swung a full ninety degrees, missing her mark by a mile, and it was swallowed up. She zipped out of the way, dodging a tree thrown like a giant javelin with telekinetic force, and panicked as a dozen more were torn free from their roots.\n\n“ME-TA-GROS! ME-TA-GROS!” The crowd roared more as the jungle tumbled around in great, splintering stacks. They wanted to see the Bloodshed for themselves, so anything that kept Metagross raising Moltres’ Flames stoked their thirst. “ME-TA-GROS! ME-TA-GROS!”\n\nBianca’s darling thought to retreat, to call in the bigger guns as she had to launch herself around a gym of exploding trunks. Audino would’ve rather not, remembering the oaths she’d made so long ago, and kicked herself off.\n\nShe landed out of sight, slapped her cheeks in her palms with intense, overwhelmed thought. Then she gasped, parkour rolled along the ground, and lobbed a rock up into the air.\n\nPlonk!\n\nMetagross flinched as the stone bounced off her arm, not out of pain or some aural interference forcing her to act out of turn, but straight, unexpected confusion.\n\nAudino filled her lungs, stomped her feet and her body split into a trio of blurry, flickering reflections of herself.\n\nMetagross buzzed with concern. [i]What is this?[/i]\n\n“[i][b]INCREDIBLE! Triple Team! Outside the warzones and here for your viewing pleasure![/b][/i]”\n\nEmilio clenched a fist in his pocket. “That’s a thing?!” \n\n“{Yes. It is.}” Vaporeon nuzzled his cheek, knowing now that he was just as upset as she was. “{Some military mon use it to dodge gunfire.}”\n\nHe pet her smooth, intoxicating skin, more to soothe himself than his mate. “{Can [b]you[/b] do that?}”\n\n“{Umm…}” Vaporeon had to bring a claw up to her chin in thought. “{Maybe… It’s hard on your body and doesn’t help much in battles like these. I don’t know why she’d even try it.}”\n\n“[i][b]LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, what a display! Moves, rare and even totally unseen, performed with the most masterful of hands! It’s times like these we’re grateful for our high definition, high speed, three dimensional film!”[/b][/i]\n\nStabbing trunks struck the ground as the figures bolted forth, evaporating on impact as brand-new illusions flashed to life barely out of view. \n\nBianca whistled through her fingers. “That’s the ticket! One more, TIMES FOUR!”\n\nEmil and Rich’s jaws both dropped. “No way.”\n\nAudino’s clones skipped a step and all at once they crouched to all fours. The air hummed like a circular saw left with nothing more to cut as a fourth image appeared, encircling their foe, and they converged on the enemy’s position.\n\nMetagross toppled wooden dominoes around as her senses lost track of Bianca’s mon. She could spot her four times over, but any time she locked on target they flicked out of existence and popped behind her somewhere else.\n\nA glistening shower of Swift storm stars pelted Metagross’ hide like rain on a sheet-steel shed. It did little but tickle, but made abundantly clear just how badly she’d miscalculated with an enemy who would NOT give her any second chances.\n\nShe swept the air with a silver scythe of light that should have sliced a cone of trees clean through, but instead was consumed by the energy well she’d made. [i]You… clever girl.[/i]\n\nSwifts never miss. Any bottom rung, wannabe trainer could tell you that. Most pokemon forgot the move entirely after years mastering stronger, more effective techniques. In a way, the gross presupposition about how Audino should behave as a formidable enemy completely assured that Metagross would forget to consider such a trivial, low-tier tactic.\n\nAnother barrage poked red-hot welts in her biometal skin and she let her energy well come apart, leveling huge, smoldering swathes of forest in a storm of monotype, energy strikes.\n\nTeam de Bell gasped at the display, excited to be alive.\n\nTeam Stone was left wondering what to do next.\n\nMetagross chuckled. An [b]audino[/b] was giving her [b]this [/b]hard of a time?\n\nHer moaning was muffled by the din of that disgorged, thunderous force. She winced, and chewed on a mouthful of static as stronger torrents of stars crashed against her back. \n\n [i]Impressive… but I’ve seen your game, you’re out of cards, and I’ve stacked the deck.[/i]\n\nShe let the weakling pelt her hide, winding her aura up into metaphysical knots. Her energies snapped free, sculpting a Mirror-Coat meshed with Reflect; difficult, intensive, but equally as unexpected. \n\nSure as algebra solved, Audino shrieked in pain as her own, inerrant strikes bounced back and the Quadruple Team clones blinked away…\n\n…but not before a knuckleduster was thrown in with one final spritz of starlight shards.\n\nMetagross sensed its deviant composition and slapped the weapon away, only to find it stuck fast to her skin with a powerful, electromagnetic force.[b] [/b]Lemon-colored light sparkled, arcing around her leg, and she curled up in a violent, spastic fit that rang her head like a gong.\n\nShe blacked out, and the unconscious processes she’d programmed for just such an occasion leapt into action, turned into a deadly disco ball of steel, fire, and psychic rays chopping trees clean through at every angle as she careened to the ground.\n\nAudino hefted up a cement slab and shoved it forward, taking cover as she made herself a one-mon phalanx. She stopped just a bit too close, ducked a point-blank beam that sliced her shield in two, and made a daring, all-or-nothing leap. \n\nMetagross woke with a clang, barely conscious, preparing one, final, bout-ending blast.\n\nAudino was washed away in hot, metallic light, and Metagross hoped that the harrowing, point-three-percent chance her opponent might perish didn’t come to pass.\n\nWith the sound of a metal bar struck against a pipe, the light faded and Audino closed the distance, unscathed, awash with a skin of Protective light.\n\n“{Sorry…}” Audino peeped, dodging desperate, flailing metal claws as she took careful aim, and then jabbed her other knuckles up inside Metagross’ innermost joints.\n\n“[i]Kzzz rrrp p p paaaah!”[/i] Metagross couldn’t recognize the feeling, she’d never known what it was like to lose control of anything before. Even those tiny tales of the humans in her life waking up with floppy, worthless, blood deprived limbs was difficult to fathom.\n\nSo it came as a humiliating shock to find her legs hanging like worthless, miltank udders.\n\nAudino wound her wrists into spinning, static dynamos, her antennae twitched, and she went for it, eyes glowing with medical concentration as her palm landed right between the eyes.\n\nMetagross groaned with a sickening feeling in her metal guts. She tried to hose Audino down in an undisciplined gout of light, but nothing happened; some rapid onset constipation of the mind had Disabled everything everywhere inside, no matter how she tried to manifest her energy.\n\nShe roared like an engine forced to pull beyond its weight, glaring helplessly as Audino slapped her second iron knuckle down, right where Bianca had bored the hole that saved her life the day before.\n\nAudino’s claws snapped and the neural mass threading through Metagross’ body flushed with muddy, musical static. She looked on with indifference from afar as her body twitched, seized, and stopped. Her ego fractured into a timeless soup of semi-conscious spare parts…\n\nThen the lights went out.\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "
Forbidden Waters - 28




A fluffy, brushy tail combed the air of Indoles’ bunk as he basked in the glow of a brand-new, state-of-the-art lapdex screen. “Oh my…”

His father sat at his desk, trembling, respiring, perspiring, darkened in the shadows of his own creation.

“You know them, you love them, you can predict them as far as you can throw them, it’s TEAM STOOOOOONE!”

The eevee’s peerless, paragon body sank into the sheets as he watched, sucking at his claws with televised titillation. “Oh my…”

Cress grunted and filled his lungs with air as the medicine was finally finished with him. “Mmmnnn…” he moaned, scizoring a squishy psyduck toy in two with hands long embalmed in scientifically-concentrated youth.

Indoles cut short his indulgent streak and peeked down upon his most esteemed human. “Can I get you anything, Father?”

Iseas winced at the sound of his creation doting over him like a withering elder. “Time.”

Indoles clicked with a loving tut-tut-tut. “Show me the corner store that sells it, I’ll buy the place.”

Cress spit blood into a polypropylene cup, and cast his ichor down a biohazard hatch. “From whence did you develop such enterprise?” he asked, wiping his glasses clean as he broke the waxen seal of a surprise, quill-penned letter of recommendation for Emilio Mallison from Prince Clemont Bourbon, one of Jade Institute’s brightest and finest.

Indie’s eyes rolled around and knocked against his head. “Who could possibly know?”

Cress booted up a dextop comp, typing with such speed the keyboard hissed with anger. “I suppose you’ll be pitching this ‘research’ as extra credit?”

Indie hummed, combing through his long, luxurious mane. “Can I get an A++ this semester too?”

“I am tempted to restrict such frivolous wastes of free-development time, but this is apropos, I suppose,” Cress said, watching the hungry gaze Indoles made as the league camera operator zoomed in on the face of that Vaporeon who’d barely failed to make the program’s cut. “A fool lets themselves regret things twice.”

Indoles whipped around in surprise, then donned his sanguine, silken mask again. “Of course, Daddy; I’ve no such silly intention.”

Cress executed his secure digital caller and impatiently waited with his fingers woven shut, staring into an encrypted, police dossier titled ‘E. Mallison’ “You shouldn't dream of breeding at all. Your current offspring requires every ounce of guidance if she is to walk beside you.”

The eevee replied with a presumptuous roll of the eyes.

Cress loaded a lecture in his mind, ready to fire upon his pet project for the insolent display, but purged the thought as the call connected with a loud, metallic CLACK and the camera on the other side came into focus.

“Gah… Givvit here, Atlas.” The microphone shuffled as the images smeared with motion blurs.

