Chapter Two
Disclaimer: Well, do I really need to do this again? It's just the same thing as I said in the last chapter...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some hours later, Michael and the girl who'd found the Shadow Zangoose (she'd insisted on coming along and hadn't allowed the helicopter to take off until he agreed to take her) stood with Lily Horner, Professor Krane, and the rest of the Pokemon HQ Lab staff in the room of the Purification Chamber.
"I know you want to get the poor Pokemon purified right away, sweetie," Lily was saying to her son, "but that's exactly my point. It's proven quite fortunate that you took that detour to check the woods, because it gave us time to discover the trap Cipher set."
Michael blinked as he heard this, the rant he'd been preparing to let loose vanishing as he heard the third to last word of his mother's statement. "Trap?" he repeated it, blinking. "What trap?"
"Well," replied Lily, "it appears that they've done their homework, because they must have heard from the news how you managed to purify Lugia and taken steps to prevent a similar occurrence. Our simulations indicate that if you were to attempt to use the same method, it would cause the Purification Chamber to utterly and completely crash, to the point where we'd have to build an entirely new one from scratch."
Michael swore under his breath. "Cipher," he growled. "They'll use any sort of nasty tricks, won't they?"
There was a general murmur of agreement, and then the girl who'd unintentionally pointed out the current problem to Michael said quite suddenly "Well, maybe if we track down their new lab and hack into their computer systems, we can find some way to disarm the trap, or else an alternate means of purifying XD Pokemon."
Everybody in the room turned to stare right at her. "What?" she asked, somewhat weirded out by the sudden, intense attention.
Michael laughed a little and said "Well, what do you know! She actually came up with a good plan for once! Allright, mom? Now that I've switched Arcanine for Alakazam, I'm heading back to the forest to try the tracking again. I might not be home on time for supper, so don't wait up for me, okay?"
His mother just nodded, looking grim, and gestured for him to get going, as if to say "Go on, time's a wasting."
"So," Michael inquired a few minutes later as the helicopter was taking off, "I don't believe I caught your name..."
Smiling at him, the girl who'd found the XD Zangoose replied "No, you didn't. I never gave it to you. It's Lucy, though. Lucy Kuro."
Michael smirked. "Nice," he said. "I've always liked an English first name combined with a Japanese last name."
Lucy giggled softly and replied "I know. I was quite excited when I read about that on your website." Blushing hard, she added "It...It made me think that perhaps I had a chance with you."
The Horner boy's smirk changed to a soft, warm smile and he replied "Well, you're quite lovely and you seem like a nice enough young lady...You never know..."
Lucy blushed even harder, but did not respond. For several moments, the helicopter ride continued on in an awkward silence, then she finally blurted "What if we get there and there's a lot of trainers with Shadow Pokemon? Did you bring along plenty of Pokeballs?"
Michael chuckled softly and replied "I've been keeping a decent supply of Pokeballs ready this whole time, just in case I should need them again. Don't worry, I'm more than ready for whatever happens over there."
The rest of the trip was spent plotting all sorts of plans for every possible outcome they could imagine. Once the chopper had landed, they headed straight to the place where Lucy had discovered the Shadow Zangoose.
"Alakazam, go!" shouted Michael as he tossed the Pokeball that held his favored Psychic Pokemon.
The Alakazam burst from the Pokeball in a flurry of white light, then stood up, stretching out, getting used to being out of her Pokeball once again, looking back at her trainer as if to ask "Yes?"
Holding up the Ultra Ball holding the Shadow Zangoose, Michael said "Read her memories. Find us the path she followed and lead us back to the lab that made her."
The Alakazam nodded, then closed her eyes as she bent forward to rest her forehead against the Pokeball. After a moment, she stood back up and gestured for her trainer and Lucy to follow her.
As the Pokemon hovered deeper into the woods, Michael and Lucy followed shortly behind her. The trek through the woods took hours and the sun had already set and a bright, full moon had taken its place in the sky by the time the brightly-lit building that could only be the lab for which they'd searched came into view.
Michael stared, utterly awed by what he saw. The thing was HUGE! It had to be miles across! He already knew he had his work cut out for him and he didn't even have a clue where to begin.
Lucy's arm suddenly grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back behind a nearby tree. "Wha-?!" he began, but she cut him off by shushing him.
"I think somebody might have seen you," she whispered. "Just sit back and wait for a moment..."
Several moments passed by in silence and, then...Sure enough, somebody peaked around the tree at them. Michael instantly recognized the uniform of a Team Snagem goon from his run-in with the troublesome gang during his last adventure.
The man grinned and said "Hey, kid. I've been hoping to get to meet you for some time, now. I heard about how you managed to purify that strangely-colored Shadow Lugia, so I knew that if anyone could help this Pokemon I Snagged, you could."
It was then that Michael recognized the man. It was the Team Snagem deserter that had stolen the first portable Snag Machine and ruined Cipher's first attempt at world domination. The man left a Great Ball and a strange, arm-shaped machine on the ground in front of Michael and after a briefly-muttered "I'm sure you'll make better use of them than I could," he disappeared into the forest.
