Unbroken Disguise

Chapter 37



It was a strange thing to look at. He’d seen Pokedexes before, even the models specifically used by Professor Rowan thanks to travelling with Ash’s group. He knew what they were meant to look like. And by and large, it was still mostly the same, but… now there was a sort of aura around it. It was faint, and it didn’t project very far from the plastic surface of the Pokedex, no more than a centimeter or two, but it gave the device an eerie, blueish-grey glow. Whatever was meant to be displayed on the top screen was hidden behind a large pair of eyes with deep blue irises, and the bottom screen had been covered up by a small mouth. But these new parts didn’t seem to be a part of the Pokedex. Instead, they seemed… flat? Like they were little more than stickers, floating over the surface of the device. Maybe that eerie aura was holding them in place?

Bebe scooped the Pokedex off the ground excitedly, holding it up in the air like it was a winning lottery ticket. “I can’t believe you found a Rotom! Do you have any idea how hard it is to find one?!”

Even if Lucas were able to respond, she didn’t pause for an answer, holding the Pokedex close, inspecting the new eyes on it.

“I heard rumors that there had been sightings in recent years, researchers kept getting called in to investigate malfunctioning electronics, but the leading theory was that the Sinnoh population had gone extinct! They were originally native to the Coronet Mountain range, you know, probably drawn to all of the lodestones like Probopass and Magnezone. There’s definitely strong evidence that they were still present in small numbers in the time period where Jubilife was still just a small village… but to find one now?!” N’s ears rang as the woman got overexcited. “This could revolutionize so many things for us! The only other confirmed specimen I’ve heard of was a few years back in Alola, but those jerks wouldn’t share any data on it once word started to spread! All we’ve had to work with has been a few grainy images of the one they had possessing a television! Ohoho, the Porygon system has been great, but if we could get a decent population going and start producing Rotom based electronics first-!”

N cleared his throat as he removed the poor Pokemon from the woman’s grasp. His skin tingled as he touched it, traces of electricity shocking him. To ensure that she didn’t snatch it up again, he held it behind him, intending for Lucas to take it back. Ideally he could just leave it free to wander, but if the initial reveal had shown him anything, it was that Rotom didn’t exactly have control over its… housing?

“What is wrong with you?” He demanded of the blonde.

“Uh, N?” Mimikyu spoke up from his shoulder, but N was too busy trying to contain his anger to pay much attention.

First she hands a random trainer who just barged into her… house? Office? And he would be having a conversation with Lucas about that later… but she just handed him an Eevee! One that it sounds like came from some sort of awful breeder situation, and he’d heard enough horror stories for that to set off all sorts of red flags.

But now she follows that up with seeing a new Pokemon, and instead of seeing to its care after it falls to the ground, she immediately launches into a spiel about how she could use it?

That was not something that N could allow.

But instead of trying to explain herself, which he was sure would go poorly, Bebe stared behind him with wide eyes. “No, no, no, wait! Not the PC system!” She reached out desperately, and so N turned to follow her gaze.

In his hand was Lucas’ Pokedex. Notably, it looked completely normal. Floating in the air beside it was an orange orb, a bit shorter than Mimikyu, with a spike sticking out of the top and a small bulb hanging beneath it. It was surrounded by that same eerie aura, which projected out even further near the base of the orange form, forming into two limbs that resembled the symbol often used to represent Electric types.

N assumed this was Rotom’s true form. It shot through the air, away from him and the Pokedex, and towards the giant computer in the corner of the room.

“Look at all of that sweet, sweet power!” Free from the Pokedex, there was still a sort of crackly quality to the Pokemon’s androgynous voice, but it no longer sounded synthetic or like static.

N wasn’t entirely sure of what the problem was, but Mimikyu was apparently on the same page as Bebe.

He leapt off of N’s shoulder, the small rag doll that covered him flying through the air until the two Ghost types collided, sending them crashing to the ground.

“Get off of Rotom! Rotom just wants a little taste!” Rotom wiggled and squirmed, trying to free itself from where it had been trapped beneath the disguise.