“Thanks.” Lieutenant Keenan Steele’s dexnav lens followed him with an awkward, upward angle. “Aaah, good evening, Doctor! Strange getting a call from you in the hexing hours.” He was bare from the belt up, sweat dripping from a chest of shredded crevices cut from granite slabs.

“I am loathe to hassle you so late, but I assure you that the matter is quite urgent.”

“Ah, not a problem, big guy. Lemme put you right up here…” The view panned out as his dex was perched upon an empty, barbell rack. Steele slapped his knees, crashing back upon a pressing bench in some dim-lit, precinct gym. It was crowded, surrounded by equally-ripped Lucario quietly pumping iron as they eyed Cress with suspicion.

“Strange time for anaerobic exercise, isn’t it?” Cress asked with an eyebrow raised as he scanned those pokemon in the background of his live feed.

All male. Seasoned, dog-tagged combatants well beyond adult maturity, wrought with bodies grizzled in ghoulish scars. One-by-one, they returned to staring at the ends of their empty, gossamer eyes as their interest slowly faded away.

Steele nodded up at a monstrous, six-foot-five, spotting ‘mon with bulging, cornerstone shoulders, and laid down with his palms up. “Only time the boys get the gym all to themselves.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve considered setting such a diligent example when your officers are actually around?”

Steele dusted his palms in chalk and grunted as Atlas brought the barbell down with round, cast-iron wheels reading ‘150 lbs’ on each side. “Hooo. Hng, alright. Nah, not-a one of them’s ready for my regiment.” He shoved the weights up with ease, again and again, breathing in steady time.

“One might think the missus is lonely in bed,” Indoles cooed as his attention was drawn away from his live, extra access, league battle broadcast.

Steele chuckled and groaned as a couple ‘carios added two-more identical weights to his set. “Kgghah, yeaaah! C’mon, you and I both know that was never in the cards.”

“I suppose,” Cress replied. “I can see you’re busy, so I’ll cut to the chase. I just read through your report on Mallison and I had some concerns I’d like cleared up.”

“Fffnnnggg. Mmm, aaah, that fool?” Steel ground his teeth, clattering the metal back up with a sharp pop of the arms. “What of him?”

Cress cleared his throat. “I’m a bit shocked to find the words ‘suspected homicide’ littering this affidavit you’ve submitted to Mauville Hall of Justice. Quite the story you’ve written up.”

“Aaah, yeah, don’t… ghkah! …real piece of work, that one. I’d steer clear, Doc. He’s heading nowhere in a hurry.” His arms were starting to slow, his breathing building in intensity as his face ran with slobbering beads of sweat. “I personally guarantee it.”

Indoles crept over to the edge of the bed, listening in with a delighted look on his face. “Oooh, Richard’s wallflowers’ got corpses in their closet, huh? That complicates things.”

“Shush!” Cress snapped up at his pet.

Steele smiled. “Whoa, hey Indie! Been a while, still setting records up in Frankenstein's lab?”

“Salute, chief.” Indoles waved and let his paws hang over the edge. “Every single day.”

“Hell yeah, convince your curmudgeon there to let ya jam one of these nights, aight?”

Cress grunted at the disruption. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you a favor.”

Steele strained, face turning pink as he filled and purged his lungs on repeat. “Hit me.”

His spotter cocked his head. “Caa, lara?” he asked with uneasiness in his tone.

Steele nodded with his elbows at a powerful, shallow bend.

Atlas shrugged, and a pair of ‘50’s were clipped on.

Cress paid close attention to the man’s physique as it started to shake with the strain. “Ahem, shift that one-inch right, you want to be perfectly centered at that sort of intensity.”

The old lucario nodded, helping him with the adjustment, then gave Cress a pawsy, thumbs-up.

“Hnnnggg, gaaah. Thanks, Doc.”

Dr. Cress nodded, abandoning his pleasantries. “I’d like Mallison’s case shelved.”

All activity in the gym came to a sudden, unsettling stop as the ‘carios went right back to staring.

Steele, however, didn’t stop. His jaw clenched as he curled his legs back with every single, flesh rending rep. “Fuuuck-errr… Sh- Nnnaaa!” he roared as the bar made its way back up. “Hit me!”

The police-chief's partners nodded, grunting in approval as Steele chose to push on, and slipped another hundred pounds to Steele’s impressive, dead-iron stack. This left Cress looking on with rapt, analytical observation as the weight slowly lowered to his chest and Atlas kept his paws ready to snatch the bar at a moment’s notice.

“Haah… Haah… No can do. Not with a gaggle of rebel pod people playing dead-weight. Warrants’ on my desk, and an old, cold case is worth its weight in gold.” He turned to the camera and winked. “I’ve got my own suspicions about little-old ‘Emmi’ I wanna look into.”

“Of course you do.” Cress groused, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I find it puzzling that a man with your background hasn’t an ounce of clemency to spare for cases like this one.”

“I… guugh, ngggrrraaah!” Keenan growled low and slow, like a challenger was fast approaching. “Haah, haah… I cleaned my act up a long time ago,” he said as his body quivered and twitched with those long, herculean lifts ripping the muscles of his chest apart.

“Hit… me…”

Atlas’ face washed with serious concern. “Aaah… Ra-la cara lo?”

“D-did I st-tutter, fucker?” he asked with a furious, jaw-gnashing look of disgust. “Hit. Me.”

Iseas Samuel Cress sat like a researcher scribbling notes in a hidden ducklett-blind as another couple fifties barely clinged to the solid-steel rod. Nine-hundred pounds warped and bowed the bar in his grip and the skin of his wrists split open, threatening to crush the man’s torso as threads of blood trickled down his arms and stained his sweaty puddles red. “Fascinating.”

The darkness in the gymnasium lit with excitement as he writhed around, piping and puffing with every half-shredded strand of fiber pushing like a skitty laying wailord eggs.

“Nnnggg…” his arms started wiggling with his face turning red, and his spotter lunged.

“BACK OFF!” Steele barked with his teeth bared, slamming his feet down for support, and his muscles slid right back into place as he conjured up some feral, superhuman burst of strength.

Lieutenant Steele screamed and sent the weights wobbling up into the air, only permitting the enemy to escape his blood-soaked clutches when he was good and done with them.

The room rumbled with the applause of heavy, steel-type paws as he was helped up to a hazy sit, and slumped his elbows into his knees as a couple ‘mon wrapped his hands in gauze.

“Bravo,” Cress finally permitted himself to speak aloud. He waited a moment, giving Steele time to let the ringing in his ears subside and suck down a couple bottles of water. “I don’t suppose a department-wide, J-series recalibration would be considerable to the department’s needs?”

Steele snatched the dexnav up, glaring down into Cress’ insentient, room-temperature face. “Come again?”

“I’ll make Father’s language plain,” Indoles cut in. “Factory reset.”

Steele’s nerves chilled and he murmured a disturbed, braindead chuckle. “You can do that?”

Cress nodded with a single blink. “A clean slate should rehabilitate your conscious capital, yes.”

Steele fought to contain an arm-twisted look of pain as his inner demons battled with the cold, hard demands of modern life. He thought to mumble some incriminating questions up, but the conditions were clear as ethylene gas, smelled just as foul, and stained the open air with risk.

Verbally or not, Cress knew that this was the moment to say nothing at all.

Finally, after a full ten minutes of sour-faced deliberation, he sighed and closed his eyes. “Y’know, maybe I will keep my eye on him. Just a little longer…”

“You know what they say.” Indoles’s mouth twisted into a cool, malicious smirk as he read the empty, sixth slot in Horace Slate’s competition roster. “A hasty chase spoils the case.”



\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/-\\|/



“GO!”


Richard smirked, snapping his fingers with confidence and command. “Macham, Bind!” he shouted, to Emil’s astonishment. “Make me some Macramé!”

Vaporeon smiled and clapped her paws. “Ooh, fancy words!”

“SO MUCH FUN!” Bianca cheered, pushing play-calloused knuckles into her cheeks with glee.

Rich’s face went slack. “Huh?”

She punched at the air, grinding the balls of her boots against the ground. “Get’m baby, that's your jam he’s playing!”

Emil’s mind whip-snapped into action as Mienshao’s aerodyne body circled her prey. “Wait, hold up!”

Machamp’s veteran-battlers’ mind had leapt right into action long before any thought came to consider alternatives. Some ‘mon could come up with better reactions on their own, if they felt their trainer had made a mistake or missed something, or if they simply didn’t trust them, but ol’ Machamp had long cast his Stone-cold doubts aside.

The caped gladiator leapt forward with all four hands clutching at the air, flapping like a flag in a storm. “Chaaaaamp!”

Mienshao grinned and chirped with a snap of the vermillion ropes wrapped around her paws. “{You want me, huh?}”

Machamp felt that strange, niggling sensation rushing up his back again as he caught the tiniest, alluring glimpse of her gazing eyes. “{Huh, ah!}” he choked as she slipped past his fists and up into his ‘comfort zone’, suddenly remembering that he even had one in the middle of combat.

With a twitch of the cheek she let his arms wrap around her back, then slid her chest, neck, and face up his body, from thigh, to hip, to abs, to pecs, ending with her cold little nose tickling at his neck. “{Show me what you got!.}”

Machamp’s instincts leapt him away, suddenly short of breath as he worked on whatever distorted thing that was wrong with him. “{G-gah. Hold still, I’ll be gentle!}” he shouted out, trying to keep his grip on the bravado he’d shown up with.

“{Awww…}” Mienshao chittered with a long, husky, effeminate cackle. “{That’s suuuch a shame,}” she lamented with her face half-hidden behind the flaps of her arms, and then suddenly fell to all fours and swept the other pair of lines clutched in her hind-paws behind her with the force of her entire body.

