Professor Mokusen strode through the upper laboratory, his jaw set, his eyes following the machop as they worked. Kimigawa’s peons set a wide berth around him – exactly as it should be. The ectoplasm chamber slowly made its way to an empty section on the far wall of the room, and as it approached the indentation he reached for his belt; slotting it in was a precision job, something best left to more… gentle ministrations.

“Put it down. Return.”

Four flashes, and the machop disappeared. One more, and something replaced them.

With both its arms and legs crossed, the word ‘hovering’ failed to describe the kadabra only due to its voluminous tail still keeping contact with ground. The Pokémon’s sharp eyes were closed, and so deep was its meditation that it seemed almost dead, not even breathing.

“Harry, I need this connected to the wall socket.”

The vaguely fox-like humanoid did not stir – but even so, a soft glow enveloped the chamber, and it began to float just a hair off the ground. It moved in straight lines; up, forward, a touch to the left, then forward again. With a soft thunk, it was done; electricity flowed, and the machine began to hum away. Mokusen nodded… but there was a touch of frustration to his features. “Good work. Return.”

The kadabra disappeared, and the Professor took a moment to admire his latest breakthrough.

Immaculate. The ectoplasm chamber would get them one step closer to transforming a haunter into a gengar… perhaps it would even be the last step. It was simply a shame that constructing and transporting the bulky thing had required Harry – the only one who could be trusted to properly move the exceedingly fragile thing – to use so much of his stored telekinetic potential, delaying his own evolution.

Thirty seconds passed before the scientist realised he was procrastinating, and so he huffed and turned. Best to just get it over with. With the chamber connected, it was time to update the… other Rocket Professor.

----------------------------------------

“There we are, Dos, there we are… Kimmy, honey, the box! Quickly!”

The hypno snuffled in irritation, but hoisted the box. It was a simple thing, cardboard lined with old rags, but Doc hadn’t found a single other thing that his old bird would tolerate as bedding. The porygon2 eyed the inviting surface with customary wariness, but descended a handspan. She bleeped out a complex series of tones, and Doc gestured with his hands.

“Completely safe, I promise! There isn’t a single thing that-”

A harsh voice entered the room, interrupting him and completely negating his efforts. “Doctor, the chamber is in place. Everything is ready for the next stage.”

His office door touched the wall with a faint sound, and Dos took that as her cue to race back to the ceiling, screeching. Doc hung his head.

“Damn it all,” he sighed, before turning to his new guest. What absolutely atrocious timing. “Hello, Professor. I’m afraid you’ve caught me at an inopportune moment.”

The man bared his teeth. Dabi Mokusen was an… interesting person. Many of his colleagues found the man intolerable to work with, but his competence was undeniable – and Doc found much of the man’s rumoured aggression to be overstated, anyhow; he had certainly never had any such trouble.

“Just put it in its ball, Doctor. We have important work to be doing.”

Bah, you young people don’t know how to treat a delicate lady – ‘put her in her ball,’ indeed! If I did that, she’d hide herself away for a week! Dos was eminently useful, but she had an unfortunately nervous disposition; one had to know how to deal with the latter, if one wished to make use of the former.

But of course, he wasn’t so rude as to say that to his colleague's face, so instead he simply sighed again. “It’s fine, I’ll just have to leave her here. Come along, Kimmy.”

His darling hypno, at least, was fine travelling via Pokéball; she returned without protest, and Doc sent a fleeting look towards the unorganised pile that grunt had made of his notes. That would be bothering him all day, but there wasn’t anything for it.

“Lead the way, Professor.”

With a sneer, Mokusen turned, his coat whipping like the tail of an angry persian. Doc grabbed his cane and followed, exiting his office and venturing out into the lab proper.

Everything seemed to be in order, his people going to and fro like busy little bees, and a smile tugged at his lips. Ah, always nice to see people being productive. “So, any trouble with the assembly?”

“No.”

“And moving it? Getting it up the stairs must have been-”

“You can see it from here; obviously I handled it,” the diminutive scientist snapped, and Doc decided that further conversation was a lost cause. My, he’s in a mood. What put a beedrill in his bonnet today, I wonder?