“No, ya lunatic!” Mimikyu kept the Pokemon pinned. “Ya can’t jus’ go messin’ with stuff ya don’ understand!”

“Get away from Miss Bebe’s stuff!” A boyish voice yipped, and Lucas’ new Eevee jumped into the fray, his body taking on the familiar white glow of a Normal type move… only for what N thought was a Tackle to be completely ineffective, managing nothing more than to add himself on top of the growing pile of Pokemon.

Bebe threw herself between the large computer and the Pokepile, her arms outstretched and panic on her face. “Do something! If a Rotom takes over the PC system-” She cut herself off, though he wasn't sure if it was because the consequences would be dire, or because she genuinely didn’t know.

“You can’t stop true love!” The Rotom called out, still struggling, but making even less progress now that there was more weighing down on it.

“Knock it off already!” Mimikyu demanded. “We’ll get ya yer damn electronics, but ya can’t ‘ave these ones! They’re too impor’ant!”

“Bebe says stop!” Eevee yowled, trying to bite and scratch the pinned Pokemon, even with Mimikyu sandwiched between them, but apparently not having gained the control over the Dark type for a proper Bite.

N saw Lucas pull out a Pokeball from the corner of his eye, but he quickly put a stop to that, grabbing it and forcing the hand down to the boy’s side when he tried to toss it. Trainers always were quick to resort to such horrible methods of conflict resolution.

A stern glare kept a confused Lucas from acting on his own, and N stepped in to solve the problem.

Kneeling down between Bebe and the Pokepile, N pulled out his flip phone. It wasn’t like he ever used the thing for something other than contacting Plasma or Ghetsis, and he hadn’t exactly done that much recently. He didn’t think he had used the old thing since he’d run into Mimikyu, actually…

It wouldn’t be missed, if a sacrifice had to be made.

“Rotom.” He held the device in front of its face, causing the Ghost to stop squirming for a moment. “You like electronics?”

The frown on its face was replaced by a bright smile. “Of course! But there’s no way Rotom is giving up something like that for some dumb old flip phone!” Its eyes narrowed with suspicion.

Of course it couldn’t be that easy. But there had to be a way to satisfy Rotom’s desires in a way that wasn’t destructive, and if that computer really was involved in the horrid PC system…

“What if it was a temporary sorta thing?” Mimikyu chimed in once Eevee stopped trying to attack Rotom through him. “What if we could get ya somethin’ better, if only ya held off?”

Rotom seemed to think it over as the rest of them watched on. Bebe and Lucas were probably quite lost, given they only understood one participant in the conversation.

And now that he was thinking about it, he should be careful not to reveal his understanding to Bebe. Hopefully Mimikyu could handle things from here.

“...something better? Like what?” Rotom eventually asked.

“Like…” Mimikyu hesitated, apparently not having fully thought it through before he opened his mouth. “A washin’ machine, or a lawn mower, or-”

“Rotom has already had those things! No deal!” It started to squirm again.

“Then what abou’ fancy new tech?” Mimikyu hurriedly added on.

“...new tech?”

Mimikyu looked up to him. Or, tried to anyway. It was a little hard when his eye slits were cut into the disguise’s torso, which was holding Rotom down, but N got the message when the false eyes tried, and only failed a bit, to meet his own.

“N here is gonna get ‘is ‘ands on a neat lil’ thing called a C-Gear, and luck would ‘ave it, we were actually in’erested in ‘avin one of yer kind inhabit it!”

That was… stretching the truth a bit. N was surprised that Mimikyu had remembered his offhand mention of plans to get a C-Gear once they were released. Though, even if that was his plan, they hadn’t been released yet. He didn’t know when they would be released, let alone when he could personally get his hands on one. And while Mimikyu had suggested that a Rotom might help them fight the League’s Porygon surveillance measures, he hadn’t realized that meant offering up a brand new, top of the line piece of tech to the Pokemon.

But they didn’t exactly have a lot of options at the moment, so he didn’t argue the point.