The muffled screams of Emil, Richard, the Crowd, and even that sensation of something curling around his ankles came roaring back like a tunnel flushed with water. Machamp gasped, yelling in surprise as his feet smashed together like a pair of super-attracted magnets and were pulled out from under him, crashing onto his back with an wrecked-paver crack.

“{I didn’t come all this way for a snuggle, big boy.}” The audience gasped as Mienshao scurried atop his shoulders and raked her razor sharp claws all the way down his chest. “{Give it to me!}”

Bianca brought a thumbed fist to her lips in thought. “Huh, well, that works I guess, but it'd be alot easier with a GRIP CLAW, ya silly noodle!”

Emil clawed at his cheeks, tugging at his face. “The blazing bannettes is going on?! It’s like he’s deaf or something!”

“Ey! ‘Champ! Snap out of it, buddy!”

Richard was starting to feel the pressure now. The batshit witch was shuffling some serious nasties around in that old bag of tricks. Maylene must’ve been slim pickens in Bianca’s mind to get put out with such a straight-forward punch to the gut.

“Close Combat!” he commanded, pressing the ball’s command switch.

The Royal exhibition box was equally aroused as the Bourbon nobility leaned on the tips of their toes, barely clinging to their seats.

Machamp snapped back to his senses as a bloody pair of three-lined tracks were laid into his flesh, and his knuckles popped as all his fists balled up with ochre light. “{You asked for it!}”

Everyone watching winced as Machamp’s strikes made their mark: from neck, to side, to temple, to toe. She whimpered and cried as he did so, practically winding her body around his limbs from the force, but only Team Stone's finest, femboy support ‘mon could see the elated smile she was hiding from the crowd.

Spinel, who’d taken his place on the sidelines to pep and pamper his new teammates, tilted his head with interest at Machamp’s bewitched reactions. “{What the-?}”

Machamp finished his barrage by yanking his feet apart, breaking the single loop of rope holding them fast (but not the two stringing him to her paws) and grabbed her by the nape of her neck and the scruff of her hips. “{You’re going dooown!}” he roared, hefting her above his head.

“Oh yeah, Seismic Toss!” Rich called her number, pointing across the field. “Hope you’re ready to dig her out, lady!”

Bianca gasped in horror. “Mienshao! DO SOMETHING!” she screeched, dancing on her heels as if she had zero control of the situation.

Mienshao nodded back and giggled, barely hiding the shiner forming over her right eye as she slipped between his fingers like a bar of prison soap.

He shuddered as the wings dangling from her arms stroked his cheek and she spun around his back, coiling his cape around his head.

Mienshao, body visible in her glorious, battered-blue state, tugged at a pair of lines she’d managed to tie around his upper-biceps during the assault. Machamp’s screams were muffled up in his own wound-up regalia as the ropes tightened, his upper-arms snapped into wriggling torchic-wings and his towering body rolled along her back.

“{Oooh yeah!}” Mienshao moaned with exhausted pleasure, nuzzling Machamp’s face through the cloth. “{That’s the stuff!}”

Bianca cackled again. “Nice Focus Sash, sneaky boy! You buy that from the Poke Libre folks?”

“Maybe!” Richard grunted, scratching at his cheek. “VITAL THROW!”

Bianca’s palm slapped her lips. “OH NO!” she cried as the audience murmured alongside her.

Mienshao rolled Machamp around her lithe, powerhouse body and bucked him away with her shoulders. “{Down we–  Gah!}”

Machamp snatched her skull in his upper hands and nabbed her flaps in his bottom grip, wrapping them around her head instead.

She squeaked with manic, cackling laughs as her back claws playfully scraped across his skin and felt herself lifted back into the air.

Machamp growled, winding his face up like a furious cloth of fresh-pressed cheese, buckled his elbows in, slid his feet past her stance, and howled with all his might as he was forced to maneuver the debacle back into his own favor. “HUHR HUHHRRR!”

Onlookers popped up off their feet as the virgin, concrete pad laid early in the morning shattered into a twenty-foot scab of shale centered where her body was swung up, and over, and down into the ground with a wave of amber light.

Machamp’s head ripped free as his cape was torn apart from the force, grumbling with muscles bulging around his restraints.

Mienshao laid in the dirt, eyes wide with shock as she finally managed to suck the wind back into her punch-stunned lungs through a glowing, gourgeist grin.

“You ok, honey?” Bianca called out. “Need to switch?!”

Richard snickered and sneered, “she’s gettin’ real tore up, granny!”

When Mienshao returned the worried call with an emphatic shake of the head, Bianca pumped her fist and nodded back. “Awww well, you know what they say…” she began, her expression mirroring her ‘mon’s.

Richard seized on the sudden turn-turn-turn around. “Bulldoze!” he yelled as Machamp snapped the knots holding his wrists up inside his armpits.

“PIT HAPPENS!” Bianca screamed, swinging one arm around like a windmill, then stabbed her finger down, straight to Groudon’s den.

Mienshao flipped and slithered down into the earth like a fish ducking Machamp’s billowing, pelipper scoop of eye-watering, dust-colored swirls.

Richard shook his head with a smirk. “You think I’m gonna fall for that trick twice, lady? Earthquake!”

The command interrupted Machamp from fighting against the scarlet bracelets Mienshao left on his ankles and wrists. Biceps, triceps, glutes, and abs all came together to bring his leg up for a single, glorious stomp, his head fronds glowing with a power that only came with decades of work. “CHAAAAMP!”

His foot struck the ground and the tile floor turned to concrete soup, showering the front-seats in a dusty, pebble hailstorm.

There was silence for a while as Bianca waited with bated breath, a lip’s breadth from chewing her nails in anticipation. “C’mon. C’mon. C’mon,” she silently mouthed, practically in prayer.

Suddenly a diglett mound burrowed its way around Machamp’s flank, like a predator circling a boat stranded at sea.

Machamp didn’t wait, he knew exactly what Richard and his grandfather would do. He curled his arms up in a defensive stance, closed his eyes with a faint, iridescent halo around his body.

“Run!” Emil shouted.

Richard shook his head. “Machamp, don’t fall for it. Get out of there!”

Machamp looked back in shock, but trusted Richard’s judgement. This looked exactly like the thing Lucario fell for in Maylene’s match, after all.

He bolted, maintaining his Counter focus, blasting a pair of craters into the earth as his feet pushed off, and booked it to safe, sturdy–

“Machamp, WATCH YOUR STEP!” Bianca screamed.

“{Huh?!}” One of Machamps two-toed feet snagged on a red booby-trap snare hid beneath a fine sheet of powder. “{DAMMIT!}” he managed to scream just before he dined on premium, gourmet shit practically excavating dirt with his wailing gob.

Emil and Vaporeon’s heads cocked, brows tight, mirrored with confusion.

Richard made a bewildered guffaw. “You sneaky hex!”

Bianca’s ecstatic bouncing at her mon turning the tide stopped with a record scratch and a dumbfounded tilt of the head. “Huh? He really was in danger, though!”

Mienshao burst up from the rubble and somersaulted back, untangling the lines with fine, godling grace. “{Where do you think you’re going?}” she jeered, and reeled him back to shore.

Machamp reached for the rope, spewing muddy mouthfuls of cud as he was drawn and quartered towards her. “{You knock that off!}” he coughed, and—

“{Ah-ah-ah!}” Mienshao tisked and sent a volley of machine-gun swirls sliding down the line with blurry snaps of the wrist.

The old ‘mon growled in frustration as his forearm was wrapped, again and again, until a skin-swelling cuff of rope bit into him. “{Fight me like a mon!}”

Mienshao sang that amorous, husky pang again. “{You’re the one running, sugar,}” she barked, and unearthed another cord from the crumble with an ear-splitting whip-crack.

Oh yeah, well two can play at that game. Richard balled up his fist. “Yo, Mienshao, you better get in close while you can. Machamp’s got a mean focus blast he’s just itching to throw!”

She curled her back and crouched like a hunter in the brush. “{My pleasure.}”

Machamp had barely enough time to bring his arms up for a hasty, defensive crunch. “CHA MAPA!” he shouted back across his shoulder.

Richard didn’t need to be a pokeglott to know when he was being called out as a traitor.

Vaporeon nibbled at her lover’s ear. “{What is the idiot doing right now?}” she hissed.

Emil gave Richard the side-eye, but thought it best to keep his protests to himself.

“Watch the rope’s, Machamp! She’s a bindmaster ‘mon!” Bianca flailed her arms around. “Low Sweep!” she instructed as Mienshao fired herself fangs-first, right for the abdomen.

Machamp felt just about as willing to let a weavile watch an egg, but saw the opening in Mienshao’s defenses plain as day. What distorted thing was the old bag up to?

Ah, well, never look a gift-bray in the mouth, he thought, and fell to all-sixes, swirling his legs around.

Mienshao’s stubby legs were hooked at the thigh, swept aside with a glowing, orange ankle and spun like a flung-off wheel.

Her body skipped across a pond of broken stone and tumbled to a stop. She rolled her joints around with a crepitus crunch and smiled back at her trainer, rubbing her paw across the smoking bruise on her leg, nursing some unseen damage he’d done to her aura.

“Nice job, now you’ve slowed her down. Go for it! Close Combat!” Bianca shouted as if she’d been infected with that youthful, first-time excitement a child got watching the masters at work.

Richard was starting to wonder if he was on the wrong side of the ring, desperate to turn that strange, ever-revolving table Bianca had them playing on back around.

Gotta earn her trust first. “Go for the solar plexus!”

“PACHAAA?!” Machamp decried as his weakness was laid plain for Arceus and everyone to see.

