Frontier Town Nina's Place

[Chibi Pika]

Jade’s ears pricked forward. “Right, yeah, Nova was the first one to bring up the Mewtwo he knew, and that was what made me think about, like, different versions of the same person coming up in different worlds.” Same as what Gladion had said…

She scratched at her whiskers. “So like, Mewtwo… there’s one back where you’re from, but he hasn’t gone public yet?” Jade wasn’t sure if it made sense to put it like that—who’s to say he ever would, plus Laura had just said that it wasn’t a sure thing.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Yet. The idea that he would both thrilled and unnerved Laura.

"Well, I... I already believed he existed in the first place. Now I know he exists in other worlds, I'd say it was a sure thing. But who knows, right? Like, it's possible that the project was real but unsuccessful, or that he did exist but, uh, died at some point..."

Laura's whiskers twinged, and she rasped her tongue over her lip.

No. On her world... Mewtwo lived. She felt it.

"But no, not public at all. Just rumours and pop scifi. I'm starting to take the idea more seriously because it might, y'know, connect to the Perihelion stuff."

She'd already filled Jade in a little on that, here and there. They hung out often enough that eventually it just... seeped through.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Right, she should've realized that it'd be possible for there to be worlds where the project just failed. Laura didn't seem to think that was the answer, though.

"It... would make a lot of sense for there to be a connection, what with the secret Pokemon hybrids and all," Jade said thoughtfully, reaching for a berry. "That's actually sort of how it went for me--I was trying to help the hybrids first, before I ever got involved with the Mewtwo project." It felt a bit to weird to say it so casually, especially to someone who only had rumors to go off back home.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Jade got involved? She hadn't expected that... Howling hell.

Laura grinned, some inhibition in her breaking. She wasn't even using Radiance, it was just... Why be cautious and serious and painstaking when everything was as crazy as it was?

"Right then, five quid says I meet Mewtwo back home by the end of the League season. It happened to you, it'll happen to me. It'd be unfair otherwise."

She stuck her tongue in her cheek, and gave a small, nasal chuckle.

"Okay Jade, go on. Spill. I wanna hear what Mewtwo is like." The fur on the back of her neck rose in a shiver. "What it was like for you. To be there."

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade found herself laughing a bit as well; the energy was... strange, but good. "Honestly, at this point, I'd believe it." After all the parallels, it just felt right.

But then, Laura asked what it was like. And how could Jade sum that up, really? There was too much weird, layered drama, too many conflicting emotions... Maybe it was easiest to go back to the beginning.

"We met in the lab where he was created. I, that is--I never would've gotten that far if I hadn't help on the inside. I was just there to snag some data on the project, and, well..." She found her paws gripping the table unconsciously. "The psychic pressure was intense. Kind of got a headache just from being there. He wasn't in control of his power yet. He hadn't even woken up yet."

Hadn't opened his eyes yet. Hadn't been able to move under his own power yet. Was it any wonder he turned out like he did?

"I wanted to help him."

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura's tail fluffed up despite herself. Envy and awe competed in her gut, each overshadowed by sheer curiosity. Her reporter's impulses pressed her to Ask Questions. Find out everything.

"Wait, he was born while you were there?" she breathed, ears quivering. "And... Did you? Help him?"

She wanted the answer to be yes.

She wanted the answer to have been yes if it were her in Jade's place.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade rubbed her arm. "Yeah, I mean, I wasn't there when he woke up or anything, I just had a small talk with him while he was still asleep, and..." And she'd promised to help him, a promise she had no way of following up on, but that felt true at the time, while still on the high of making a difference from being on the Rebellion.

"My friend Ajia was the one who came up with the plan, but... it worked. We freed him."

She still wasn't sure if it was the right thing.

"Sometimes I think the rebel team was specifically made to free him, but I never did find out for sure." And the last time she'd asked Stalker, she'd gotten the most infuriating non-answer of them all. He didn't know? What on earth...

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura's brain sparked with assumptions and imagined background info. A rebel team with many objectives, only one of which was their true purpose. Uncertainty – distrust of the leadership? The plan was Jade's friend's idea. (Not her own – reflexively downplaying her own involvement?)

She shook her head clear of all the noise.

"You talked to him. Which – wow. I bet that was wild. And you freed him. And... Well, I guess that must have been pretty important if there's any chance it was your 'real mission' or whatever."

Laura bit her lip. The obvious question. Just go for it.

"What did he do, afterwards...?"

 

[Chibi Pika]

What did he do. A lot of things. Viridian. Indigo. It felt... wrong, somehow, to shatter the wide-eyed curiosity that Laura held.

But the oldest parts were easiest to think about.

