A few minutes of navigation, and Hoshi was beginning to sympathise with his apparent underling. Puce was right. This place really is built like a maze.
Even with Casca knowing where to go, and a literal map to his destination, he still felt slightly lost – and the fact he was still processing his conversation with the Rocket duo wasn’t helping him get a handle on things. “How does anybody find their way around this place?”
Casca looked back. “Practice, Hoshi. Trust me, a few months from now you’ll be able to find any room in the building – once you stop focusing on what turns to make, and go with what each hallway looks like instead, it gets, like, twenty times easier.”
Suppressing his urge to grouse, Hoshi continued following her back, the map taking up the bottom half of his vision. Why the fuck would they build it like this? It's like one of those old Lavender houses that were built to confuse ghosts. Maybe this was just how rich people lived? Maybe it was to confuse the Jennys if they ever discovered the place? Maybe those two Rockets are insane, and this is just an extension of the chanting and posing and shit.
Eventually they went down a flight of narrow stairs tucked into a corner, completely different from the ornate set that had led up to the second floor – and at the bottom was an entirely different aesthetic; the basement was, from ceiling to floor, solid stone. No carpets, no greenery, no conspicuously lavish wealth. Lit by fluorescent bulbs set into indentations where wall met ceiling, it gave off the air of a mad scientist’s secret dungeon; unsettlingly medieval and almost completely sterile at the same time.
Hoshi shivered. “Woof. I feel like I just walked into a horror movie.”
Casca shot him an understanding smile. “Oh yeah, that never goes away. Especially when you see some of what they cook up down here…” Her blue eyes flashed in the almost overpowering illumination. “Nice and cool, though, so at least we’ll be comfortable before we’re dissected.”
With an unappreciative grunt, Hoshi slipped around her. “Girl, don’t joke about that. I feel like today has taken a decade off my life.” He held the map up. Okay, this is actually slightly less of a maze. Helps that the halls are following a consistent square grid pattern… “But seriously, what am I in for? You make these ‘Professors’ seem like real assholes.”
“Well…” she began, accepting his lead. “I’m kind of playing it up, a bit? But not really.”
Hoshi lowered the map to give her a look.
“No, I mean it! Professor Mokusen – who I’m struggling to picture as a construction worker, by the way – is literally always angry. Today’s speech was like the first time I’ve ever seen him drop the holier-than-thou scowl.”
“I’m having a hard time believing it too,” he replied with a shake of his head. “Dabi’s always been spineless. I can’t imagine it’s just an act – can you picture yourself swapping personalities that consistently? Without slipping up all over the place?”
She mirrored his expression. “Both my lessons and common sense say it’s unrealistic. You don’t make your undercover personality too different; you put as much truth in as you can afford to, ‘cause otherwise your story’s gonna come out half-baked.”
“Exactly.” Freaky shit. “What about the other one?”
Casca made a thoughtful noise. “Professor Kimigawa – Doc Hypno is… Well, you can probably guess from the name.”
Straight at the next intersection, then a right… “He fits that old stereotype?”
“Oh, to the letter. His eyes…” She shivered, hugging herself theatrically.
Hoshi stopped moving. “He ever… do anything?”
“Not to me,” she answered, and the red tinge in the corners of his eyes went away. “It’s just a vibe, you know? Like if somebody said he did, I’d believe them before they could finish saying it.”
He grunted, and began walking again. “That’s good. But like, what do they do? Like I heard Dabi talk about evolution, and the Executives-”
“Just call them the instructors, everybody does.”
“Right – and the instructors said they made the licences and Mini-Dex and this bug we’re going to plant. But how much is them, and how much is the two-dozen guys in labcoats who got their asses kicked up there?”
The next hallway was silent as his girlfriend thought. “I can’t really say?” she eventually replied. “I think a lot of it is actually just one or the other, but it’s not like I’m here, you know? I’m a Grunt; I do grunt stuff, not science stuff.”
Another straightforward hallway, and then Hoshi paused. To his left was a tunnel that didn’t seem to be on the map, just slightly smaller than the normal ones. “Is that..?”
“Oh, that looks like a new one. Sometimes diglett come by and mess something up, so they have to switch the rooms around.” Her smile was brittle. “The big rooms are usually where they always are, so we should be fine.”
Hoshi suppressed the urge to fling the map down and stomp on it, putting that energy into moving forward instead.