Mienshao blasted forward in a flash and they collided with a thud that struck those closest to the ring like a board against their chests.

Though she was a full head smaller than Machamp, and stumbling from the sweep, Mienshao was formidable and unyielding in her assault. She danced around his lumbering arms and plunged her claws into the rubble, snagging his limbs in snares she’d laid with care,

Machamp snarled as she tugged him towards her by his ankles and wrists, and smashed her across his shin with a bony smack that made the audience shift with sympathetic suffering.

Mienshao practically wrapped around his leg in flow with the force, but she clenched her claws, flipped to her feet, and prepared to stand her ground against the coming storm.

Each battered the other here-and-there-and-everywhere, trading tortures with bare-knuckle scourges in a whipping blizzard of blows.

“Aaah, um, err…” Richard tried shouting random, idiot suggestions to the enemy, but either she couldn’t hear him or the girl simply didn’t care if he was there. Long shot, but worth a try.

Mienshao side-stepped a wild, haymaker swing and shoved his sneaky, sucker’s jabs away with ropes pulled tight in her claws. The maneuvers left her opponent teetering at the edge of his toes and she lassoed him to the ground with a catty loop thrown around his head.

“{That’s ENOUGH!}” Machamp slammed his fists into the earth with fury and cracked her across the skull with a high-flying, hand-stand kick. “{Taste it!}”

Mienshao’s knees buckled and she tumbled to her ass, then kipped back up to her feet just in time to collect a meteoric, overhand strike square in the eye.

She shuffled with her muzzle shaking as her senses made it back around. “Mrrrooowwwlll!” she growled, wobbling around with her face draped in traumatized hide.

Bianca whooped and socked the air with balled-up fists. “GIT WHAT’S COMIN TO YA!”

Fist-shaped marks all over Mienshao’s body glowed red with pent-up stores of power. She tagged his jaw in a jumping, upper-Comeuppance punch that lifted Machamp off his feet with fat, flubbering cheeks.

Machamp’s body shuddered with a warmth he found difficult to describe as her claws made contact again. He felt sluggish and stupid, like a childhood bully feeling pangs of guilt for hitting the wimpy kid with glasses or the fairest schoolyard maiden of the class.

Had she poisoned him? Was he paralyzed? No, the old slugger was well acquainted with those feelings; but what was it, then? “{What is your deal, woman, jeez!}”

Spinel finally realized what he was seeing and trilled so loud that people in the stands actually noticed, to his immediate, humiliated dismay. He ruffled his fluff and his hackles raised as he practically felt Mienshao’s fur stroking Machamp’s skin from afar. He was a pokemon evolved from love, adoration, and affection. How could he NOT see it, hear it, feel it? For Gods’ sake he could taste her seduction from space.

“{Richie!}” he chirped, wanting so, sooo badly to reach out to his man and tell him with his tendrils. He nearly did it too, barely stopping himself as his teammates on the bench told him off with their eyes. Regulation forbade anyone but the battlers and their trainers from entering the square. He hated it, so fucking much!

“{You guys, she has Cute Charm!}” he squeaked to Vaporeon and Emil, hoping, praying the message would be relayed in time.

Vaporeon’s head snapped away from the fight. “{Come again?}”

“{I don’t know how, but that ‘mon was born with Cute Charm. I bet he hasn’t had a good spoink in ages and she’s rustling his jimmies up something fierce!}”

Emil choked on an exasperated laugh. “Oh for– Rich, switch him out, he’s infatuated!”

Richard gawked and thrust his pokeball out. “Hoopa’s Loops! I’ll take the penalty, Machamp, ret–”

Mienshao gave Richard the nastiest, most viscerally hostile glare he’d ever seen from a caught mon. “{MINE!}” she screeched, flipped one foot up, and snagged Machamp's thigh in a swirling  dervish of rope.

Vaporeon recognized that energy like a reflection in the mirror. “{Oh…}”

The light from Richard’s pokeball struck Machamp’s body, but his contact and energy proximity with his opponent left his pokeball error-ing out with an aggravating buzz. “Oh shit!”

“{C’mon!}” Ropes creaked and crackled from the force of her battle-augmented body mooring him in place, grunting in a titanic, egotistical tug-of-war. Then her body went slack and he unwittingly slung her into his chest. “{Tussle like you mean it!}” she crooned and wound her wings around his neck.

Mienshao spun on her heels, cinching flesh to fur, and threw him over her shoulder, straight into a stone-shattering, earth-shaking, machamp-handling Bind, the likes of which few had ever bore witness.

Meanwhile, the royal viewing platform exploded with spat drinks and breathless laughter.

Even-more meanwhile, Mr. Gyarados' private family stands were dominated by the incomprehensible hoot-hooting and mon-speech hollering of two very intoxicated pokephiles.

Bianca stomped her boots, hot with embarrassment. “Mienshao!” she groused as she finally realized what was going on. “Now is not the time! Gods!”

Incineroar and Vaporeon both slowly breathed to keep their tempers in check, ready to leap in at a moment’s notice and put the nutcase down if Machamp couldn’t somehow get it together.

You would think that four fully-functioning arms would give you an advantage over a smaller, two-armed opponent. But on that teeny-tiny ladder leading up to the Master’s League, nothing should be taken for granted.

Mienshao slid his limbs around like they laid atop a bed of ice, striking his body, belly, and cheeks with crushing elbow, after paralyzing jab, after razor, stabbing claw. She didn’t go unscathed though, squinting through watery eyes at the rows of fractured ribs behind her breast.

He was running out of gas. So was she. Both their gazes hardened; it was time to bring this close-quarter catastrophe to its rightful conclusion.

Machamp made a snapping jab at Mienshao’s throat and her flaps whipped his wrist behind his back. She tied his arms together with all four paws, one by one, and cinched the ropes tight with her foot jammed against his calf.
 
“{Gaah, this is… Aaaaaa!}” Machamp grumbled and yelled in mortified surprise.

He wouldn’t stand for this pitiful sort of defeat. “Mrrrraaaaaa!” he gritted his teeth, pushing through the seductive fog clouding his mind, and split the fibers free in an explosion of silk confetti.

Team Stone’s starter swung himself around, spinning on his tied-together toes, and windmill-smacked a look of astonishment from Mienshao’s face with the cleanest quadruple Dizzy Punch he’d ever mustered.

One! Two! Three! Four! She stood fast until the final backhand blow and crashed to the earth, splitting a cement slab with her shoulder at the arena’s edge.

Machamp ripped the lasso from his legs and screamed, unable to form any sort of intelligible utterance worth half a distorted damn. He was so overwhelmed with raw, primal frustration he was starting to look a lot like Rhydon with the way his eyes went red with rage and his ashen skin flushed pecha-pink.

Amidst the trickling, bloody channels and the holes in his flesh, his anger concealed the pressure building from just how hot and bothered his body was.

Mienshao’s swollen, one-eyed gaze fixed to Machamp’s big, beautiful face as his shadow blocked out that fated, amber, afternoon sun. She spat a gory mouthful of shattered fangs and wiped her mouth dry, saddling back up for one more brutal round. “{In-credible!}” she gargled, favoring her un-swept leg.

“Machapamachaka!” he babbled in a wrathful fit of tongues, crushing stones to powder beneath his seething stampede. He clamped his fingers down around Mienshao’s arms and thighs, hoisted her up above his head, and worked her into what the audience was sure must have been the single most painfully-compliant ball of muscle-wound bone ever contorted on camera.

Mienshao just… let him, gasping with what sounded to the innocent ear like harrowing, tortured howls as he twisted her like a floppy, laundry doll. She moaned and cried aloud as her body was bent and gnashed into one, grievous, gargling knot. Her limbs wound up and over her head, around her body, and back behind her hips in what appeared to be soul-crushing suffering.

To the non-breeder’s ear, she was in absolute misery.

It was anything but agony to Mienshao de Bell.

Machamp sputtered and yawped as every single one of Mienshao’s joints snapped and crackled around, popping free from their sockets with strings attached. “{WHAT!?}” he cried in despair, trading those supple layers of gray slithering from his grip for a set of rosey, silken cuffs.

He’d slipped right into that crazy little jill’s trap, like a tailor-made, seel-suede glove.

The flexy femme fatale crumpled to the ground, wracked her hips back into place, unfolded her spine, and crunched her shoulders right, reassembling like a collapsing puppet toy.

“{My–krgh!–turn!}” she coughed through the swelling in her throat with all four paws brandishing the fragments of her Destiny Knot rope.

Machamp knocked his knuckles together. His fists sparkled and boomed alight, suddenly wreathed in Fire Punch flames. “{BRING IT!}” he screamed, lunging with reckless abandon.

Mienshao stood like a bombed-out tower, silently sucking the sky in through her crumbled, blood soaked nose. She closed her eyes, whiskers twitching as he entered the fray, and breathed all her pains away. This was the place she wished she could stay, that most pivotal crux of combat, where victory met defeat along the thin, gray line separating pain from pleasure.

Shifting through a sea of slow-motion strikes, she traced those rippling muscles he’d stacked like stucco bricks with her claws, admiring his flesh as it did its level-best to set her soul to rest.

She sighed, satisfied with her time at the edge, and deflected the fisted quartet with her vermillion lines in one cool, fluid, calculated swirl.

Both boys in the opposite trainers’ square stood dumbfounded as she whipped around, pushed her back into that tattered, rock-hard body, and hunched him over, tangled in a web of blood-red snares.

Mienshao’s mouth curled into a smile full of missing teeth. “{Since you like playing rough this much…}” she purred, grinding her butt against the writhing hiker’s pack strapped to her back.