Jade reflexively went to put her hands in her pockets, remembered for the eighty-seventh time that she didn't have any pockets, and settled for tearing bits off of a tortilla. "He... destroyed the facility where he was made, and then he left. That was last year."

 

[Jackie Cat]

There was absolutely no way that was the whole story. But Laura knew another sensitive spot when she saw one. She imagined what 'destroying the facility' might look like from inside it. She remembered the dread feeling in her gut when the skies darkened over Galar. People generally didn't feel too great about vast, unpredictable power...

"I'm guessing that was a... You know— It must have been a pretty big deal. His creators losing him and the facility and everything in it must have been a hell of a blow."

But Jade and her allies had lost anyway.

"Uh – you said something about the rebel team being made specifically for that, didn't you? How come it's not a sure thing?"

Yeah. Ask about something tangential. Good move. Hopefully.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade let out a long exhale. "Yeah, it really was." In ways that she hadn't fully realized at the time. The aftershocks of the Viridian incident wouldn't be felt for another year, and she'd spent that year determinedly not thinking about it everything fell apart.

Stupid. She was acting like a falling out was anything on the level of two dozen people losing their lives.

"That's why people were afraid of him, and the other Legendaries," Jade went on, further tearing the tortilla into ever-tinier pieces. "No one really knew how to handle seeing what he and the others were capable of." As much as she'd been angry about the way the League handled all of it, some small part of her understood.

Jade shook her head, trying to clear the fog from her brain. "Anyway, uh... the rebel team was technically made before the Mewtwo Project ever finished, but the whole reason it started was because the Rockets had been making bolder moves toward targeting the legends, and making Mewtwo was part of that. So in a way, he was always going to be an important part of our mission." She paused, ears tilted toward Laura. "I know you just said it wasn't a sure thing, but those rumors about him, where you're from... was there anything to do with why the Mewtwo project was a thing?" Assuming it was a thing.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura winced with sympathy for Jade. Her world sounded... difficult. Dangerous. If she was talking about the legendaries – her allies – this way, alluding to what they were capable of, it was only too easy to imagine the fear that ordinary people might be feeling. Laura knew what scared humans were like.

She swallowed, and resolved to answer the question.

"Well... You can find just about any unhinged take online, you know? I've seen posts feverishly suggesting he was made to kill Arceus and elevate his creators to godhood, or some shit like that."

Laura smirked, hoping the absurdity of it would be disarming.

"But seriously, the, uh, saner ideas... Mostly that the Rocket Gang yakuza wanted a threat they could extort governments with, even as a bluff, or as a pokémon they could control that was strong enough to fight legendaries and the like. I guess if you can catch pokémon that strong, you get all the money and power you want. Puppet the state from the shadows, conquer everything, whatever the boss prefers."

Laura coughed, aware that this could hit a nerve.

"Uh, anyway, what I've been looking into is the motivation that the actual scientists had. 'Cause like, the Rockets might have had in-house researchers, apparently, but the project was supposedly commissioned. There were a lot of credible geneticists in the 80s and 90s who just kinda disappeared after people started pushing anti-cloning laws. It was mostly a religious thing, I think. In Japan, there were a bunch of guys like that, and I read some articles about one of them whose daughter had died, and he wanted to clone her back to life. Very controversial, I think he got fired or lost tenure or something like that? Anyway, the theory goes that this guy and some gym leader who also specialised in genetics and who also went missing for a bit and a bunch of others were approached by the Rockets (or approached them) about funding their research off the record, what with all the new laws basically making practical cloning illegal."

Laura pursed her mouth, thinking about Dave's genetics work, combining pokémon and human DNA to create hybrids... Over and over, artificial genetic hybrids. A multiversal theme.

"The reasoning I like best basically goes that those scientists wanted everything from medical advances to cloning a dead daughter, and it got co-opted by the Rockets after they bankrolled the research. And there's plenty of evidence to suggest they made something before they all pretty much disappeared from the public record for good."

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade listened to Laura's account with both ears and whiskers forward, and something about the way she told it made it click that of course Laura was the kind of person who'd be fascinated by Mewtwo. Something about it just fit.

"I bet you'll find him when you get back home," Jade found herself saying, before she could overthink it. "I dunno whether he's connected to that company doing the experiments or whatever, but... I think you'll figure it out."

 

[Jackie Cat]

She grinned, relaxing a touch as her babbling – apparently – just endeared her to her friend. Kindof a relief...

"I honestly dunno," she admitted, feeling free to be unguarded about it. "But I'm like... this sure that it's related somehow. Humans trying to control and exploit pokémon genes..."