----------------------------------------
Eventually, after only a small number of wrong turns, they made it to the correct door; Elec 303 stared back at them, the font exactly the same as the financier doors above, the only thing breaking theme with the barren styling of the corridors. Muffled sounds came through, too indistinct to make out.
Hoshi was glad; Casca could have taken the lead back at any time, but had restrained herself to pointing out his mistakes, letting him find his way. I probably won’t have her with me every time I come here; better to learn it early.
“Do you want to stay out here?” he asked.
She shook her head animatedly, sculpted orange hair wobbling. “No, I’m fine. I don’t like being here, but it’s just uncomfortable, not anything else.”
“Right.” With a deep breath to prepare himself, Hoshi turned the knob and pushed.
The muffle resolved into a symphony of clashing sounds; it was loud, much more than he had been expecting, beeps and whirrs and crunches as a dozen different kinds of computer noises and industrial machinery slurred into one another.
“Fuck, that’s loud,” he commented, before pushing forward.
“You get used to it,” Casca replied, following.
Elec 303 appeared at first glance to be about half chemical lab, half… factory, or something. Men and women in long white coats occupied everything from standing desks to computers to what Hoshi recognised as assembly lines; real heavy-duty ones, like you’d see in a car factory, metal being shaped via machine before being taken and assembled by human hands.
Other scientists were rushing about from section to section, and there were Pokémon too, a couple voltorb and electabuzz powering different generators scattered around, and a row of large tubes – are they still called test tubes if they’re that big? – contained a selection of muk and weezing.
Danny sometimes uses grimer to make his own battery acid and shit. Is that what they’re doing here?
He stepped further in, sweeping the room with his eyes. “More crowded than I thought it would be.” I was picturing something more… orderly? This is closer to what I’d imagine if you shoved twenty Dannys in a room, than anything I’d expect from a professional laboratory… Then again, it wasn’t like he’d ever been in a laboratory before now – maybe this was the standard.
A man started screaming, bolting up from his seat in the desks-and-chalkboards part of the room.
“It all makes sense!” he yelled, easily overpowering the machinery. “It’s the only way the math lines up! A simulation, it’s all a simulation! Arcus playing dice with the universe! It’s- no, get off! Unhand me!”
Hoshi watched, mouth agape, as a trio of other researchers lifted the man up and dragged him to an… open pool? Okay, no, this is more weird shit. Does working for Rocket make you insane?
“The world needs to know! I can feel His hand, guiding my motion, the unseen string behind every-!”
They dunked the man – an experience that must have been unpleasant, given that Hoshi could see ice cubes floating in the blue water – and when he came back up the mad mathematician had lost some of the crazy in his eyes.
“What the-?” he sputtered, treading water. “Where am I, why am I-?” His face blanked, then screwed up as he started to feel the cold. “Damnation, not again!”
Casca slid a hand under his chin, closing his mouth. “I know, right? Total madhouse, top to bottom.” Hoshi snapped out of the shock the strange event had instilled, drawing his eyes across the room a second time. What the actual fuck? “I’d never have thought they’d get anything done, but the balls and cards and stuff seems to come out clean, so it must work on some level. Let me grab one of these pencil pushers, wait here a sec…”
She sauntered off, visibly enjoying his bafflement, and Hoshi’s mental jaw followed the physical one as he pulled himself together. Madness. Actual fucking mad science shit. The trio finished pulling the screamer out of his ice bath and then just… walked back to their stations, like it was the most normal shit in the world.
He spent a minute continuing to take it all in, and almost against his will Hoshi began to see a reason behind the room’s ebb and flow. There’s where they make the Rocket Balls. The fumes off the gasbags feed a dozen different stations, both generators and what looks to be distilleries, so they’re using the gas as fuel as well as material for the stuff they’re manufacturing. The muk get showered in I-don’t-want-to-know, then the filtered liquid goes down into a grate – where does it go after? Are there even deeper labs? Some of these machines are actually for making car parts; they must have raided or bought out a factory…
When Casca came back, she brought a tall woman in thick-but-not-Dabi-thick glasses with her.
“Here we go,” she chirped. “This is Hoshi, he’s meant to get some mission-critical doohickey from the Professors. Oh, and his uniform.”
