Frontier Town The Wanderin' Zera

[HelloYellow17]

Folks lump 'em together, but they're different. Don't go thinkin' they're the same or you'll run into trouble."

Wes nodded. “Noted. Thanks for the heads up.” So, some folks around here preferred to live in the wild. A small part of him could relate to that. He couldn’t deny he was more than a little curious about those kinds of people.

"Anyway, I take it you're a trainer, then?" Dave turned his head back toward Wes. "And earlier I overheard something about experiments. What's that all about?"

Wes bristled. “Damn, you’re shameless about eavesdropping, aren’t you?” he snapped.

But then…he wasn’t from Orre—wasn’t even from the same world as him—so it wasn’t like it needed to be kept secret from him, at least. And of course the scientist would be curious at the mention of “experiments…”

He leaned against the countertop with a huff. “Whatever, I’ll answer your questions. Though I don’t really know a whole lot about it. Just that someone is taking Pokémon and screwing up their heads so that they become these ruthless fighting machines. And yeah, I’m a trainer. Nearly had my Pokémon stolen from me for this same ‘experiment’, and I wasn’t about to let it happen.”

 

[Butterfree]

"Escarpa? Mm. I know a thing or two about them," Gerome said. "Daughter's a real firebrand. Has trouble with her strength. Folks're leery about that sorta thing. Get the picture?"

Dave squinted at Gerome. Trouble with her strength? "Not sure. So like, too powerful for her own good, breaks things she didn't mean to?"

Wes bristled. “Damn, you’re shameless about eavesdropping, aren’t you?” he snapped.

But then…he wasn’t from Orre—wasn’t even from the same world as him—so it wasn’t like it needed to be kept secret from him, at least. And of course the scientist would be curious at the mention of “experiments…”

He leaned against the countertop with a huff. “Whatever, I’ll answer your questions. Though I don’t really know a whole lot about it. Just that someone is taking Pokémon and screwing up their heads so that they become these ruthless fighting machines. And yeah, I’m a trainer. Nearly had my Pokémon stolen from me for this same ‘experiment’, and I wasn’t about to let it happen.”

Okay, what the fuck. It was the fucking TV show. Sort of. He didn't think the show had had anything about his own Pokémon getting stolen. Maybe, in the cartoon logic of this batshittery, the TV show was a 'based on a true story' sort of retelling of the events that 'really' happened out there in some other world. Did this Wes also have a chipper redhead love interest who could see auras, or had she just been added in for the sex appeal?

Well, Dave was not fucking asking about that. It was creepy enough having watched a couple episodes of the TV show based on this poor fucker's life without telling him that.

"Okay, chill. We were all walking around in a group, hard not to hear snippets." He waved a paw. "I take it these people you're talking about weren't exactly approved by an ethics board? Some kind of illegal underground thing, or what?" In the show it'd been some kind of cheesy criminal organization, right?

 

[Namohysip]

Gerome shrugged again. "Too strong to be called normal," he said. "People don't like strange and different, 'specially when the frontier's already got enough unknowns as it is. Guess she'd appeal to the adventurous sort, though."

 

[HelloYellow17]

"Daughter's a real firebrand. Has trouble with her strength. Folks're leery about that sorta thing. Get the picture?"

Wes raised an eyebrow. “So, is she a former human too, I take it?” he asked quietly.

"I take it these people you're talking about weren't exactly approved by an ethics board? Some kind of illegal underground thing, or what?"

Wes snorted. “It’s Orre. Closest thing we’ve got to an ‘ethics board’ is whoever’s calling the shots in the black market. And don’t ask me who that is, because if I knew, my job there would be done already.” He shot Dave a sideways glance. “So…what kind of science is it that you do, anyway?”

He went to take another sip of his drink and was irritably reminded that Gerome hadn’t heard his request. He nudged his glass toward him again. “Another, please. Surprise me.”

 

[Namohysip]

"Doubt she's human, since she was born here," Gerome said. "...I'm sayin' she's a half-human. Someone with a parent who's a former human, that sorta thing."