Eventually they came to the object of their small journey, and he couldn’t help but let out a chuckle. “Ooo hoo hoo, what a wonderful mechanism! Mokusen, you’ve outdone yourself once again!”

His partner sneered in appreciation, and Doc walked forward to place his hand against the glass. Cold to the touch – or should I say, deathly cold? Hoo hoo! The ectoplasm chamber was one of their – or rather his – longest-running projects, something he had been tinkering with on and off since well before he had joined his current employers. Seeing it finally whole made his aura positively radiant.

“Are you waiting for something?” Mokusen asked. His voice dripped with acidic tones, but the Doctor knew he must be just as excited as he was. “Release your haunter; I want to get preliminary readings.”

“Blast it, Professor, don’t you have any sense of how momentous this is? Obviously, we must give it the weight it is due!” He clapped his cane on the ground, raising his voice. “Everyone, gather ‘round! Yes, I see half of you are only pretending to work anyways – we might as well make it an official break!” Hoo hoo hoo!

Magnificent, absolutely astounding! The machine was cylindrical, like a great technological pill, and composed mainly of glass – from the outside, anyway. The caps on each end were metallic, the surfaces bearing fresh tool marks – Mokusen must have finished it literally within the hour.

But inside the glass casing, dark shadows and points of light seemed to swirl. He didn’t even attempt to contain his beaming smile.

Over a minute – during which Mokusen irritably tapped his foot – the laboratory’s workers came together to witness the coming historic moment. How long have I been waiting for this? Over twenty years, at the very least!

Finally, the last researcher took their place, and he drew a pair of Rocket Balls from his belt with a reverent flourish. Kimmy was released, appearing with a soft bleat, but he paused before continuing. “Ah, I almost feel afraid. What if it doesn’t work at all?” The joints of his fingers locked the second ball in a tight embrace, as if reluctant to part with it.

“Then we’ll redesign it and try again,” Mokusen answered. “Now get to it. This is only the first use; who knows how long proper calibration will take?”

The Doctor chose not to immediately follow his partner’s advice, instead readying himself with a breath. Steady on, steady on. Then he threw the ball, low and with extreme spin. “Hiebelle, this is the moment we’ve been waiting for!”

The ball hit the ground and popped open, the backspin causing it to jump straight up. His precious haunter was released, a gaseous cloud with two clawed hands and a wide, gaping maw. She was hard to see, the harsh lights only seeming to make her less visible, her airy body interacting strangely with the senses.

The returning ball flew back to his waiting palm, and the dense smack felt like triumph.

All together, the entire room held its breath. The indistinct blur floated around the machine, inspecting it with her senses, and Doc gripped his cane so hard he feared something might break. “Someone dim the lights,” an onlooker hissed, and a moment later the ghost became more discernible.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

As the room fell into a dusk-like gloom, Hiebelle became more vivid, more solid, as though gathering a body from the shadows themselves. Mokusen, the cretin, only continued to tap his foot in the face of her majesty.

“Hiii…” the Pokémon snickered, and Doc felt a chill go up his spine, several researchers gasping as they experienced the same sensation. She feels it. What must it be like, to sense such a thing? The power to reach your final form..? Then, like the incorporeal being she was, the ghost slipped right through the glass body of the machine and disappeared.

Immediately, the surface began to dance as a series of lights buried in the glass blinked on and off, a cascading rainbow of colours that dazzled his vision. Doc put a hand out to shade his eyes, but refused to look away. “It’s working! Mokusen, it’s working!”

“Shut up you dolt! I can’t think with your meaningless babble!” His thick spectacles must not have provided much protection, because he raised his hands to shade himself as well. “Damn it – the reaction is too strong! Shut it down!”

The man’s kadabra came out, but with a gesture from her master Kimmy raised her pendulum and disrupted its telekinetic grasp.

“Absolutely not! Look at the pattern! It’s holding steady!”

The man gnashed his teeth, and between scintillating flashes a graveler and exeggcute materialised. “I refuse to rebuild it from scratch! Dan, Bernard, restrain that hypno!”