The dark-skinned woman adjusted her collar, gently but insistently tugging her sleeve out from his girlfriend’s grip. “Yes, we’ve been expecting you. Things run a little late up above?”
“Probably,” Hoshi replied. “So where should I go?”
The scientist’s brows came together in thought as her face became vacant. “Hmm, would he be..? No, Professor Mokusen explicitly said…” She trailed off, her mouth moving but not making sound. Great, even more crazy. Eventually she stopped muttering, giving an actual audible answer. “Doctor Hypno should be free at the moment. His office is there – just behind the crusher, see?”
Hoshi, in fact, did not see; whatever she was gesturing at was firmly hidden behind a massive industrial press, whose purpose he refused to consider. Nonetheless, he nodded. “Thanks, we’ll be on our way.”
The woman half-nodded and turned, returning to muttering under her breath as she stepped away. Latching onto his girlfriend’s arm, Hoshi took the scientist’s cue and walked swiftly, making a beeline for the… crusher.
“You okay, my man? You seem kind of spooked.”
He looked his girlfriend in the eye. “Casca, I just watched a man have some kind of- of psychotic break, and it’s like seven PM. I am tired and hungry, and yes, kind of fucking spooked.” I haven’t eaten since breakfast – actually, why aren’t you starving? Is there a cafeteria around here? “I want to grab some takeout, go home, and crash for twelve hours.”
She nodded. “Good plan. Sorry if I’m doing the forced-casual thing a little too hard; this place creeps me out, too.”
They entwined their hands, and the doorway the scientist had implied came into view; very similar to the other ‘classroom’ doors he had seen, this one was labeled Prof. K. Kimigawa in gold leaf. With mirrored nods, Hoshi twisted the knob, revealing-
His Pokémon’s ball jumped into his hand. “Rattata! Tackle!”
The rat appeared in a burst of red light as its vibrantly-coloured target spun in place with a shriek.
“What’s-?” came a voice from in front of him, but Hoshi’s hindbrain set it neatly to the side to be processed later. His rattata’s eyes found its hovering opponent, a duck-like collection of magenta and blue shapes. “Wait! No! You’ll mess up all my-!”
Rattata pounced, the porygon dodged, and the rat slammed its head into a desk, sending papers everywhere. Hoshi reached for his other ball – but an impact to his side jarred him, and it slipped from his fingers.
“Hoshi! It’s tame, it’s tame! Call it back!”
Chaos as his Pokémon tried to climb the desk, the porygon – it’s smooth, why is it smooth – plastering itself to the ceiling, still screeching, the noise joined by multiple human voices. The insistent impacts along his arm jarred something loose in his brain, and the raw panic gave way to a hot flash of jumbled-together emotions.
“Return,” he breathed, semi-conscious, and rattata disappeared.
“Oh,” came the voice again, and Hoshi’s tunnel vision widened to the point he could actually see the room as something other than streaks of colour. “Darn it, I just finished organising…”
He swallowed. “I-” I’m sorry, he tried to say, but his heart was racing too fast, pulse thundering in his ears, every muscle jittery from adrenaline. “Who the- why the fuck do you have one of those killing machines?!”
The man- the Professor stood beside his desk, a cane in his hand, looking up at his Pokémon. His gaze turned down. “Murder..? Oh, don’t be overdramatic, that’s a porygon2, not porygon.exe. Entirely different evolution!” His head tilted back up, to where the collection of coloured shapes was trying to phase through the stone. “Blast. It’s okay, girl, the scary little mouse is gone, you can come down…”
The reality of the situation finally settled, and Hoshi’s heart rate began to normalise. “Fuck, sorry. I- you get why, right?” Casca’s grip on his arm registered, and he sent a grateful look her way.
“Oh, I had hoped we’d be past it so many years later, but I suppose I’m a little too much of an optimist.” The elderly man awkwardly climbed up on his chair, reaching up with his cane to beckon the… porygon2. “It's okay Dos, there isn’t any danger. Come on down, please…” The Pokémon endured a few light prods without moving.
Stolen novel; please report.
As Hoshi eyed the trembling artificial creature, his traitorous hindbrain fucked him a second time by supplying a memory: being seated in front of the family computer, his mother showing him a colourful web page, the exact contents gone – something about a dancing monkey, maybe. She draped over him as he sat in the too-big chair, her hand covering his as she manipulated the mouse for him.