Laura gave a low whistle, and clutched at her belly with a small grin. "Whatever. That's enough distraction, don't you think? I meant to order a bite to eat, like, half an hour ago or something. I'm flush enough right now, you want something on me?"

She swiped her tongue over her whickers at the thought of a sandwich the size and shape of a pair of fucking bricks.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade couldn't help breaking into a grin. "Yeah, sounds good." She hadn't been all that hungry when they'd arrived, and had been content to poke at the snack plate for half an hour, but they'd been talking so long that it was practically dinnertime.

It felt good to be able to share stuff from back home. To share it with a friend. Part of her wished that she could be even less guarded. There wasn't even any reason to, she just... still didn't know how to admit a lot of it, even to herself.

Still, she'd made a bit of progress. That was at least something to celebrate.

<><><>​

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade leaned back in her seat, glancing out the window at the darkening shades of dusk creeping over Frontier Town. And only a few hours past noon, too. Why'd it have to get dark so early? She found herself cursing it every year. At least it didn't snow in the Soja, so that was at least one good thing.

"Feels weird that it's winter now," Jade said, finally taking a sip from her mug after letting the heat saturate her paws for the last few minutes. "I know it's like, obviously time was gonna pass while we were here. I guess it's just a reminder that we have a life here now, and it's not just some one-and-done mission." She took another cautious sip, letting the warm-spiced berry juice fill her mouth.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura nodded, and pulled a mock-grimace. In truth, it didn't really bother her. Existentially, or whatever.

"Yeah, obviously Betel didn't exactly give us an itinerary or anything. Sometimes I wonder if we're going too slow, but then... it seems like we're always just strong enough for whatever the next challenge is."

She sipped at her drink – the same as her friend's. Mulled berry cider. Sweet and warm and comforting. Perfect. Yet another thing to remind her of home... but at least it was a positive one.

"Novelux is more of a 'big city' than home – that's Circhester, in Galar – but the snow made it feel... I dunno. It was weird, like, the most familiar of any place I've been on Forlas. I guess it was a reminder that I'm not here indefinitely, right? But the more I get used to Forlas, the more I like being here. I mean, I have to go back, I don't even dread it—" much "—but I've started to fit in here, kinda."

She smiled lopsidedly, and raised her mug in a cheers gesture. They were both rangers, they'd both picked up little Soja' eccentricities, so maybe Jade would get it.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade gave a small laugh. "Oh man, I hate snow. Not looking forward to heading north, that's for sure." She raised her mug along with Laura's, then sank back into the land of warm, fruity spices to avoid thinking about how they'd all be heading to a frozen wasteland in the uncomfortably near future.

"It's kinda silly, but like... this time of year, being here this long... it makes me feel like I'm getting older, while we're here? I guess because last month would've been my birthday, sorta. Technically." Second-to-last month before the shortest day? That seemed to line up.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura nodded, and scratched sheepishly at her ear.

"I think mine would've been pretty recent too, actually... like, I think Gloom corresponds more or less with December, then Spirits with November, Rot with October... I guess late Rot, early Spirits, somewhere around there? Maybe even Winter Crossing, aha. Do you, uh, have All Hallows' Eve in your world?"

(Maybe not – Jade was from Kanto. Or at least somewhere Nihonese, definitely.)

"....Guess we've got pretty close birthdays, huh. I'd be turning... Fuck, twenty, I guess. That feels fucked up."

 

[Chibi Pika]

Twenty?? Whoa.

Okay, it wasn't that weird. Starr was almost nineteen back home, and well... I guess after a year on Forlas, she'd be twenty now, technically? That was a weird thought, that Starr had lived a year in the space between both of their respective arrivals.

"Yeah, it's not a huge thing where I'm from, but like, people on the internet post about it. So I guess that means I'll be..." Jade paused, furrowing her brow, suddenly unsure somehow. Which felt stupid, and reminded her of Stalker and all his bizarreness.

"It's weird... when I think about how old I am, my brain automatically goes to fifteen, but... I think I already had turned sixteen, before leaving. Everything just feels sort of wonky leading up to arriving here." She set her mug on the table, to better move her paws while she talked. "Like, if you asked me what I was doing the day before Betel called us all together, I have no idea, but if you asked me like, the general state of the world and stuff, then sure."

Her eyes drifted back to the window, her breath forming a small patch of fog on its surface. "I guess I've turned sixteen twice? It's a weird feeling."

She wasn't sure how else to put it. She definitely hadn’t been on Forlas long enough to feel properly seventeen--adulthood was still just as much of a far-off nonexistent thing as it always had been. Ajia had only just turned seventeen, so Jade definitely wasn't allowed to be seventeen yet. So, turning sixteen twice was the only sensible way to put it. Would she live to see her seventeenth, back home?