He took the glass and refilled it, this time with something with a little spicy kick to it, sliding it back over. A surprise, as requested.

 

[Butterfree]

"Half human? So the human thing, this 'immense power', that's heritable?"

(And also, the silent corollary: some human had come here and fucked a Pokémon. Of course they had.)

This was... Huh. Back home, being half Pokémon gave the Pokémorphs some powers no human had, but here, somehow being half human did the same, in whatever strange metaphysical way a human in a perfectly normal Pokémon body was magically more powerful than other Pokémon. And then, even though presumably the kid still looked exactly like other Pokémon, people were fucking pricks about her being 'different'. Of course.

He glanced back at Wes. His Orre definitely did sound like the seedy place from the show. "Like I said, I'm a geneticist. Working with the building blocks of life, figuring out exactly how they work and charting what they do and what kinds of possibilities that gives us for medical interventions. My work was on humans and Pokémon. They've got incompatible biologies normally, right? Pokémon are their own kind of life with all sorts of capabilities humans don't have. But I went and figured out how to make human and Pokémon genes work together in basically arbitrary ways, which opens whole new realms of possibilities. It was pretty fucking breathtaking." And then it'd all gotten sidetracked by uproar, of course. He downed the rest of his glass.

 

[HelloYellow17]

"Doubt she's human, since she was born here," Gerome said. "...I'm sayin' she's a half-human. Someone with a parent who's a former human, that sorta thing."

He took the glass and refilled it, this time with something with a little spicy kick to it, sliding it back over. A surprise, as requested.

Wes scrunched his brow in thought. “Wait, I…huh. So some human got thrown into this world and decided to just…settle down and have a kid? With another Pokémon, I guess?” Gods, that sounds bizarre on so many levels. “Why didn’t they go back home? Does that kinda thing happen often around here? You know, former humans just settling down and having families?”

It was all utterly beyond him. Wes had only ever known wanting to get away from the desert. Why someone would land in a place like this, in a Pokémon’s body, and choose to stay was something he just couldn’t wrap his head around.

His thoughts were interrupted by Dave’s answer to his question. Most of what he said flew over Wes’s head, but some phrases stuck out. A few particularly disturbing phrases.

“Hang on,” he said slowly, “are you saying that you…experimented on both humans and Pokémon? And you merged them together?”

That did it. Every scientist was absolutely zubatshit insane. Wes was growing more and more repulsed by the second. Who the hell is this guy?

He seized his new drink and knocked back a couple swallows. This one burned as it went down the throat, and he grimaced in a self-satisfied way. That was more like it, at least.

 

[Namohysip]

Gerome grunted. "Yeah, who'd ever do that, settle down and have a wife and kid," he said with a shrug. "Who knows? Maybe that human didn't have a way back. Maybe he preferred it here, for whatever reason." He shrugged. "Either way, he's a Pokemon by blood. What, he gonna spend the rest of his days in isolation?"

Then, speaking a little lower and more discretely, he said, "Do you have a way back?"

 

[Butterfree]

“Hang on,” he said slowly, “are you saying that you…experimented on both humans and Pokémon? And you merged them together?”

Dave sighed, scowling. Of course the ex-criminal fictional backwater kid had watched too much sci-fi. “No. You can’t just take existing people and magically fuse them together with other organisms. That only happens in movies, and if you could do that it’d be extremely goddamn illegal and also not fucking genetics. I said my work was on humans and Pokémon as in about. About how they each work and why they’re incompatible and how to work around that. The point was to be able to one day do stuff like leverage Pokémon’s superior healing to help humans. You’re fucking welcome.”

He put his glass back down, harder than he meant to. Little hope for getting into the nuances of in vitro genetic modification and exactly how creating hybrid embryos furthered that research. He’d done this song and dance a million times. Wes’d probably just decide it was all the same fucking thing.

He looked back at Gerome. Was he implying the Escarpa kid was his daughter? Dave’d assumed Gerome’s kid could’ve been adopted, but even if the Escarpa kid wasn’t his, he sure was making it sound like he, too, would fuck a Pokémon.