“Aaauuugh!” Machamp wrought and fought with all his might, ripping and twitching his muscles from the strain. “{What… are you doing?!}”

She wrapped a single, luxuriant flap across his cheek and licked the arteries throbbing through the tree-trunk neck hunched across her shoulder. “{I’m taking you with me!}”

Then she bit him there, in broad daylight, licking the blood from her lips as she launched them both up into the air and out of the ring.

Machamp’s jaw fell and his face went bright red as his gums started flapping without his consent. “{Yyyeeesssnononono!}” he cried, flying out of bounds on a humiliated, hog-tied arc.

The entire colosseum was silent as a snover runt as the combatants crashed with a puffy thud, Mienshao finishing on top, both desperately gasping for air.

The Judge Drone didn’t waste a single, solitary second. “DOUBLE OUT OF BOUNDS!”

Richard had long succumbed to the laughter plaguing the stands, slapping his knees at the sight. “Haaa hahaha! Oh, hoo, oh gods, what distorted thing was– HEY! Where are you going?” he shouted as Mienshao grabbed Machamp by the ankle and started dragging him away. “Get back here with my ‘mon!”

“She, uh, appears to be taking Machamp… prisoner?” Muttering echoed through the speakers as Rotom consulted the judges in their observation booth. “Is that legal?”

Bianca stood with her fist pressed into her hips and her foot tapping as her cheeks puffed out. “WHAT in TARNATION were–”

Mienshao waggled a broken-clawed digit, beckoning her trainer’s ear down to her level.

Bianca’s face shifted from anger, to confusion, to shock, and then turned that frown upside down as she bent back, cackling like she stood above a cauldron full of brew.

“Care to share with the class, teach?” Richard shouted, more demanding than asking.

“Mienshao wants to ‘go for a walk’, if ya catch my meaning.” Bianca gave him that glowing, enamorous grin so unbecoming of her age. “My ‘certs are up to date. You down?”

Rich couldn’t believe what he was hearing for a second, then slapped his palm against his head, laughing into the air. “Shoot, if Machamp wants to go for a stroll, why should I step in?”

“Oooh, a little mienfoo. I just lovelovelove them!” Bianca gushed with her cheeks in her palm, then gave a fingertip wave to the thoroughly-tenderized couple beside her. “Stay on site, honey!”

Mienshao nodded, bowed to her master with genuine respect, then eagerly slunk away with a sobbing sack of whipped champion sliding in the dirt behind her. “Shao!”

Emil scoffed. “Uh, hey Rich, um… can we take her team seriously now?”

Richard sighed and scratched at his cheek. “Yyyeeeaaahhh… Alright, get your next starter ready, madam! Count that as your senior-citizen handicap!”

“One moment, contestants!” the announcer boomed through the speakers. “With this lul in the fighting, we have the perfect opportunity to unveil our happy little surprise!”

A portcullis clacked and clicked a hundred feet away behind the front seat freaks.

“Miss de Bell, it seems you just can’t escape your schoolhouse duties!” the league voice said in jest. “Say hello, everyone, and give a luminous welcome to Nuvema Primary School’s finest! Permission to enter the square is granted. Go get her, kids!”

Bianca pressed her fingers to her lips as a horde of unfinished humans dressed in white, waving red-ring flags mobbed Bianca’s square. An exhausted vice-principle waved to her colleague in a cream-colored suit beside a long procession of adult chaperones. The crowd swelled with wholesome vibes, cheering for Miss de Bell and her gang of adopted youth.

Bianca thanked Jirachi that Mienshao’s shenanigans were out of the way as she and her team were trampled with affection. “Oh my Gods, when did–”

“Miss B, Miss B!” they squealed in a haphazard, dissonant chorus.

Dewott, who clung to Bianca’s thigh, dashed out from his safe place and leapt into the arms of an exuberant, dandelion-haired, eight-year-old girl.

“I missed you Dewott,” she whimpered, rubbing her face into his bushy, hydrophobic fluff. “Has Miss B been really nice?”

Dewott’s eyes melted, dripping down her dress. “Dewowowot!” He shoved his muzzle through her hair, nodding as he took a hock of it up in his mouth in some kind of infantile, nervous tic.

Bianca was overcome with the wonderfulness of it all and watered her field of schoolhouse flowers in a glistening rain of tears. “I missed you all too, my little chestnuts.”

“Daaawww, don’t you love to see it folks? But don’t think we’ve forgotten about you, Mr. Stone!” the announcers said, and another gate cranked open.

Richard’s father, Stanley Stone, walked onto the sun-baked cement in an untucked, button up shirt with the collar set loose. Behind him, Richard’s grandmother followed her son in that antique, floral dress, looking him up and down with a pride that was visible from the other side of the universe.

Diantha caught Richard’s gaze as the pseudo-thing Eeveeon leapt into her arms and winked.

“Here on lay-away, jet-lagged with the finest five-o-clock shadow money can buy, Stanley Steven Stone!”

Every pair of shoulders on Team Stone’s side of the isle drooped in unison as Stanley gave them a tired wave, his Gimmigoul flailing a tiny, dynamo-badge flag from the top of his head.

“Alright everyone, please take your seats in the landed reservation stands, generously donated for this occasion by Aqua Royale Research Center.”

“Say what, old man?!” Valorie squawked and spilled her beer in surprise.

Fenny clapped his paws together, dancing in place with excitement as an army of children stormed the wall. “{Human hatchlings! And so very many, yes yes! I want to scratch them all behind the ears.}”

Emil gave a wry, appreciative smile, tossing a grateful glance up at gilded seats where he was sure François was writhing in pain with each and every blow landed in the ring.

Mr. Gyarados caught the look with a smile, and shrugged as Valorie groaned in protest. “How could I possibly not bring them here to see their teacher’s glorious moment first-hand?”

Val rolled her eyes and slumped into her seat as the Unova Circus paraded up the stairs. “Easy. Y’don’t.”

Richard waved to his dad and around the elated faces in the crowd, but something bothered him. “Hey, don’t forget– ah” he started, but stopped with a hiccup in his throat as he looked back again and his Grandmother was no longer there. “Damn she packs up fast. Hah, guess she doesn’t miss being in the spotlight these days.”

Spinel snuck behind Torterra’s shell, watching Richard’s father loom by with a hung-over gait. But the old executive caught the Pokemon’s sight and wandered over.

Richard thought to stop the interaction and coax him up into the primo-seats, but convincing his dad to walk off when he had ‘that’ look on his face was next to impossible. Stupid as it was, he looked on and accepted the consequences, ready to deal with them in the wake of Bianca’s defeat.

“So you’re that little fae who’s won my son over, huh?” he hummed with one hand stuck in his checkbook pocket.

Gimmigoul smiled and blew the sylveon a kiss like they thought it was some sort of traditional, Kalosian greeting.

He looked left and right, then poked at himself with a jittering paw. “...vvveee?”

“See any other pink, ribbony things that cook around here?” he said with a jocular smirk.

Spinel reached for his flank-bags and scribbled a shaky, red-inked note.


“So… you know?”



Richard’s Father reached out and brushed his keyboard-softened hands through the Eeveelution’s fluff. Normally such a gesture would have left Spinel with a sour, infantilized taste in his mouth, but the way Stanley did it seemed more soothing, fatherly even, which contrasted with his torn-up, businessman chic.

“Yeah, Richard let me know the whole story. Says you’re really something special.”

Spinel’s body went cold and numb, staring up at Stanley in petrified terror, and he nearly dropped his pen as he scrawled,


“You’re not upset?”



Stanley chuckled and slipped Gimmigoul into his breast pocket. “Nah, now I can see what my boys’ carrying on about, I’m invested. Don’t normally take on spare tires, we run this ship lean, but I’ll bleed the coffers a bit if ya promise to work hard and keep things in order.”

Spinel’s anxiety left him as swiftly as it arrived, filling his chest with warm life like a drowning swimmer brought ashore. Oh, thank the Gods it’s not what I thought.


“Of course, sir. I won’t let you down.

Merci beaucoup!”



Stanley raised his brow at the tiny, bilingual display. “Welcome aboard, little guy,” he replied, and unlike all the other humans he wrote with, Stanley slipped the notes into his wallet.

Spinel wasn’t sure whether to be concerned or flattered, but gave Richard’s father-figure a puff-chested salute all the same. He kept that stiff back until Stanley was far enough away that the guy couldn’t spot him laid out and hyperventilating on the grass coating Torterra’s shell.

“{It’s ok…}” Torterra croaked. “{Mr. Dad is only scary on tax day!}”

Spinel couldn’t shake another, very dissonant feeling. He thinks I’m something special, he swooned inside as a warmth spread in his tummy and that put a dopey smile across his face. “{Thanks Torterra, I’ll remember that.}”

Both Richard and Emil waited for their hearts to start up again as the exchange between Daddy Stone and Spinel came to a close.

Incineroar watched with a passive, side-eyed glance, but blew a ring of disinterested smoke as she kept her eyes on the field where a pink-puffed, mocha-colored smudge caught her eye.

Standing in a shadowy, portcullis arch was Opal and her whacked-out, alcoholic trainer. Opal waved with a cheerful buoyancy that could have kept everyone afloat at sea, and though Incineroar was the least sentimental mon ever hatched, she waved back and gave her master a slow, respectful nod.

Bianca wiped the moisture from her face, hugging Dewott, who looked distraught at having to let what must have been his real human walk off without him. “Ok, youngster, enough boob’n. Let’s scrap.”

Richard nodded and then leaned to his partner in crime. “Who you think?”

Emil squinted. “We need an edge, she left Serperior out…”

Rich caught that hint like a backyard pitch. “Torterra!”