Doc felt a laugh bubbling up, and released it with a howl. “Hoo hoo hoo! Oh, don’t be overdramatic!” He could feel it now, too, the glut of ghost-type energy permeating the room; it was no coincidence that ghost and psychic were once considered a single type. He gestured with his cane. “My fellows, the Professor and I are having a cordial disagreement! Who else feels like weighing in?”

The intense lightshow tilted towards red as over two dozen Pokémon were released, and the containment tubes slid open in a series of whooshes, muk and weezing joined the field. Then the lights dimmed further, winking out for a fraction of a second before blue emergency lighting flickered on, painting the laboratory in deep, shadowy tones.

“You-!” Mokusen snarled. But then he stilled, the pulsing veins in his forehead disappearing – but the anger did not; the Doctor could still see it, the small dregs of psychic ability he had sacrificed so much to awaken showing him the truth of the man’s very soul. “Very well, if you want it to be like that, I’ll show you how disagreeable I can be.”

Another flash, and a towering figure appeared; something seven feet tall, its four arms bulging with muscles like coiled arbok.

“M-machamp!” screamed a panicking fellow. “Weezing, Explosion!” Several aghast faces turned his way, but the Doctor only continued to laugh.

“Dos, Barrier!” The timid girl didn’t show any part of herself, but she must have heard his order, because a pane glistening like crystal glass shimmered into being between the delicate chamber and the soon-to-explode weezing. “Oh, I feel like I’m back at Cinnabar again!”

The bag of poison gasses detonated.

----------------------------------------

Professor Mokusen strode through the halls, his jaw set, the remains of his formerly pristine labcoat smouldering.

Insane fool. Dexus take that man and spare us all his bullshit.

He always hated going to the upper labs; they were an uncivilised, barely functional cavalcade of half-baked ideas – not unlike their master, the self-proclaimed Doctor. Every time he went there, something conspired to blow up in his face.

He looked back to scowl in its direction, and realised with rising horror that he was leaving a trail – he lifted a foot, staring in disgust at the coating of muk juice liberally coating the bottoms of his shoes.

There went a perfectly good set of footwear, joining his coat in the casualty list. He shucked off the ruined shoes, setting them next to the wall and continuing in his socks – he would have someone dispose of the toxic waste later.

Blowhard. Arrogant, selfish prick, he admonished internally. And since the chamber ended up being semi-successful, I can’t even complain to the instructors.

That was always the way it went; Kimigawa would swoop in at the last minute, toss one of his carefully designed experiments like a cheap salad, and manage to produce something viable by sheer luck. Luck. Fucking luck!

The man was a menace, a bad joke, but he always appeared to be just competent enough to warrant promotion, just innocent enough to avoid backlash. Mokusen had traced him back through one disastrous event to the next; the illicit Ghostwire Project, whatever perversion Bill had been up to in Cerulean, Silph Co.’s Porygon3 Open Initiative, the original Cinnabar Labs disaster – the man’s resume was a smoking crater. And every time, he had escaped by the skin of his teeth; ironically the only time he hadn’t been responsible for the outcome was the one time the authorities blamed him, ruining his career as a civilian scientist.

The Professor took the stairs two at a time, descending down to the sub-basement – his domain, a place of sanity, of real science.

But although the softly lit corridors calmed his heart, he couldn’t discard the seething rage produced by the day’s events. The ectoplasm chamber had indeed exploded, as he’d predicted – but it had also produced a fully evolved gengar, something that he hadn’t projected to happen for months, still.

Yet again, by nothing but luck, Doctor Hypno would take the win. It was maddening.

The door to his primary lab was caught by the doorstop before it could collide with the wall, and the Professor entered to see everything in its place; the machoke training with a rotating cadre of martial artists, a duo of kadabra quietly meditating in a psychic resonance chamber, and, taking up half the room, the area for his underlings to observe and record. He repeated it to himself again: actual, sane science.

A doctor – a real, medical doctor – approached, her face covered by goggles and a paper surgical mask.. “Professor, welcome back. We heard something of a… commotion. Do you require assistance?”