“Hmmmm….” Rotom sounded more like the hum of an old radio rather than the hum that he might make himself. “Fine. Rotom accepts, but if this C-gear isn’t as full of power as this computer, then Rotom will come back here!” The little Ghost type asserted.

Hopefully all of the advertising claims he’d heard about the product were accurate, because it would take a lot to hold a candle to a machine like this.

But for now… N gently pressed his old flip phone against Rotom’s forehead, watching as with a brief flash and spark, Rotom disappeared from beneath Mimikyu and his phone took on the same eerie glow that Lucas’ Pokedex had.

Mimikyu fell to the ground, trapped between Eevee and the floor now.

As N stood back up from his kneeling position, Bebe sighed a breath of relief behind him, and Lucas’ grabbed Eevee by the scruff of the neck, pulling him off of Mimikyu.

Now, where had he been? Ah, that’s right.

“What is wrong with you?” he demanded.

Bebe frowned as the boys left her place, making sure to lock the door behind them.

She could see where the N kid was coming from, and she thought he had his heart in the right place, but was the lecture really necessary?

Yes, breeding mills were gross and awful, but Bill didn’t run a breeding mill! He was a respected researcher and inventor, he had class! Him sending one Eevee to a friend of his wasn’t a big deal! She would have appreciated being asked about whether she had the time to take care of the little guy, but still. Her inability to give Eevee the proper care it needed was a problem easily solved by passing him off to a responsible trainer. And what trainers could she trust more than one who was working with Professor Rowan?

She’d seen the Lucas kid in one or two of Rowan’s reports, he had to be a good kid. Although… perhaps she should have paid more attention to his friend before she had handed off Eevee.

The reports Cynthia had been sending out didn’t make N sound like a bad guy, but he definitely got into more than his fair share of trouble. Though hadn’t the last report stated that he was in a larger group? Maybe she should send an email to update everyone on the new development…

But that could wait! She had more important things to worry about. Namely, that Rotom and what she was going to do about it.

Yes, it seemed like neither of the boys had captured the Pokemon, so technically it had been up for grabs… but snatching it out from under them would have made her feel slimy. Still though, there had to be something she could do to get access!

That smug, handsome bastard Kukui had dared to taunt the rest of the scientific community with his Rotom discovery and then cut them off! How long had it been now? Two, maybe three years since then? His focus was on Pokemon attacks, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t making all sorts of progress in secret! He could have handed the R&D off to Alola’s Silph competitor. Aether could claim to be an alternative to the Joy family all they wanted, nobody outside their stupid island region believed it!

She had quietly accepted N’s complaints about her “horrible treatment” of the little Electric type, if only because he had saved her ass by keeping Rotom out of the PC system. That would have been an absolute nightmare, both in the sense that she didn’t know what having a non-Porygon entity playing with it might do to the Pokemon stored inside, and in that it would have been a bureaucratic nightmare typing up all the reports afterwords telling everyone that she had screwed up so badly…

But surely N would come to see the scientific importance of breeding more Rotom! Well, assuming they bred? So little was known about them, so she couldn’t go off of assumptions like that. Maybe they reproduced asexually? That little bulb on the bottom could be the initial stages of budding, or maybe it was one giant cell that would go through fission…

Hmm. Well, if N wasn’t going to be helpful, maybe she could go to Rowan about it. He would undoubtedly pick up a thing or two since it had been hiding in one of his Pokedexes.

She laid down in front of her laptop, pulling up her League email. “Hey, Porygon2.”

“Yes, Bebe? How may I be of assistance?” Her laptop’s speakers responded.

“I need to send some private emails. Could you do me a favor and isolate me from the League’s Porygon network?”

“Of course, Bebe.”

Lucas let out a deep breath, relief rushing through him.

His Pokedex was just fine. Professor Rowan wasn’t going to kill him.

He glared at the phone Rotom was in from across the shared Pokemon Center room that he and N were using for the night. If N wanted to take care of the annoying thing, that was fine by him. Saved him the trouble.