The gentle, shelled giant gawked, swaying her head towards the noise that sounded like her master. “Huuuh?” she said as she lurched up, leaving behind a thousand scattered leaves and one squeaking Sylveon abandoning ship. “Yeah!”

“Wasting no time AT ALL, Richard sends Torterra as his tie starter. Who will Bianca select next?”

The old soldier eyed her team, who looked up at her with an absolute intention to succeed, whether they were the right choice or not.

“You’re all so wonderful, but I can only pick one! Haaahhh, I miss doubles. Don’t you?”

All of her ‘mon nodded with a zealous approval.

She nodded and clenched her fists with pride. “Well, we’ll just have to crash that roster for old-times sake when we’re done showing’ this upstart what-for.” She pointed straight at Richard. “Musharna, let’s go!”

Emil felt an uneasy shuddering in his chest. “Not a lot of solid info about that species on the Dexnet. They’re real psychoactive, crazy to train. Might wanna switcheroo at some point.”

Vaporeon closed her eyes with a curt nod. “I can handle it,” she decreed, giving it her level-best to pronounce the words in her best, royal-human accent she’d been studying from all the Kalosian nobility.

“Patience, Your Majesty.” “{Patience, Your Majesty.}” Richard and Incineroar said in unison, staring Dewott down across the field.

The pastel fetus of a pokemon blimped its way into the ring, staring back at her trainer and around at the crowd as she stumbled into a round of applause. The strange thing seemed uncomfortable with the attention, even a little distracted as the enthusiasm from the crowd grew.

Torterra watched, head empty, ready for anything and nothing all at once. “Ooohhh…” she sighed, watching Musharna float. “{What do you taste like?}”

Musharna slowly turned and glared at Torterra with a lifeless, albino eye. “Whaaat dooo yooou thiiink III taaaste liiike?” she etched the words onto Torterra’s blunt, dense, stone-slab of a mind.

Torterra brought an elephantine foot up to her beak. “{Cotton candy!}”

Musharna hovered there for a moment, considering the response, “Clooose, clooose…”

Torterra smiled as her belly rumbled like those mountains of fruit gelatin she sometimes got to taste at Daddy Stone’s big, business parties. “{Well, I’mma bite ya then!}”

Musharna floated up and fell into a slumbering, cradle sway. “Dooo yooour beeest, biiig sheeell!”

“Contestants, are you ready?”

Richard and Bianca locked eyes, “Ready!”

“Three… two… one… GO!”

“Grassy Terrain!” Richard shouted out. “Make this place a fuck’n jungle, girl!”

“Language!” Bianca snapped, pointing to the guest seating above.

Richard rubbed the back of his head, chuckling nervously. “Aaaw, yeah… right.”

Bianca smirked and chuckled as Torterra erupted into verdant light, glowing like an exploding, green star on the field. Palms, fronds, and the knuckles of a bajillion buttress roots beat the cement into a shattered cadaver of its former self, choked in miles of strangling vines.

Everyone gawked in awe at the display as the entire arena exploded with iron-dense, tropical rainforest, but Richard was overcome with disappointment at the old-woman’s response pictured for him on the massive, jumbotron-screens.

Bianca gasped at the display, clapping in amazement like a kid on a blanket watching fireworks in the twilight hour. “Oooh! Good job, Torterra, you laid that thicket like a brick-knit house!”

Rich did his level best to maintain a poker-face as he searched for some sort of meaning in the thick, innocent fog surrounding her. “Yeah? Glad ya like it. Wouldn’t wanna be trapped in it, especially with Torterra romping around.”

Bianca laughed like she was hit by the punchline of a sit-com played on the kitchen-table T.V. “Trapped? Awww, now don’t go worrying about little-old-me…”

Then Richard watched in a cold sweat as a calm, reminiscing smile haunted her face, “Ain’t our first deployment in the bush.”

Rich bit his tongue and moved on. “Torterra, start a Leaf Storm!”

“Uh oh, I hope you splash-zone folks are ready, because it looks like this is gonna get messy again!”

The leaves of the forest swelled with a rustling sound like an angered swarm, and a fine mist of razor leaves filled the empty space between boundaries in a swirling column that climbed to the regulation flying limit. Though she lay unseen in the sea of green she spilled, deadly slivers of leaf litter sparked against her armored hide, saving the tortoise from her own attacks.

Bianca held her hat down and batted leaves out of her eyes. “Real sh–poop storm you’re brewing there, wooo!” she whooped out, careful to stay the best example for kids, then stomped a boot down with a shrill, sharp whistle. “Mix em up a glass of MIME LIGHT, hup hup!”

Musharna crept uncomfortably close to the laser-sensored upper-edge of the battle zone as the angry, botanical fog nipped at her plump, bushy tuckus. The instant Bianca’s order hit her pokemon’s ears, she sucked her own swirling mists in, inflating to three-times her normal size.

Then she burst into a soupy flood of pastel fog that swallowed the jungle whole.

Bianca cheered like a parent watching her child at a tiny talent show. “That was sooo goood, Musharna! Amazing! Not a single spot of rust on your edges!”

Emil blinked. “What.”

“Now hit her with the good stuff!”

Vaporen and Emil both turned to Richard. “Get her out of there!”

Stone’s lead strategist was starting to think it was time to skip the type-advantage song-and-ponyta dance and go straight to improv. In retrospect, he realized that’s how he should have played it from the start. “RET–”

“LOCK IT DOWN!” Bianca cut him off in a ferocious, commandeering bark. “NO ESCAPE!”

Musharna’s living-mist coalesced on a single point in the woods as Torterra’s ball buzzed.

Richard’s heart raced and panic began to set in as he was forced to commit to the idiot bit. “AMNESIA! AMNESIA!” he cried, knowing for sure that some awful, psychic strike was coming.

Torterra heard and obeyed. She had record reaction time with this move, due mostly in part to the fact that she hardly had anything upstairs to purge at any one given time. She hummed, glowing purple and white as her thoughts left her ears in a rippling warp.

Bianca tapped her foot, face straight as their plan made contact with the enemy.

The space inside flipped on itself; what was green was now red, up was down, and (most importantly) hard was suddenly soft. Her body became a blubbering, squishy mass while in the same snap her psychic fortress became steel-tight in ways Torterra couldn’t even conceive.

Torterra’s mind was clear as purified ether, able only to experience the unavoidable moment as it came to her, which made the feeling of her own Leaf Storm grating her body into a mound of deep, oozing wounds all the more horrifying to endure.

Bianca punched the air left and right, her team of pokemon cheering beside her. “Yeah, yeah, YEAH! Get her like a ghetsy, baby!”

“TaaaAAAAAAHHH!” Torterra roared with agony, eyes closed tight to keep from gushing like sliced grapes, and her precious little mind shattered like a pane of window glass.

Everyone in the arena, Richard most of all, felt something in their guts wind up as Torterra’s cries came to a sudden, heart-skipping stop.

Bianca wiped her nose, staring through the brush. “Let her go! Whirlwind!”

Torterra's half-dead corpse spat from the trees with a blowgun puff, spraying Team Stone in freckles of hot, red ichor as she crashed down beside them.

Spinel wiped a cheek and froze, gawking at his own paws.

Bianca popped at the sight and lobbed an explosive, morbidly blithe laugh over the canopy that landed dead center in the Stone Team trenches. “Like a cherry from a window pie!” She bent with what seemed like pain on her face that had been twisted into hysterical bouts of merriment.

Mauville’s Monsters felt a collective chill walk across their skins.

“GET THAT GIRL A MEDIC!” Bianca screamed, wiping genuine tears of laughter from her eyes.

Vaporeon rumbled in wide-eyed shock and displeasure. “{Fire, we need fire!}”

Richard recalled Torterra to her ball and turned to Incineroar, but a lavender flash leapt the device in his hand and struck Rhydon in the stomach. Everyone in the Stone square was blinded by a dusty devil of left-over leaves as the great, horned menace was forcibly launched out into the war-zone.

The Rotom drones surveying the fight flicked their ocular lenses and pinged with approval. “WHIRLWIND, FORCED SWITCH! I hope Rhydon's ready to rumble in the jungle!”

Emil ground his teeth around, unsure of Musharna’s natural moveset but absolutely certain Team de Bell’s aural flexibility plotted well beyond the norm. “This is crazy!”

Rhydon collided with a great big kapok tree, screaming with bewildered anger as it split at the trunk and flattened a line of lesser plants.

Richard coughed and rolled his shoulders. “Rhydon, RETALIATE!”

The order was received, and Rhydon needed no cajoling to run rampage through the woods and destroy anyone making the mistake of having a face. “{Where are ya?!}” he roared, destroying anything that resembled a hiding place.

Bianca leaned forward, just as blind to the action as her opponent, confused at his choosing to keep the berserker in. “Uhhh, YOU REALLY SHOULD SWITCH HIM OUT, HONEY!”

Rich scoffed. “THANKS, GRANDMA, BUT I’M A REBEL!”

Rhydon yanked a curtain of trees down and was met with Musharna’s bottomless, emotionless eyes looming through a wall of ferns.

The eerie, expressionless thing shivered and rang in that way Rhydon knew from experience had to be a sleep-inducing technique.

“RRRAAAHHH!” he screamed as the air around his fist burst into white, air rippling flames.

His balled-up claws made purchase right between Musharna’s eyes, and she bounced around a group of rubber trees, flubbering to the ground with a tired wheeze.

Everyone in Richard’s corner rattled with excitement as a shockwave of pure, unsplit energy washed across them. “That sounds like it hurt, old lady! I could hear that hypnosis ringing from here!” He pointed into the trees with his eyes on the prize. “No nightmare bites for you! Rhydon, Uproar!”