His face twisted. “Get me new clothes, and alert the project manager for Ghost Level Three.” A smidgen of fear came through the woman’s posture as she took in his expression. “We’ll have to build a new ectoplasm chamber.”

“I… see,” she stated. “I’ll get right on that. Excuse me.”

She hurried off, and Professor Mokusen, with excruciating effort, placed the simmering rage into its box; it could come out later, when it wasn’t in the way. He headed into the martial section of the lab, and was again approached – this time by a martial artist, one of Saffron’s premier blackbelts.

“Sir!” the man said with a salute. “Is the facility being invaded? Shall we prepare for battle?”

“No,” he replied sharply. “I had a small disagreement with that idiot upstairs, that’s all. Give me a status report.”

Another salute; while the martial artists were all competent enough, some of them did have their own… quirks. “Yes sir!”

“And don’t yell!”

The man looked confused for a moment, before continuing. “Of course, sir. The machoke are absorbing everything like sponges, as always; we should see them ready to evolve within the month.”

“Good, you’re within schedule. The machop experiment?”

He winced. “Results haven’t been what we were hoping for, sir. They just don’t learn very well until they’re adults.”

Mokusen hissed through his teeth. “Fine. Have a written report on my desk within the hour.”

Yet another salute. Neither of us is in the military, you fool. “I’ll get it done right away, sir!” Then he turned and headed off.

With a shake of his head, the Professor did the same. He took a moment to release Harry with the other kadabra, then crossed the room to the observation chamber. For a third time he was approached, but he waved the researcher off. “Later, after I’ve dressed and read my reports. I’ll be in my lab; have those two things delivered to the office, nothing else.”

Without giving his underlings any more attention, he opened the door to leading his private laboratory and stepped inside.

----------------------------------------

Dabi Mokusen did not consider himself a genius. No; there existed towering giants, titans of progress, and he was not one of them.

His mother had been. He was merely above average, barely adequate to follow in her footsteps.

And yet, he continued to follow. He passed through his office, cleansed himself in his private bathroom, then went through into the clean room beyond, where he dressed in sterile medical scrubs. Yet another door opened, this one keyed to open only for someone of his precise height and weight, and he finally stepped into the lab proper.

Brilliant white lights flicked on in sequence, revealing massive tanks containing different Pokémon; three prominent spaces were filled by charizard, blastoise, and venusaur, while more out-of-the-way containers held beedrill, pinsir, pidgeot, and more. While they might have appeared like nothing more than preserved corpses to the untrained eye, the truth was that they were merely in suspended animation, not altogether different from the state a Pokéball took when in storage mode.

On the front of each pod was a control panel, and affixed to the front of each panel was a stone, perfectly smooth, bearing a spiral pattern within like a cat’s-eye marble.

Professor Mokusen breathed in, and Dabi Mokusen breathed out. The urge to rub at his singed face was overwhelming, but that would destroy his sterility, so he suppressed it.

With heavy steps he made his way to the centre of the room, where the main control panel was located – and beyond it, the largest tank of all. “Hello, Granny,” he muttered, placing his hands on the controls.

The massive machamp did not answer; out of all the Pokémon in the room, it was the only one that was actually dead.

For several hours, he worked, carefully teasing apart the corpse’s secrets, compiling notes, attempting to translate his mother’s coded writings. He made little progress; all the low-hanging fruit had been picked years ago.

But progress was made. A shaky half-step was taken on the road to true evolution. That was real science: observation, repetition, and refinement. Moving carefully, lest valuable, irreplaceable samples be lost.

Eventually his body cried out for maintenance loudly enough to pierce his fugue, and Dabi carefully packed everything away, away from light, and air, and time.

The lights went off behind him of their own accord, obedient and logical, and Dabi became Professor Mokusen once more. The hunger pains went from excruciating to merely distracting, a problem to be solved, and he emerged from his bathroom to find fresh clothing set out, and a bundle of reports waiting neatly on his desk.

He smiled without mirth, stuck his head out to order one of his peons to fetch a late night snack, and continued to work.