Pokemon Fan Fiction / Pokemon Fan Fiction ❯ Wild Horses & Pokegirls - sidestories ❯ Of Islands & Wild Horses ( Chapter 3 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Sidestory #3: Of Islands and Wild Horses

::Pallet Research Lab #3 Main Computer
::Password?_
::Password accepted
::Secondary level password?_
::Password accepted
::Personal log?_
::Passcode 'Giovanni sucks worms' accepted
::Creating new file.

Hmmm. Where do I begin?

The beginning? I suppose. It just seems a bit trite and overdone.

Well, I'm Professor Aldus Hyram Mahogany Stroak. More often referred to as either simply "the Professor" or as "Professor Stroak". My father Arus was a minor League functionary who had a pokegirl assigned to him as a field worker/researcher. My mother Peregrine was that pokegirl: an Amazonchan if you must know.

I had a relatively normal childhood growing up in a small town that no longer is even there. I *am* rather old, you know. Not dead, not nearly dead yet.

I attended high school, fell in love, was rejected, and attended college. In those days I had thrown myself entirely into my work, ignoring everything around me. I was going to become the greatest of researchers and find a way to discover what there was of Sukebe's science.

Oh yes, Sukebe was fascinating to me. Hardly anything was known of him at that point, other than the press accounts from that time. His technology was haphazard, you see. A bit here and a bit there and gaps all around. Which didn't make sense until later. Much later.

After graduating, I became a teacher's aide briefly. At the behest of my few colleagues, I needed some vacation time and so I scheduled a trip to the Orange Islands.

How different my life would have been if I had chosen a mountain trip, or a pokegirl expedition, or had even chosen to visit the tiny reclusive area that was my mother's people. What would have occurred if I had gone elsewhere than a quick three hour tour of those very islands so that I could choose where to visit?

Things didn't go as planned. The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed, if not for the stupidity of the crew then we wouldn't have gotten lost.

Spending five years on an uncharted desert isle was an unhappy bit. I had never even camped out before, and here I was "roughing it" and trying to put together electrical generators with bits of wood and vine and palm leaves. There were equal amounts of frustration and amusement at watching the antics of the little social experiment around me. An odd group too.

There were many things that occurred on the island that I'm not proud of and refuse to revisit. When we finally left, I had two pokegirls. Yes, the two girls who had been with us had been through Threshold.

I could have stopped them. I could have kept them seperate and thereby they wouldn't have been further triggering each other. Instead I actually encouraged it.

The world was a different place back then. When we'd gotten stuck on that island in 249, Mao Shin Mao had simply been a rumor. Pokedexes hadn't been invented, and pokeballs couldn't be shrunk. There were scanners in buildings, but not that common. Some pokegirls could pass for normal human girls and did so. The pokegirl rights movement was going full speed and it had been expected that by 255 they would be able to own some forms of property and to have a say in who their Tamer was. Basic rights, but more than they had had.

As a high level researcher, I've since had access to more information and know more now about what was occurring than I knew then. Mao Shin Mao, more often referred to simply as Mao, was a Tigress who committed the cardinal sin of a pokegirl: jealousy. As she had a psychic bond with her Tamer, had been abused previously, and now found herself getting less attention as a result of her Tamer Recognizing an Elf, apparently intended to wound her Tamer in a taming - pointing out his lack of attention. Instead she killed him, the psychic backlash along the bond drove her mad, and by the time she had recovered enough to realize what was going on she had already begun the Rebellion and was being influenced if not controlled by some of her own lieutenants. From studying her actions, I think she woke up to this at the so-called "Battle Of Pine Ridge."

For years afterwards, people were known to ask "where were you when Pine Ridge occurred?" With shoddy radio reception, our little crew hadn't known what was actually going on and had missed the speech.

As a result of that speech, the "pokegirl rights movement" was derailed. No, worse than that. Pokegirls were being killed if they showed any signs of independence and had no set Tamer. Humans may lack the powers of pokegirls but when our very survival is being threatened and with the pictures of what was left of the townsfolk who had resisted fresh in their minds...