Bianca giggled like a child hit with the best kind of playground joke. “Well, that’s alright!”

Rhydon marched his way over Musharna’s deflated body as her breathing slowly came to a stop and she fell into a cold, dead sleep.

Then he stared at his fist glowing purple in the hazy, canopy shade, and his body went numb with the phantom clacking of a movie reel ringing in his ears.

Bianca made a thin, calm, contented smile, the kind that finds you as you’re sipping spiced tea on a bitter, winter morning. “The real nightmares are there when you’re awake.”

Rhydon looked up, and Musharna was gone. The trees were gone, the sky was gone, the crowd was gone, all replaced with a humid, muddy replica shaking with the staccato of gunfire, distant booms, and the howling of bloodthirsty monsters in the air.

“Haah!” He wobbled around, feeling a horrible pain in his stomach, and saw his massive, rock-hard claws were replaced with weak, miserable, broken human fingers coated in curtains of spilled viscera. “Whaa?!”

“Now don’t say I didn’t warn you, buddy boy.” Bianca raised her teacher’s finger, leaning over with a wink. “DREAM FEED!”

Musharna’s body flashed and smoked like a magnesium bulb. “Goood… Niiight…”

“{I… I need help!}” Rhydon cried into a radio with a voice that wasn’t his. “{I’m…} hurt…”

Emilio felt the frightened prickles of a child seeing something shift around the closet at night.

Richard swallowed and choked on his own throat. “Rhydon, hit her again. FLAMETHROWER!”

The charred, crinkling crust of his skin flaked away in gooey chunks as he grasped at his arms, trying to catch and kill the source of his awful, all-consuming pain. “GgrrraaaAAAAAA!” He flopped to the ground, dropping a heavy, hand-stamped, bolt-action rifle into the mud as his still sizzling meat sank in a soup of standing water.

An empty, camo-pattern ball rolled out of his grip; the gravestone of a friend lost in a wall of fire.

“Medic!” he screamed in an unmistakable, old Unovan accent.

His arms were yanked from the radio, snagged with a crack of vine-whip lines, dozens of them reaching out from the underbrush as he reached for a knife he never knew he had.

He slashed them loose from his limbs, spilling sappy smelling juice across his wounds. But they finally broke his guard and the knife dropped with a crunchy twist as his wrist was milled into a meaty sack of gravel. Looking down in horror, he watched himself speadspearow across the ground with tendrils that burrowed in and out of his mud-soaked uniform, threading through his flesh to wrench napalm-baked pieces free.

He heaved a gutful of blood, lifted by the ankles, and stared down into the insatiable maw of an ungodly sized victreebel sloshing with the stinking stew of decomposed flesh, dog tags, and melting human bones.”

“Grrk,” Rhydon’s real body painted the ground in that-day’s breakfast.

Vicreebell shoved him in, face-first, glazing his body in warm, wet, tingling, stringy ooze riddled with bits of corpse. He bruised his knuckles and broke his nails clawing at the inner stomach wall. It burned: in his lungs as he held his breath, in his eyes as the fluid slipped through the gaps, casually consumed like a burmy swallowed in the bush.

…

“We’re coming honey!”   Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!  “Ice Fang!”

The world came rushing back as the victreebel's side was split, spilling him out in a ruddy flood of half-digested guts. He didn’t want to open his eyes, but they were pried apart anyway with the gentle but demanding fingers of a much younger, much angrier Bianca de Bell.

She rolled him onto his back and slid him to safety, away from the screeching creature busy being freeze-mauled to death in a stoutland’s jaws. “He’s still alive!” She shouted and fed the forest a pack of lead pills from her SMG as a team of their comrades-in-arms circled the area.

“It’s ok, you’re gonna make it,” she soothed him, unrolling a wicked arsenal of work-worn chrome clamps, sutures, salves, and an empty jar of meds. “I’m sorry, this is gonna hurt.”


Silence.


“AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

Nobody moved a muscle as a screaming spot in the forest rustled all the way back to Richard’s side of the ring. Rhydon burst out from the brush, scrambled in a crawl, and crumpled beside Spinel in a whimpering heap. “Rhy… Rhy… Rhy…” he gargled with terror, unable to summon the will to even cry.

“Gods…” Emil stepped back as Spinel leapt into action, pillowing Rhydon’s head, covering his eyes, and wrapping his ears in a headset full of cushy, lo-fi jazz.

“RING OUT! Penalty, Team Stone. Release your next pokemon!”

“What the fuck was that…” Richard hissed.

“Rich, this is bad. We need to turn things around fast…” Emil uttered, and thumbed an ochre capsule up between his lips.

He looked at Em like he’d snapped back from a nap. “I got just the thing. Ah… what’s that?” Richard asked with a suspicious twist of the face.

“Caffeine,” he said, glaring out into the jungle, thoroughly done with that line of questioning.

Richard shrugged. “Fair enough. Now…” he murmured in strained deliberation.

Without a doubt, Bianca’s mon were less than no joke, they took the unfunny reality of battle and folded it back around into hysterical, laughing madness. Everything he’d prepared had failed in spectacular fashion. Anything he tried was turned on its head.

The basics were pointless, strategy was too slow, even his subconscious instincts came up short, having been forged from tens of thousands of reasonably conventional fights.

He needed to get her on the back foot, and knew exactly how, but the idea filled him with dread.

He was gonna have to get creative...

Vaporeon growled and snapped the air with her tail. “I’ll fix it,” she barked, leaping for the field from Emmi's shoulders.

“Na-ah, Princess!” Rich recalled her before those manicured paws crossed the rubicon, and then the rest of his active pokemon too. He pocketed their balls, mixing them around, and pulled one out. His thumb pressed the command switch, his lips whispering into the microphone buried within, and he hurled whoever-it-was out to face the music.

Richard mouthed a silent prayer as it hit the distorted, green pit swallowing his family whole.

“Silent switch!” the megaphones boomed, “Miss B had better act carefully!”

Bianca’s head tracked a shimmering ufo floating up and out of the canopy with eyes smothered in blackened flames and cloaked in uncanny, backwards shadows.

“Kkkkkkrrrrrrbzzz!” Metagross shredded the air with garbled, biotechnical noise, then the flames went out, and she stayed in unmoving suspension as the drones orbited her around the field. Scanning, searching, sensing the trees with their advanced, extrahuman sight. “DONE!” she thundered against the minds of any that dared to look upon her.

The judge drones snapped evidentiary pictures of the readings on their scopes. “Musharna is unable to continue!”

Bianca gasped, set aback grinning at the impressive, hard-switch riposte. “Oooh really,” she said, recalling her mon.

Richard punched the air as Bianca’s wild momentum finally started chipping away. “Yeah! That’s what you GET!”

“What was that, Rich?” Emil asked with droll, hyperfixated eyes stuck to the field.

To-be master trainer Richard Stone stuck both thumbs his way with a proud, toothy grin. “Nightshade! Ha haaa, worked with Metagross forever getting that worked out.”

Now that got Emil’s attention. “How did you teach her that? She hates you!”

“That’s the neat part, I didn’t!” Rich perched his hands on his hips like a rum-barreled pirate. “She taught herself when we weren’t look’n and I caught her practicing behind our backs. Aaanyway, I made a deal…”

“And that deal was?”

“If I treated her better, she’d use it in battle.”

Emil hummed with his chin in his fist. “Good thing you kept that promise then.”

Richard gave a low, anxious groan. “Yeaaahhh… well, it all worked out, so yeah SUCK IT MISS B!”

Bianca waved to Metagross as a misty line of energy was drawn back into Musharna’s pokeball for a snuggle against her cheek “Wowee! Look. At. You.” She adjusted her glasses, squinting up into that dead-steel gaze. “Your auras’ the combee’s knees, girlie; no doubt about it. Richard, you should be mighty proud!”

Metagross looked Bianca’s way for a fraction of a second, exhaled a sweltering column of steam, and submerged herself back down into the depths of the jungle.

“That’s not the only ace you snuck under the table, is it?” Emil whispered over his shoulder.

Rich smirked and thumbed at his nose. “Just you watch.”

A pokeball popping cracked in the forest. Before the announcer could narrate the scene, everybody but the hard of hearing buckled over, burying their heads in their hands to hide from a squealing, nincada call that stabbed their eardrums.

Metagross fell a few feet and went blind and deaf and almost dumb. She groaned and growled, shaking the air with her own mechanical ruckus; destructive interference she hoped would cancel out the wailing, mind-churning, psychic noise.

Seconds passed, and the audience slumped over in relief as the waves blasted each other into oblivion. As long as Metagross could maintain it, she could see and hear and think. Easier said than done, as whoever it was slinking around kept wobbling the frequency, pitch, and shape of the waves.

Then another cloud of sparkling, pink haze flooded the field, choking Metagross’ senses, and her lungs. She tried to shift and search with infrared, but the Misty Terrain blackened her sight.

The announcer chimed. “Audino has been deployed! Go get her, soldier!”

“You are sneaky,” Metagross projected out for all to hear. “Dodge this.”

Her body fired up, glowing red to orange to yellow hot, then burst with a flame that incinerated the closest trees to ash in an instant. This was not a move, It was radar.

The shockwave rocked the forest, and she bolted left as a blob of biped-shaped flesh touched her mind. However, a lapse in concentration made Stones’ Steel Monolith slip and the brain-wracking noise returned. She worked her focus back into shape as the shuffling, snapping, burrowing noises in the fairy fog made abundantly clear that her opponent was preparing to make her life very, very difficult.