Then something popped up from the bottom of the screen, a little duck-like head poking out like it was looking through a window, cocked to the side, curious. Black and green and purple, wavering like water, like it was made of gelatin.
“Oh?” his mother said, in a voice he couldn’t recall. “Is that a friend of Mr. Buddy?” She frowned. “It looks a bit scary, doesn’t it? I like the monkey better-”
A sound, cartoonish, whizz-pop like a firework, and his mother stepped back, a line of red starting to go from the top of her shoulder down her blouse. Again, the same sound, accompanied by a giggle, and another point of red appeared on her collar.
Hoshi breathed out. “Yeah, way too fucking optimistic… sir,” he tacked on at the end.
The scientist gave up with a huff, stepping down from his desk. Now that he had enough processing power, Hoshi could immediately see why Casca would find the man creepy – his face was built to leer, his eyes large and heavy-lidded, his mouth seeming to form a too-friendly smile no matter the man’s actual emotion – or at least, Hoshi has to assume so, since his tone of voice had seemed pretty damn exasperated. His hair, dark grey with a touch of chocolate, was bowl cut, stubble dusting his cheeks and jaw, lengthening as it went until his neck was covered in bristles cut like those of a toothbrush.
And what a neck – his body couldn’t seem to decide if he should be thin or fat; his head down to the cheekbones was skeletal, but then he suddenly put on enough meat to form a double chin that melted into his chest. His arms and legs seemed thin, but his open coat was pressed to the side by an expansive pot belly.
I regret ever calling Ryan’s face weird; all those comments belong to this guy. He was so weirdly shaped, Hoshi was actually having trouble placing his age – he could have been anywhere from a bad forty to a good sixty.
“Fine, fine. She’ll come down on her own time.” The aged scientist sat heavily, leaning his cane against the desk. “What are you here for, ah…” His squinty eyes narrowed further, and Hoshi felt a spasm of revulsion pass through his entrails like the tide going out. Dear Arcus, it really does look like he’s checking me out. He isn’t, right? “Executive?” he guessed.
“Grunt, sir. Uh, Senior Grunt, that is.” Is that an official rank? I don’t even fucking know – how the fuck is this all happening on my first Arcus damned day?
The scientist grumbled. “If you insist. Unless my memory is failing me, I don’t know you.” The man’s voice was ill-matched to his face; he spoke a lot like some of the Junior Executives Hoshi had met up above, a sort of old-fashioned cadence that emphasised soft tones. “Are you one of the new recruits? No, if you’re a senior, then…”
Actual rank it is, then. “I actually am – a new recruit, that is. I need my uniform, and also the tool for the Vermilion Gym job. The instructors sent me down.”
The man continued to squint in what for all the world seemed like sexual fascination. “Ah, I see.” He opened a drawer on his desk, pawing through it. “Your name?”
“Hoshi Mutsu, sir.”
“Just call me Doc, everyone does. Hmm… Ah, here we are!” Hoshi was expecting him to draw out a bundle of black fabric, or whatever widget would go into the computer, but instead the Professor pulled up a bulky cylindrical case, like a stretched-out egg carton. “Here, your coverings.”
Hoshi took the offered case. My what? Rather than ask, he just opened the thing – the side split open along a series of tabs, and inside were red-and-white plastic disks. Wait, these look like…
“Need a hand?” Casca asked.
“No, I think I understand.” He plucked out one of the disks, and squeezed it by the edges; the flat plastic jumped into a spherical shape – turning into a hollow shell that looked exactly like a standard Poké Ball. “To hide the Rocket Balls? Clever.”
The Professor nodded. “Oh, not that clever. Got it working before the balls themselves were even finished.”
Slapping the thing over Rattata’s ball, he found that it fit like a glove – no, even better; it was completely undetectable. The lens was now the standard circle rather than a sinister eye, and none of the underlying colour came through. “I assume I can’t use the Mini-Dex like this?”
The answer was slightly muffled as ‘Doc’ continued to dig in his desk. “Unfortunately not. But you can put them into storage mode just fine, and they’ll pass inspection at a Pokécentre. Give me one more second, and…” With a noise of triumph, he withdrew something not entirely dissimilar to the tool Hoshi had asked about; a long, complexly-shaped piece of metal and plastic. “Here we are, my last Super Re-router! Be very careful with this, it’ll be a good while before Dos can scrounge up the passcodes to make another.”