I'm told that Mao herself had only eaten those who had resisted and was actually upset at her own troops for assembling those who had surrendered and killing them off however "merciful" those deaths were. Some of the human women were "Tamed" and kept as slaves, some inevitably breaking under the constant pain and humiliation as well as taming methods that had been used on pokegirls for generations. It doesn't much matter. What does matter were the results.

There were exceptions. The Amazonchan united in a single front and came to stand against Mao. She had been trained in Amazonchan fighting techniques, you see, and had a few of their breed tamed and under her command. Others had fought to the end. There were pokegirls who saw the reversal of attitude against them, the suspicion and anger, and then turned against their Tamers to join the Rebellion.

Others proved themselves. Even under torture and brainwashing techniques and even psychic assault, some breeds had a higher than average refusal to turn against their Masters. These were, after the Rebellion, regarded as acceptable pets for the non-Tamer.

Overall, however, the human race had rallied however briefly. The infighting between the various Leagues and branches was set aside. It didn't last long, but because of it, Mao and her cause lost even as converts swarmed to her flag.

During this time I had dropped back to research. I was visited by Maryanne and Ginger, and they ended up being my first pokegirls. It was dangerous to be a "free" pokegirl at that moment in history, not because a Tamer would catch you but because a mob might. Paranoia was high.

Oh, the others? Well, Gilligan was lost at sea one day not long after our return to civilization. The Skipper opened a seafood restaurant in Cinnaboob, and died just a few years ago from a heart attack. The Howells were rich and retired. They passed on quietly within a year of each other over twenty years ago. I suspect Gendo's father, and the Howell fortune was absorbed by the Giovanni family except for a small amount that was in their Will deeded to myself.

Thurston apparently had felt some guilt after all, and as he had been the one to convince me to let Maryanne and Ginger be triggered and go through Threshold, he was right to do so.

Ginger was killed shortly after Mao had finally been caught and executed, but some of her lieutenants had escaped. One formed the Limbec Pirates and these raided my laboratory in hopes of getting some advanced technology. Maryanne was injured badly, Ginger was stolen. I found out later that she'd been used and then killed. After which someone hunted down and killed that particular band of pirates. Why everyone thinks I had something to do with that, I'm not sure. I may be a researcher, and certainly I know how such an explosive device could be built, but there are laws against hunting down even scum like that.

Maryanne bore me a human son, Auron. He initially wasn't interested in anything his father was. No, he was going to be a famous Tamer and have greater glories than a mere Researcher.

Oddly enough, I think my proudest day was when Auron Stroak won a crosscountry skimmer race while still in High School. Oh, to be sure, a car would have been safer and a gravcycle flashier. His High School had a Racing Club and he'd abandoned his childhood dreams of being a Tamer for the race - for the thrill of doing something himself instead of a directing a pokegirl. You've seen skimmers, I'm sure. Sort of a winged bobsled with a grav repeller, no brakes and engine speeds of Off, Fast, Ridiculously Fast, and Ludicrous.

I think his initial enthusiasm for the sport came from my disapproval. He developed a love for tinkering with engines and high speeds in that club and stayed with it after I stopped protesting. On my mantle I still have the picture of him and his friends grinning at the camera, one of his friends holding up the trophy.

About that time I had developed the first pokedexes. It was a wand-sensor cabled to a box on one's belt that housed the computer. I experimented with a visor-like version that turned out to be too buggy, but I've since perfected it. Unfortunately by then the "book" shaped pokedexes are official and getting the design changed in any major fashion would require getting it through a committee.

After some time I went my seperate ways from Auron. He was going to go off and become a racer for a few years, while I had a chance to explore some ruins spotted by a Tamer named Bellerophon Jones.

It was in those ruins that I discovered the message from Sukebe. It was triply encrypted when I found it, and after I had decoded and translated it, the League decided to suppress it so that only a few would know its full message. It told of his origins and his madness, of a woman named Linda McKenzie, and of the why and how of his War.

The effect on the Inner Circle was electric, and that is why they concealed this from the public. Sukebe had been an evil world-conquerer, a deranged genius that had proven why the sciences should not be explored and only certain types of research and development were permittable. That he had intended to be mankind's benefactor and had been driven mad? That he had not actually developed anything but a form of interdimensional transport himself? That his entire War hadn't actually been an attempt to conquer or destroy the world, but motivated by revenge and madness? That he wasn't *dead* but would show up every so often to find out if his plans were commencing?