Metagross brushed against a loose, hanging vine and a smart, snappy switch smacked her in the face with a strategically-placed gob of clay. She barked like a backfired car, cooked ten meters of undergrowth again as she burst the air apart, and growled as she sensed three identical shapes dashing through the fog of war. If those were substitutes, they were good ones, each having the exact body temperature and distribution of a genuine, living body.

Her brows furrowed and she stopped everything, closed her eyes, and set her brain alight. This pokemon was worth drafting up a real fight.

Trillions of possibilities battered her mind in multifaceted waves as she crunched the probabilities for each and every possible outcome, stacking the chaos of the unknown up against the variables of the day in neat little lines.

How polite of her opponent not to seize on her seconds of still, silent contemplation. She fully expected to perform those calculations while dodging accosting shots from below, but no. Audino was amping herself up, it was the most logical choice, reinforcing herself for the moment she’d have to test herself against Metagross’ mental might. Exactly as planned.

Bianca nodded with cheer as she passed packs of fruit snacks around to her team. “Eat up!”

Dewott tugged at her skirt as he watched, listening to the chorus of chaos crashing through the trees. “Deww?”

She kissed the tips of her fingers and planted it right between his ears. “Don’t you worry, pecha pie.”

Metagross’ Future Sight was one of the best, but this opponent had proved contrary to statistical expectations. Indeed, she’d need to consider a greater depth of possibilities if the correct solution was to be selected. She just needed a liiitle more data…

The air broke again, in a blast that nearly sent both trainers tumbling from their squares, and Metagross whipped around at one of the figures that had leapt up and was following her from the trees.

Outcome selected. Execute.

She fired a hot, atomizing ray of pure, silvery light at the enemy; fast, just a little pulse, a distraction for the real threat hiding below…

Her brain shook at having to put up with the noise again, it took every ounce of her power to focus the second beam as quickly as she did, but she overcame the pain andshot another capital-grade, death laser that carved a molten, thirty-foot-long grave deep in the soil.

Audino flipped on her palm and dodged with a spinning somersault. She crouched, wiggled her antenna around, and vanished in a blurry, blinking cloud.

Missed, damn, but the noise was finally gone. Now she could truly work.

Metagross was surprised at the speed Bianca’s medical assistant moved at, but it still sat within acceptable tolerances.

The squealing, psychic barrage returned that eye-watering intensity as a tree branch cracked and she obliterated the canopy in a flash of superheated wind. “No more tricks!” she boomed, scanning the land for prey scurrying for safety through a storm of smoke and burning leaves.

Audino popped out from the bushes to dodge a sheet of flaming foliage falling down. She brought her claws around a pair of old-school iron knuckles, wiped her whiskers clean, and scraped the knuckledusters together to charge up for another electrical attack.

Metagross knew she had the edge and Audino was running out of places to hide. The sky cracked, her body glowed with violet light, and she raised a technique she was happy to say her master had earned the right to see. After all, she’d nearly died learning how.

A well of energy formed in front of her, warping space and time as the air was crushed in, then the little sparks around Audino’s wrists were sucked right up. Metagross’ own emanations couldn’t escape either, and her purple, psychic glow ended up sucked into a tiny pin-prick light that swirled like a dying star.

She didn’t know what to call this thing, anything accurate lacked creative punch, but it would hoover up any raw projection not held to a pokemon’s core with an iron-tight weld.

A Static bolt flash from Audino’s hands and she hissed as it swung a full ninety degrees, missing her mark by a mile, and it was swallowed up. She zipped out of the way, dodging a tree thrown like a giant javelin with telekinetic force, and panicked as a dozen more were torn free from their roots.

“ME-TA-GROS! ME-TA-GROS!” The crowd roared more as the jungle tumbled around in great, splintering stacks. They wanted to see the Bloodshed for themselves, so anything that kept Metagross raising Moltres’ Flames stoked their thirst. “ME-TA-GROS! ME-TA-GROS!”

Bianca’s darling thought to retreat, to call in the bigger guns as she had to launch herself around a gym of exploding trunks. Audino would’ve rather not, remembering the oaths she’d made so long ago, and kicked herself off.

She landed out of sight, slapped her cheeks in her palms with intense, overwhelmed thought. Then she gasped, parkour rolled along the ground, and lobbed a rock up into the air.

Plonk!

Metagross flinched as the stone bounced off her arm, not out of pain or some aural interference forcing her to act out of turn, but straight, unexpected confusion.

Audino filled her lungs, stomped her feet and her body split into a trio of blurry, flickering reflections of herself.

Metagross buzzed with concern. What is this?

“INCREDIBLE! Triple Team! Outside the warzones and here for your viewing pleasure!”

Emilio clenched a fist in his pocket. “That’s a thing?!”

“{Yes. It is.}” Vaporeon nuzzled his cheek, knowing now that he was just as upset as she was. “{Some military mon use it to dodge gunfire.}”

He pet her smooth, intoxicating skin, more to soothe himself than his mate. “{Can you do that?}”

“{Umm…}” Vaporeon had to bring a claw up to her chin in thought. “{Maybe… It’s hard on your body and doesn’t help much in battles like these. I don’t know why she’d even try it.}”

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, what a display! Moves, rare and even totally unseen, performed with the most masterful of hands! It’s times like these we’re grateful for our high definition, high speed, three dimensional film!”

Stabbing trunks struck the ground as the figures bolted forth, evaporating on impact as brand-new illusions flashed to life barely out of view.

Bianca whistled through her fingers. “That’s the ticket! One more, TIMES FOUR!”

Emil and Rich’s jaws both dropped. “No way.”

Audino’s clones skipped a step and all at once they crouched to all fours. The air hummed like a circular saw left with nothing more to cut as a fourth image appeared, encircling their foe, and they converged on the enemy’s position.

Metagross toppled wooden dominoes around as her senses lost track of Bianca’s mon. She could spot her four times over, but any time she locked on target they flicked out of existence and popped behind her somewhere else.

A glistening shower of Swift storm stars pelted Metagross’ hide like rain on a sheet-steel shed. It did little but tickle, but made abundantly clear just how badly she’d miscalculated with an enemy who would NOT give her any second chances.

She swept the air with a silver scythe of light that should have sliced a cone of trees clean through, but instead was consumed by the energy well she’d made. You… clever girl.

Swifts never miss. Any bottom rung, wannabe trainer could tell you that. Most pokemon forgot the move entirely after years mastering stronger, more effective techniques. In a way, the gross presupposition about how Audino should behave as a formidable enemy completely assured that Metagross would forget to consider such a trivial, low-tier tactic.

Another barrage poked red-hot welts in her biometal skin and she let her energy well come apart, leveling huge, smoldering swathes of forest in a storm of monotype, energy strikes.

Team de Bell gasped at the display, excited to be alive.

Team Stone was left wondering what to do next.

Metagross chuckled. An audino was giving her this hard of a time?

Her moaning was muffled by the din of that disgorged, thunderous force. She winced, and chewed on a mouthful of static as stronger torrents of stars crashed against her back.

 Impressive… but I’ve seen your game, you’re out of cards, and I’ve stacked the deck.

She let the weakling pelt her hide, winding her aura up into metaphysical knots. Her energies snapped free, sculpting a Mirror-Coat meshed with Reflect; difficult, intensive, but equally as unexpected.

Sure as algebra solved, Audino shrieked in pain as her own, inerrant strikes bounced back and the Quadruple Team clones blinked away…

…but not before a knuckleduster was thrown in with one final spritz of starlight shards.

Metagross sensed its deviant composition and slapped the weapon away, only to find it stuck fast to her skin with a powerful, electromagnetic force. Lemon-colored light sparkled, arcing around her leg, and she curled up in a violent, spastic fit that rang her head like a gong.

She blacked out, and the unconscious processes she’d programmed for just such an occasion leapt into action, turned into a deadly disco ball of steel, fire, and psychic rays chopping trees clean through at every angle as she careened to the ground.

Audino hefted up a cement slab and shoved it forward, taking cover as she made herself a one-mon phalanx. She stopped just a bit too close, ducked a point-blank beam that sliced her shield in two, and made a daring, all-or-nothing leap.  

Metagross woke with a clang, barely conscious, preparing one, final, bout-ending blast.

Audino was washed away in hot, metallic light, and Metagross hoped that the harrowing, point-three-percent chance her opponent might perish didn’t come to pass.

With the sound of a metal bar struck against a pipe, the light faded and Audino closed the distance, unscathed, awash with a skin of Protective light.

“{Sorry…}” Audino peeped, dodging desperate, flailing metal claws as she took careful aim, and then jabbed her other knuckles up inside Metagross’ innermost joints.

“Kzzz rrrp p p paaaah!” Metagross couldn’t recognize the feeling, she’d never known what it was like to lose control of anything before. Even those tiny tales of the humans in her life waking up with floppy, worthless, blood deprived limbs was difficult to fathom.

So it came as a humiliating shock to find her legs hanging like worthless, miltank udders.

Audino wound her wrists into spinning, static dynamos, her antennae twitched, and she went for it, eyes glowing with medical concentration as her palm landed right between the eyes.

Metagross groaned with a sickening feeling in her metal guts. She tried to hose Audino down in an undisciplined gout of light, but nothing happened; some rapid onset constipation of the mind had Disabled everything everywhere inside, no matter how she tried to manifest her energy.

She roared like an engine forced to pull beyond its weight, glaring helplessly as Audino slapped her second iron knuckle down, right where Bianca had bored the hole that saved her life the day before.

Audino’s claws snapped and the neural mass threading through Metagross’ body flushed with muddy, musical static. She looked on with indifference from afar as her body twitched, seized, and stopped. Her ego fractured into a timeless soup of semi-conscious spare parts…

Then the lights went out.
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