Besides… his team was getting big, fast. Togepi had only just hatched recently, and now he had the Eevee that Bebe gifted him. That meant his team had doubled from two to four Pokemon. He was going to have his hands full training them, so he didn’t really think that he could take on Rotom on top of that, even if he had wanted the Ghost type. Which he didn’t!

Although, this was contributing to a strange pattern. N now had two Ghost types, even if he hadn’t caught Rotom yet, and Lucas himself was now on his third Normal type. How was the only non Normal type on his team his starter?!

It would probably cause some problems with this city’s Gym leader, given that they used Ghost types like N.

But it’s not like this was a permanent situation. Or, it didn’t have to be. The possibility of Togepi trading out his Normal type for Fairy was always there with Mimikyu around, and Eevee…

“Because its genetic makeup is irregular, it quickly changes its form due to a variety of causes. It may mutate if it is exposed to radiation from elemental stones, changes in its environment, and perhaps yet unknown reasons.” The robotic voice of his Pokedex read out to him.

Yet unknown reasons….

He looked over to his roommates. N and Mimikyu were talking in Galarian again, focused on Rotom if their constant glances to the phone were any indication.

He made his way over to them, holding his Pokedex up for the two of them to see before pointing at Mimikyu.

He figured his question was clear enough with just that.

“Kyu, Mi-kyu.”

N frowned.

“He says yes, there’s a Fairy type evolution for Eevee. We’ll have to be careful about that, like with Togepi.”

Lucas pouted, but nodded, leaving them alone for now. They certainly would have to be careful about that. Togepi potentially becoming a Fairy was one thing, but Eevee as well?

No, thank you.

There would be no point in leaving behind an over focus on Normal types just to replace it with Fairy! He would just be switching which types his team would have serious trouble with… Actually, it would be even worse than that! He’d be trading one weakness for two!

Not happening. Especially when there were so many possibilities! He scrolled through Pokedex entries, looking over the options. There probably wasn’t much point in going with Leafeon or Vaporeon, given that Grotle covered the Grass type and Bibarel covered the Water type. And with the Fairy type eeveelution out of the running, that left five more…

Hmm… Route 217? If he really wanted an Ice type, he could probably catch one there instead of waiting to evolve Eevee that long. Snowpoint had that name for a reason, right? There had to be all sorts of Ice types around it. Although having a Glaceon could be very… cool.

He was glad that he never spoke, because he’d die of shame if N heard him say that.

He could go in the opposite temperature direction? Fire types were supposed to have a really good offense, right? Grotle and Bibarel seemed to be shaping up to lean towards the tanky side, so a Flareon could really help balance things out…

But it was also true that his team was focused on physical attacks right now. If he went with Jolteon then he could have a Pokemon capable of running laps around the rest of his team, plus it would be his first special attacker.

And then there were Espeon and Umbreon. While he wasn’t quite sure of how they’d stack up with the rest of his team, he had to consider that they offered the most unique advantages, at least in his mind.

Espeon was a Psychic type. Given that the only wild Abra he’d seen had teleported away instantly, and his attempts to catch a Ralts had gone the same way repeatedly, it might be a good way to get one on his team. He could always go with a Bronzor, but that would just add another slow, bulky Pokemon to the team, and a Meditite seemed a lot more… punchy than “mind powers” to him.

But he really wanted a Psychic type. Psychic types were so cool! Telepathy, Telekinesis, absolutely demolishing those stupid Poison types who ate through his Pecha berry supplies….

And Umbreon… well, any advantage that an Espeon could grant him, an Umbreon could shut down for opposing trainers.

He grabbed Eevee’s Pokeball, looking into the button on the front like that could somehow tell him which path to go down.

Except, it wasn’t really “his” path. It was like the Fairy stuff with Togepi. At the end of the day, it should be Eevee’s decision, and this time there wasn’t the whole “this baby just hatched” thing to put a damper on that.

Oh well. It’s not like he was expecting Eevee to evolve anytime soon. He should be focused on things in the here and now instead.

Like his game plan for challenging the Hearthome Gym.


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