Pocket Monster University

Marie

Have you ever stopped and asked yourself: why are there no male pokegirls? Pokemon. Pokeboys? You know what I mean. It’s weird, right? The potential to be a Trainer exists in just about everyone, but as Corruption increases, so too does femininity.

At least, that’s the commonly accepted theory. I don’t buy it. The way I see it, our understanding of pokegirls is at about the level that medical science was back when we thought the cure for gunshot wounds was leeches. Sure, it’s been a long time since there was a large-scale attack on cities and these days, most pokegirls were being held safely in captivity, but I’ve looked at pokeballs. You know what’s inside of them?

Paper seals! Well, sticker seals. Stuck tight to the inside of the otherwise normal plastic and aluminum body. The same kind of seals that were used by priests to capture demons hundreds of years ago. Which meant that Trainers were simply modern day priests that liked to pretend that everything was technologically advanced and modern.

Well, that’s bull-pucky!

If I’m going to attend this university, I’m not just going to go along with the curriculum. I’m gonna figure this out. If science can uncover the secrets of the atom, it can do the same here. And that starts with asking the questions no one else is. Questions like, why are there no male pokegirls?

Of course, if I was going to get anywhere, I’d need to find a male trainer, and those were exceedingly rare here. Women were at least ten times more likely to gain the abilities of a Trainer, but even among the men that did qualify, they usually ended up transforming into women after a few months as they learned to slow their Corruption.

Since the direct approach hadn’t worked—”Hi, I’m Marie, I’m studying male trainers, can I have some of your blood?” had been less effective than I hoped—I decided on a more subtle means of observation. I built a backdoor program into the school’s network, set it to keep tabs on every male student, and have it ping my phone whenever anything about them was logged. The first few days, nothing much of interest. Visits to the nurse. Disciplinary action. Credit rewards. One of the third years caught a wild pokegirl, but there was just a simple entry, not like a record of the battle. Still, it was giving me a baseline, and I could compile everything and run it against the behaviors of female Trainers, note the differences, and investigate from there.

That is, until I heard the news that there was a vacancy to be THE Ben Krimson’s new roommate!

Such a jackpot! I’d raced down to the office to file the paperwork within minutes of the entry being posted, much to their surprise. But the early bird got the worm. And Krimson was one delicious worm. In terms of pedigree, he was top of the class. Fully mature male trainers were already rare enough, but they had male progeny themselves so rarely it was statistically zero. And from what I’d seen of the records, his mother was one of the ancient pokegirls, more than a thousand years old!

Gotta say though, I didn’t expect our first meeting to turn out as it did, with him lying naked on the floor of his own bedroom, completely comatose. Reviewing his log though, I saw that this must have been meant by Rapid Remedial Psionic Sessions with Dr. Sabrina. That psychics could read and influence minds was already creepy enough, but knowing that they could do it remotely was enough to give me butterflies.

But, if his brain had left the building, that technically meant that he’d consent to any experiments or tests I put him through, right? I mean, not technically technically, but close enough. I don’t think what I was doing was illegal. Probably.

“Are you… stealing his blood?”

“Eeep!”

The syringe popped right out of my hands, and a trickle of valuable assets started trickling down Krimson’s arm. I lunged for the syringe, held it behind my back, and grinned at the intruder, blocking her view of the teeny, tiny, completely insignificant amount of blood making its way to the carpet. “...no?”

“...right. So I guess you must be Mandy, right?” The pink-haired girl leaning against the doorframe asked.

“Hypothetically speaking, I might not be this Mandy you speak of, but I definitely 100% have a completely legitimate reason to be in here.”

“In here stealing Ben’s blood,” she clarified.

“Yes.” Wait, she’d tricked me! “I mean no!”

“Okay… well, I’m Faye.” She kept her hands behind her back as she walked towards me, but on instinct, I backed away from her. She seemed like a nice girl, but the hairs on my arms were standing up. “If you’re not my new roommate, then who are you?”

“Ahem. Yes. Proper introductions! I’m Marie.” I thought about reaching out my hand to shake, but opted for a big, friendly smile instead. “I saw that Krimson here was without a roommate and, well, I didn’t have a roommate either, and now we are roommates. Just a completely natural turn of events.”