He placed the tool reverently into Hoshi’s hand, treating it like the thing was made of glass, and Hoshi resolved to do the same. I’m feeling a bit luke-warm on my first official Team Rocket assignment, but that’s no reason to get lax about it.
“Thank you, Professor.” A beat. “And my uniform?”
“Hm? Oh, yes, I was just distracted, thinking about all the reorganising I’ll have to do… hint hint.” Once again he dived into his desk, and Hoshi shared an awkward look with Casca, a blush colouring his cheeks.
She cleared her throat. “Sorry sir, we’ll get right on that.”
The two of them began gathering up the scattered papers, but about a tenth of the way through – which was still a solid few minute’s work, Hoshi had spilled a lot – Casca approached him.
She spoke in a low voice, not quite a whisper. “Hey, Hoshi.”
“Hey,” he replied.
“Earlier… I don’t mean to pry, but… with the timeframe, that was…” A longer pause as they continued to gather papers. “That was about your mom, right?”
He was silent for a moment before answering. “…Yeah. Sorry for freaking out.”
“No, it's cool. Well, it isn’t, it’s- you know what I mean.”
He made an affirmative noise, and they continued gathering sheets, shuffling around on their knees – until a raised voice grabbed their attention.
“Blast it all, I can’t seem to find a single one!”
The Professor emerged, his sleeves rolled up and his face sweaty – which made him look almost impossibly lecherous. Holy fuck, I think I get why everything’s insane down here; all the regular scientists took one look at this guy and ran for the hills.
Hoshi grimaced. “Is there a problem with my uniform, sir?”
“Well you see, I didn’t think they’d promote a fresh grunt right off the bat, so I might have neglected to keep stock on the Senior Grunt uniforms…” Oh, great, fantastic. “I’m afraid this will take a minute. Come out, Kimmy!”
The man drew and tossed a Rocket Ball in one seamless motion, the purple orb a blur as it went from under his coat to releasing its stored Pokémon in a fraction of a second, and Hoshi was reminded that this wasn't just some old researcher – he was actually looking at a criminal.
Taking him as harmless would be stupid, no matter how doddering he appeared to be.
A hypno coalesced, its – her, based on the name – yellow fur and white mane completely spotless. The Pokémon was bipedal, maybe a bit more or a bit less human than machoke, depending on how you measured; mammalian, with five fingers and three toes, standing at just under five feet. She was also completely lacking a mouth, though the massive pointed nose seemed to be trying to make up for that lack.
She snorted, the sound not unlike a Kalosian horn.
“Yes, could you go out and fetch a Senior Grunt uniform from the stores?” Another bleat. “Thank you, darling.”
The Pokémon waddled off, and Hoshi was stuck by the uncanny similarity the Professor had to his namesake. Is that why he’s named that? Is it an insult, or..?
The door opened, closed, and it was just the three of them again – and also the porygon2, who had migrated to the room’s other corner.
They finished with the spill before the hypno returned, and Hoshi placed the massive stack in front of the scientist with an awkward cough. “Sorry, Doc.”
The man’s eyes slid down his body, and Hoshi bit his tongue. Don’t gag. Even if he is some kind of weird pervert, don’t react. “Well, no harm no foul, as they say. Pardon, I haven’t even introduced myself have I?” He stood, and sidled around the edge of his desk to offer Hoshi his hand. “Rocket Professor Kim Kimigawa – but I’d prefer you call me by my title, Doctor Hypno!”
He laughed, a drawn-out hoo hoo hoo that set Hoshi’s teeth on edge. “Hoshi Mutsu,” he replied. The man’s grin exuded sleaze, more than any person he had ever met. “You… seem to be doing a lot of interesting work, down here.”
“Oh, you have no idea!” He continued to grip Hoshi’s hand, his skin clammy. “Every day is a cornucopia for the mind! Why, when you were coming in I was looking over these wonderful plans from- ah, let me show you…”
He slid away to flip through the stack of papers, and Hoshi glanced back as his girlfriend. Casca was leaning against the wall, subtly keeping herself between him and the Professor. She sent him a small, conciliatory smile.
…Okay, fair. I’d be doing the same thing if I could. He replied with a quick flash of theatrical disgust – Doctor Hypno was almost overwhelmingly uncomfortable as a man; he could scarcely imagine what it was like to be in here with him as a young, attractive woman.