“Well, I don’t know, I’m here in this body and I’m still happily not sexually attracted to dogs.” Though he supposed if someone was stuck here for decades maybe they’d take what they could get. God. “The entity that brought us here insisted it’d send us back and it’d be like we never left, so it’d better.”

 

[HelloYellow17]

"Do you have a way back?"

Wes paused, quickly stifling the fear rising in his chest, and injected a confidence he didn’t feel into his answer. “I do. We all do, according to whoever sent us here. I imagine if they have the power to bring us here, they have the power to send us back.”

Gods, I hope so.

He scowled at Dave’s aggravated ramble. “Well, pardon me for not knowing what the hell it is you get up to. All I know is that I’ve seen things that shouldn’t have ever happened thanks to some lunatic somewhere running a bunch of Pokémon experiments, so forgive me if I’m a little suspicious. How’d your research turn out for you, by the way?”

“The entity that brought us here insisted it’d send us back and it’d be like we never left, so it’d better.”

Wes took another swig of his drink before grunting in agreement. “That’s something we can agree on,” he said. “If that cloud was lying, I’ll hunt it down myself.”

 

[Butterfree]

He scowled at Dave’s aggravated ramble. “Well, pardon me for not knowing what the hell it is you get up to. All I know is that I’ve seen things that shouldn’t have ever happened thanks to some lunatic somewhere running a bunch of Pokémon experiments, so forgive me if I’m a little suspicious. How’d your research turn out for you, by the way?”

"Well, if I was getting up to evil sci-fi mumbo-jumbo shit, I wouldn't be going around casually blabbing about it to every guy I meet at the bar."

Dave exhaled through his nose. Wes really wanted to know more? Not like he wasn't going to just seize on it with some willful fucking misunderstanding or other. But who was he kidding. A break from the constant public harassment might be nice, and he wasn't planning on advertising it to the cowboy people (not that they could begin to understand it if they tried), but just shutting up about the morphs entirely, pretending they weren't who they were, the whole time he was here, just to avoid scrutiny by assholes? Fuck. Better just rip off the band-aid, and however they reacted was their problem.

"So I came up with this method to let human and Pokémon genes work together in almost arbitrary ways, right? But we needed a proof of concept to be sure it even worked. And obviously you can't just try something like this on living humans. But at least in my universe, in my country, at my particular moment in time, you could experiment with human embryos, up to a certain stage of development, when they still can't really think or feel anything. So we got some open-source human genetic sequences and modified them using my method so they'd develop Pokémon features. Major structures that we could see beginning to develop at the fetal stage, from all different sorts of Pokémon to test the universality of it. And it's all going swimmingly, it works perfectly, we're working on writing it up to a scientific journal."

He took a deep breath.

"Only then these shithead activists step in, and long story short, we're forbidden to destroy the fetuses when the experiment is done. Whole thing's strictly supposed to be a proof of concept to spark further research, but then suddenly we're looking at these things growing into actual fucking hybrid kids. And nobody else would have the faintest clue what to even do with them, so all we can do is adopt them ourselves, and do what we can to give them a decent life. And of course, society's a bunch of hateful bigots, so these days half my work isn't even science, it's just reading up on endless fucking labyrinthine laws or writing letters to politicians to argue why my kids deserve basic human rights. The other half is also mostly figuring out how to improve their lives when they've got roses for hands or skin that eats sand. So that's how that's going."

 

[Namohysip]

"Hm. Sounds grim," Gerome said, and while his statement was concise, his countenance had changed just slightly. "The stuff the 'hybrids' here face ain't nothing like that. But I wonder if you'll have some insight for'm... if they're willin' to listen."

 

[HelloYellow17]

Wes was fully prepared to respond to Dave’s explanation with biting sarcasm—except he wasn’t prepared for just how off the rails it actually was. He deflated as he listened, utterly speechless for a moment after Dave finished.

“…Well, shit,” he said.