“Well, that was fast.” Faye took a seat on top of the desk underneath the loft bed, legs crossed. “You’d think that if students are turning into pokegirls, it’d be fine to just let them keep living in the same rooms. No need to keep us all crammed together, right?”

“You know… that is a good question.” I’d been too busy celebrating my good fortune to really consider the policy. If they had the capacity to give students their own private rooms, why not? It wasn’t like there was an overflowing abundance of Trainers that would fill the empty rooms. Was there some hidden agenda behind it? Perhaps even mild isolation of a private room led to faster Corruption?

I didn’t notice how awkward the silence between us had stretched until Faye spoke again. “Well, hopefully you’ll last longer than his last girl.”

“Krimson’s former roommate… was his girl?” The only pokegirl registered to him when I’d checked was his half-sister and a wild Helen Shaw. I resisted the urge to bring out my tablet and look up who the previous roommate had been from his file. Lucky for me, this Faye girl was chatty.

“Well, almost. Old Benny couldn’t quite seal the deal, if you know what I mean. He got her good and worked up, right at the very edge. But then someone else went in and swooped the prize.” Faye giggled, and I mirrored with some nervous laughter of my own. Come to think of it, I’d not considered the possibility that getting close to him could raise my own Corruption. And given that in more than seventy percent of cases, high corruption leads to a sharp drop in intelligence, that wasn’t good. Especially since that number was closer to 100% when you were just talking about catgirls like me.

She cast a glance at Krimson's still unconscious body. “But then, if he’d gone slower with things in the first place, he wouldn’t have put himself into this pickle, right?”

“Right! Still, it seems rather extreme, don’t you think? Uh… knocking him out like this. Leaving him completely vulnerable. Why not simply have him attend extra classes for a week or two?”

Faye took in a deep breath, and I jumped backwards again, my tail standing straight up. Even if on the surface she was as bubbly and cavalier as ever, she terrified me. She even giggled. “Well… he kind of pushed my girlfriend over the edge of Corruption and made her into a pokegirl.”

“Oh. Wow. That… mm. That makes more sense then.”

Just great. Roommates with drama going on between them. And this Krimson fellow seemed much more volatile than his file had suggested. Which meant that my best shot at safely collecting data on him was right now. And since he could wake up at any moment…

“So… so so so… it’s super nice meeting you, but… I was wonder if it’d be okay if I… ah…”

“Continued stealing his blood?”

You poke one comatose test subject with a syringe and suddenly everyone thinks you’re a vampire!

“I am not a vampire.” Didn’t want those rumors getting started again at a new school. “I’m just, y’know… interested in the science of all of this.”

Faye shrugged. “That’s fine. Just don’t get too crazy with him. Oh! One more thing. Would you do me a favor? Tell Ben that if he wants Yang back, Terry has her. I’d rather not be the bearer of bad news.”

“That’s Terry with a Y? Not a feminine Terri?”

“Well, he’d probably look great in some tight hotpants and an open vest, but he’s a guy, if that’s what you’re asking.”

More drama. But drama between male Trainers! Now that was fascinating. And not just because it was the kind of thing I’d spent far too much time writing fanfiction about. From the history I’d read, male trainers seemed to get along worse than male lions. Territorial, driven by ego, with the few friendships or even non-hostile relationships far and few between. It’d be interesting seeing how this panned out.

“Terry has Yang. Got it.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it, Carmilla.”

“Ah, it’s Marie?”

“...Carmilla. Like the vampire?” Faye wrapped her fingers softly around my neck, and I could feel her hot breath against me. Since I’d been pointedly keeping my distance, suddenly finding her body pressed against my back nearly made me wet myself. How had she moved so fast? It wasn’t standard locomotion. The backdraft would have blown my hair up. And teleportation made a loud pop as the air rushed to fill the vacuum left behind. Thinking about it was an excellent distraction as Faye gave my neck a lick. “Since I find myself on the market again, maybe you and I can talk more about it later?”

“S-sure…! S-sounds great!” I swallowed hard.

“It’s a date then.” Faye shamelessly squeezed my ass, gave me a peck on the cheek, and then she was gone, leaving me alone with Krimson.

Well! I certainly never wanted to get on her bad side.

But back to work. First there was the matter of getting his blood on ice, but after that, I wanted to test a few of my theories on his heat resistance…