“Here’s the ticket! From one of my underlings, look at this!” The scientist passed the paper with a flourish, and Hoshi’s eyes narrowed as he looked at it.
“…Sorry, this is…” Fucking nonsense. “Too advanced for me.” He passed the diagram of squiggly lines and dense hyper-jargon back.
“Oh, it’s not too complicated. We managed to sneak out a few of Silph’s files a few months ago, and I’ve been having my people go over them with a fine-tooth comb. If you look here, you’ll see it plainly – we managed to snag a copy of the Pokémon Transfer System! Now it’s still mostly encrypted, but if we keep working on the problem…”
The Doctor’s words devolved into a thick sludge of tech-speak, and Hoshi sighed internally. Well, at least he isn’t looking at me, anymore.
An age later, Kimmy the hypno returned. The breeze of the door opening ruffled a few papers on the Doctor’s desk, rousing Hoshi from the protective fugue his brain had placed over itself.
“There you are, darling,” cooed the Doctor. “I was beginning to fear you’d gotten waylaid – here’s your uniform, Mr. Mutsu!”
The five-foot-tall goblin monster handed over the neatly-folded bundle, complete with puffy newsboy cap, with a musical snort.
“…Thank you.” Are you another experiment? No, hypno are pretty smart by default, this is actually pretty normal. Wild hypno sometimes came into town with handfuls of pilfered change; they were smart enough to understand trade, though they actually had a slightly worse understanding of language than most psychic type Pokémon; every now and then some grifter would try to show off that their hypno could read and write, before an actual test would reveal the thing to just be mindlessly parroting whatever it was shown.
Kimmy the hypno didn’t seem to have that same… spark, for lack of a better word, that Benny and Meowth had shown.
“You should be all set, then,” the Doctor said. “Kimmy, return. Do you need an escort out?”
Hoshi’s eyes slid to his companion, and she shook her head with pursed lips. “No thanks, Doc. We can make it out just fine.”
----------------------------------------
After twenty minutes – is that really all it was? My watch must be running slow – the cacophony of the larger lab seemed like paradise.
“Arcus’s fucking halo, that was painful.”
Casca made a gagging sound. “I know, right? Let’s get out of here.”
No argument from me. The two of them stepped around the crusher. “Do you think it’s an act? If he was actually like that somebody’d kick his ass, right?”
His girlfriend shrugged. “No clue. But I could definitely feel him staring at my tits, so fuck ‘im. He’s a creep.”
Again, no argument from me. They were forced to stop as a quartet of machop lifted some sort of machine – is that a fucking train car? No, no wheels, it’s just a tank or something shaped like one – across their path.
In a quiet tone of morbid curiosity, Casca continued. “Arc, he even looked at his Pokémon like that. Do you think he’s fucking the thing?”
Hoshi stared at her a beat, before grimacing. “Fuck, don’t put that image in my head!” He stuck out his tongue. “Ugh, it won’t leave! He even looks like the damn thing…”
“I think that’s actually legal in a few places up north.”
They looked at each other, and Hoshi replied, “Casca, that beard isn’t legal anywhere.”
The stupid joke made them both break into giggles, and they twined their arms together as the machop slowly carried the six-metre-long whatsit slowly across the open area. Something exploded out of sight, and Hoshi felt another spurt of hyper, almost manic amusement go up his spine.
This place is fucking crazy. Is my life just going to be this, now? The not-a-train passed, and they continued – but ten steps later, a stern voice called out. “Wait.”
Huh? Hoshi turned, and for a moment he just stared. “Oh. Hey, Dabi.”
The short man’s appearance wasn’t as brain-melting the third time, though it still made Hoshi’s gut feel off. Against the backdrop of the laboratory, he looked truly in his element.
“Professor Mokusen,” he corrected. “You will refer to me only as Professor Mokusen, and nothing else.” His voice was harsh, his words obviously an order, not a request.
Damn. The weedle really went and evolved into a beedrill. Hoshi might have been intimidated, if he hadn’t spent three years seeing the four-foot-nothing man as a cowering bug. “…Sure, Professor. You need something?”
The man bared his teeth. “We don’t know each other. Get it? Outside of this building, Professor Mokusen does not exist – and inside it, Dabi the…” he almost spat the next words “Construction worker, is only a figment of your imagination. Do we have an understanding?”