There was…a whole lot to unpack there, and he didn’t even know where to begin. After another pause, he said slowly, “So, when you said you’re a parent…does that mean…?” Oh, gods. Wes was starting to get a headache. He seized his drink and took a long pull from the glass.

 

[Butterfree]

Dave sat there, tiny Poochyena heart racing uncomfortably for the pause before Wes answered.

“…Well, shit,” he said.

That was it? Just that. Not even going to fight him on it? Wes looked exhausted more than anything else. Honestly a better reaction than he’d expected.

He looked away. “…Yeah. Yeah, my daughter’s part Ninetales. She can breathe fire, except her mouth isn’t fireproof. Like I said, the cloud better fucking deliver on getting us back like we never left.”

Dave turned to Gerome. “Another,” he said, pushing his glass toward the Tyranitar. “So this Escarpa kid, she yours?”

 

[Namohysip]

"Nope. An old... person I knew settled down with the Escarpas and had 'er. Figure I ain't inclined ter reveal much about the guy if it ain't important... But I helped the guy out. Don't tell anyone, though. Some people like using this place as a rest stop where they ain't gonna be followed. You get what I mean?"

Once again, that brief, serious air about him...

He refreshed Dave's glass, though he gave him a cautioning stare when he did. A bit much for a little pooch.

 

[HelloYellow17]

“…Yeah. Yeah, my daughter’s part Ninetales. She can breathe fire, except her mouth isn’t fireproof. Like I said, the cloud better fucking deliver on getting us back like we never left.”

“How…? How does that even—?” Wes rubbed at his forehead with a paw. “Gods, that sounds like a mess. How old is she?”

He watched Dave grumble a request for another drink and felt the tiniest pang of guilt. Maybe he’d judged the guy a tad too quickly…maybe. He was still an asshole. But a slightly sympathetic one, at least.

"Nope. An old... person I knew settled down with the Escarpas and had 'er. Figure I ain't inclined ter reveal much about the guy if it ain't important... But I helped the guy out. Don't tell anyone, though. Some people like using this place as a rest stop where they ain't gonna be followed. You get what I mean?"

Once again, that brief, serious air about him...

Wes acknowledged Gerome with a small nod. He respected the guy’s ability to keep his mouth shut. It was a rare quality, frankly. “Fair enough. Don’t suppose you could tell us more about the daughter, maybe? Perhaps she’d make a good ally, if she’s willing…”

 

[Namohysip]

"Eh." Gerome nodded. "Dunno where she is, but I figure... yeah. Alright. Maybe she'd trust you. She lives in an old cabin a ways off." Gerome gestured vaguely. "Not exactly the sort t' live right in the middle, since, y'know, that's how the Escarpa are. Dunno if she goes back to it all that often, eh, what's her name... Bristle... no... Brislyn... nah, too fancy... Brisa, that was it. Luxio Brisa."

 

[Butterfree]

"She's... well, she's ten. All of them are, technically, since they were created at the same time and all. But Pokémon tend to mature and develop a lot faster than humans, and that turned out to affect how they grew a bit, some more than others. On most of the standard measures, she's more like what you'd expect from a twelve-year-old. Or was, before she touched a Fire Stone. Way taller than she should be now."

Dave took a sip of his refilled glass as Gerome talked. Judging from the history he'd read, it sounded like sapient Pokémon over here matured at more humanlike rates. "Huh. So if this Brisa lives alone in a cabin, sounds like she's an adult? Her dad make it back, or just been here a really long time?" Brisa... did he know somebody by that name back home?

 

[Namohysip]

"...Her dad's around. Figure he chose not t' return, one reason or another." Gerome shrugged. "The relation they got, though... ain't the best. Real complicated. Ain't my place to explain." And there was also a chance Gerome didn't know the full details behind it.

 

[Butterfree]

Dave's brow furrowed. "Is it common for humans to be here for decades? We already heard of one guy who was here for like thirty years, a 'Jesse Stranger'. Same guy, or are there a lot of people coming here and never going home?"