It also raised a number of questions. What exactly *was* the plan? Merely the destruction of the institutions he had held responsible? Where was he? How did he do what he did - the dimensional transport technology was completely missing!

All this from a tiny little storage area found under a burned out building. I researched until the official League scientists took over, and turned over copies of all my findings.

Except one. There was another message after the first. Even more encrypted and compressed than the first. It took me another five years to break the code, but it's never been my area of specialty and you can understand my reluctance to discuss this with others.

The message was simple and bore out something that I had long thought after reading the first message. Our world was not the intention of Sukebe, who couldn't understand what went wrong. I, of course, already knew. Or, at least, had a theory that so far fits the facts.

My theory is simple: Sukebe was a college physics student who knew enough of the other sciences to back-engineer a number of devices or combine the inventions of other universes. He never completely understood them or researched them thoroughly. In other words, the constant need to be tamed, the enslavement of the pokegirls, the fragmentation of society and scientific development, were all because an inexperienced young boy with his head full of dreams didn't understand what kind of consequences there were in life. Makes the terrible Sukebe a somewhat pitiable figure actually.

Auron met a nice pokegirl, a mechanically inclined Threshold girl Tomboy named Dee Dee, during this time.

They made a happy couple, as such things are usually measured. For awhile at least. Dee Dee was pregnant when Auron was entered in the 281 Crescent Grand Prix and remained with me during that time. We were both watching when his car was wrecked by another car losing control.

One day, not long after delivering her baby, I found Dee Dee on her bed. A little smile on her face and dead for at least three hours. No mark on her, so perhaps she had just gone to "keep an eye on Auron" as she had so often done in the past.

The child, Gary, was human. I found some relatives who could take him in, though most of the time he grew up in a boarding school environment. I did what I could and kept an eye on him, but my work beckoned.

I continued working for another few years, gathering pokegirls at my lab complex and researching them, working on improved pokeballs and certain other projects that I did not want to let the League know.

I matched wits a few times with an irascible old mummy named Cologne. I think she suspects what I do here, but either approves or is convinced that I'm harmless.

A number of children came out to work at my lab and ranch over the summers, and of them a few became Tamers last year.

My grandson Gary, who seeks to fulfill his father's young dream of becoming a famous Tamer. He seeks to find the most powerful battle-hardened pokegirls for his harem.

In some ways his opposite, in some ways his fiercest rival is the young runt Ash. Ash, who seeks to become the friend of his pokegirls and in some ways more resembles Auron than Gary does.

And, of course, more recently - one Ranma Saotome. A dimensional traveller based on Doctor Reichman's experiments that utilized Sukebe's old technology. Someone becoming more infamous as time goes on.

The importance of Ranma Saotome in the scheme of things is something I have recently become aware of. An engineering student with a "pet" (having met the two I was uncertain which was the actual Master despite the pokegirl's demure nature) Megami was speaking of the recent interview with Saotome and had clearly found some inspiration from the crude but heartfelt sentiments there. I've even heard Tamers, hardened by experience and training, thoughtfully discuss the possibility of forging emotional bonds despite the potential for pain.

That's part of why Tamers are encouraged to think of their charges as less than human and not to form emotional bonds. Often a Tamer's pokegirls are sent into violent circumstance, and losing one's favored pokegirl is quite painful. A thousand times worse if a psychic bond is shared between the two, which worries me about both Ranma and Ash. Madness quite easily can result.

Returning to the engineering student and his Megami. A powerful Megami and one whom I'm fairly sure saw through the facade I maintain to the world of the "cranky old man set in his ways who sees pokegirls as merely tools to be used."

Did she learn the truth? Did that knowing smile indicate that she knew that under the facade that I maintain to the world that I'm working on methods of stopping Threshold? Or of the (heresy of all heresies) anti-Feral medications being worked on a little bit each day? No, even if she is indeed in the know, it is unlikely she will say anything.

And so I sit here with my own mask and I work with one face hidden.

And I wait. In one year and one month, Sukebe will again walk among us. What message or legacy will he leave this time?