Hoshi continued to stare. “Sure. As long as you play along, so will I.” What, did you think I was gonna talk about… ‘work’ stuff while on the clock? Do you think I’m stupid?
Dabi stared back, his face a rictus sneer, his fists clenched. Then the corners of his mouth tilted up into a smile completely bereft of amusement. “Play along. An apt choice of words.” He turned away. “Don’t let your rank give you a swelled head. You’re still just a grunt.”
He walked away, following astride the machop and the machine they were carrying. Fucking drama queens, every single one of these fucks, Hoshi thought to himself. Aloud, he said “That was fucking weird. Gonna be strange to see him on Monday- Casca, you okay?”
She was clutching his arm. They locked eyes, and he saw something almost like fear. “Hoshi, don’t talk to him like that. I know you know him – but don’t. He’ll have his Pokémon break your fingers.” Her voice was steady, serious, and Hoshi blinked.
“…Yeah, okay.” They started walking again. “You’ve heard about him doing that?”
“I’ve seen him do that. In one of my first real jobs…” She bit her tongue. “Later. After we get home.”
He nodded. “Right. You lead the way; I’m bone-tired.”
She nodded, but then winced. “Actually, one last stop on the way out; we should make sure your uniform actually fits.”
----------------------------------------
Casca led him to a locker room, the place right next to an indoor pool, and Hoshi examined his new clothes.
The fabric shirt and pants were black, like he’d expected, but the gloves and boots were white with gold accents, rather than grey – and the latter were slightly more shaped. These aren’t rubbery like the standard ones the others were wearing. I don’t know what this material is, but it feels strong.
Going back to the shirt, it seemed to be the same felt – or an artificial equivalent – fabric as the base uniform. It was stiff, not inclined to bend, but soft to the touch. Unlike the standard uniform, the Senior Grunt’s chest featured two yellow lines, framing the red R on either side.
I feel like the belt is slightly different too, but I can’t put my finger on how.
He quickly pulled off his suit and donned the uniform. It felt just a touch awkward to move in, the fabric scratchy. I’ll have to add a thin shirt underneath. But it’s the right fit. Looking in the room’s mirror, he felt a bit silly, like he was in a costume rather than working clothes. The hat is fucking goofy.
…But I’m sure I’ll grow into it.
Hoshi swapped back to his original clothes, and soon his reflection was exactly as it had been before leaving the house that morning – save for his new belt, two Pokéballs displayed for all the world to see. He took one off, pleased with the amount of effort it took to detach the magnetic grip; enough that he’d never lose one accidentally, but not so hard it interfered with his draw.
“Go,” he said, and Rattata appeared. He released Zubat as well, and without orders his two Pokémon loitered around, sniffing at the lockers and flapping around the fluorescent lights.
“Nicknames, huh…” Hoshi had always felt that just giving your Pokémon normal human names was tacky, but he didn’t have anything picked out ahead of time either – he had assumed a name for his new Pokémon would jump out at him organically.
Something that matches their species – but not fucking Ratty or Whiskers or some shit, something unique…
His eyes turned up. Zubat evolves into golbat… and then crobat, if the conditions are right. Some Pokémon only evolved into their final form under specific social conditions, like being the leader of a pack; he knew that crobat was one of those Pokémon, but the exact condition wasn’t something he could pull off the top of his head. Might not be possible. If it needs to be around other zubat to evolve… Well, might as well shoot for the moon. “Zubat, come down here.”
The bat swooped down, settling on the back of his raised forearm. It wrapped its wings and abdominal feelers tightly around, making soft but high-pitched chirps.
“Your name is Crow now. Do you like that?” The Pokémon’s eyeless face wasn’t able to emote much; Hoshi had no idea if it understood. “Well, it’ll stick if I keep using it.” His other arm came up with the bat’s ball. “Crow, return. Rattata, come over here.”
The undersized rat bounded over, and he picked it up like it was a cat. Okay, this one is harder. I can’t think of anything that isn’t stupid as shit…
Unbidden, a memory. Red, flecked with white and lavender. Hoshi’s face twisted, and the Pokémon responded by tilting its head, chittering. “Huh. That works.” Sounds tough, even. He put the rat back down.
“Rattata, from now on, your name is Guts.”