As the Horner boy picked up the peculiar machine, comprehension dawned on him. It was an older, cruder design than the one currently resting on his right arm, but some of the similarities in parts were unmistakable. This was the original portable Snag Machine, the thing on which the designs for the machine that helped him succeed in his own adventures had been based! He couldn't help trying it on. To his surprise, it fit quite snugly over his left arm. And, then, it hit him. With this thing, he'd be able to make successful Snags of two Shadow Pokemon at a time, rather than having to wait for a Snag Machine to cool down between each Snag Ball production!
Now, he was eager to go start some Snagging. So eager, in fact, that he almost forgot about the Great Ball the man had left with him. But when Lucy caught his shoulder again and reminded him of it, he said "Oh, yeah!" and snatched it up, immediately opening it up to see what was inside. From out of the Ball emerged a Nidoqueen. But it was instantly obvious she was another XD, because most of her scales were a deep, dark, almost indigo blue. The ones normally a cream white color were, instead, a light blue hue.
Returning the Nidoqueen to her ball, he set the ball onto his belt, which currently held only two normal Pokemon, the XD Zangoose and, now, the XD Nidoqueen. Gesturing for Lucy to follow him, he then began to sneak his way through the forest toward the lab. As he did so, he took a careful scope of the security around it and tried to figure out a way around it all. To his delight, he found that the only security he'd be unable to bypass was a pair of trainers standing guard on either side of the entrance to the lab.
The duo slowly worked their way up to the entrance, slipping past security bots and cameras and automated defensive structures along the way. At last, they could sneak no more, so they slipped out of the shadows and approached in a would-be casual manner.
"Hey!" declared the thug on their left. "Stop right there! You're not one of us! You're not allowed in here!"
The other thug looked up and gave a startled grunt of recognition, then declared "That's Michael Horner! If he's discovered us already, we're in trouble!"
"Well, let's stop him now, before he can do anything about it!"
Each thug tossed a Pokeball and Michael, already ready for battle, immediately responded by tossing the pair of balls holding his two normal Pokemon.
The Alakazam from before and an Electabuzz emerged from Michael's Pokeballs and from the thugs' came a Charizard and a Raichu. Given the track record for this place thus far, Michael was unsurprised to discover that both of the Pokemon that emerged from the thugs' Pokeballs looked drastically different from normal Charizards and Raichus. The Charizard's colorations were almost normal, except that all of its scales were considerably darker than a normal Charizard's and the orange part covering its main body had a slightly brownish tint to it. Raichu's fur was also almost the same as a normal Raichu's except that the normal electric yellow was more of a dark, grayish yellow and the brown was so dark it almost looked black. Equally unsurprising to Michael was the way the Aura Reader responded, alerting him to the Shadowy auras around both of the opposing Pokemon.
"Electabuzz, Thundershock the Charizard!" called Michael. "Alakazam, Psybeam on the Raichu!"
"Charizard, Shadow Wave!" called the first thug.
"Raichu, Shadow Hold!" proclaimed the second.
Electabuzz dodged the blob of Shadowy material that sought to hold him in place, but Alakazam wasn't quite so lucky. So it was rather surprising when the dodging luck was precisely the opposite when it came for the balls of damaging Shadow that came at them in a waving pattern. But both of them were successful in striking their targeted foes with the attacks that Michael had told them to use.
The effectiveness of Electricity on Charizard's Flying side wiped the cocky smile from its face and left it ready for Snagging. The Raichu was clearly low in level, for it, too, was already about to be defeated if another attack was given.
With a grim grin, Michael loaded an Ultra Ball into each of his Snag Machine, sent them through both, and tossed them with a shout of "Snag Balls, go!"
Seconds later, the thugs stared in numb disbelief as both of the Ultra Balls that now held the Pokemon that had once been theirs flew up to meet Michael's hands, which instantly set them into his belt.
"We gotta' get out of here!" proclaimed one thug and the other just mutely nodded his head in agreement. Both of them vanished into the lab they had been guarding.
Turning to look at Lucy, Michael nodded and she nodded back and the both of them immediately followed the thugs into the lab. The hallway beyond the door the two grunts had been guarding was long and dimly-lit. With what little light the room had, however, it was pretty clear that this corridor was still under construction.
"Perfect!" Lucy said, pointing through the studs of a wall that had only been framed in thus far at a single computer set up in a corner of the room beyond. "With this place still under construction, odds are that the security won't be up on that thing, yet. Let's see if we can use it to get into their system and find out what this place is."
Michael nodded and followed her past the wooden beams and across the room to the computer. Lucy immediately set to work, her fingers flying across the keyboard as she ticked and tacked away, searching for some clue on what this place was for.
"Got it!" she said. "I've found a huge folder that looks like it's heavily encrypted. Since nothing else is coded at all, I can only assume this is what we're looking for. But I'm no good with decoding..."
Michael shook his head and answered "That's just fine, if you can get a copy of it, we have people back at the lab who can decode it."
Lucy said nothing and just immediately pulled a laptop out of her backpack, hooking it up to the Cipher computer. She downloaded a copy of the folder in question onto her laptop, then took it a step further. Michael gave her a questioning look as he saw that she was uploading something into Cipher's system. Seeing his expression, she explained "I'm giving them a virus a friend of mine made for me. It'll shut down their system long enough for us to get out without worrying about the security we had to sneak past the first time."
"Good thinking," said Michael with a grin.
Once the malignant code had been uploaded into Cipher's computer system and given a chance to work, they fled. Thankfully, the virus worked and they were able to just run straight past all the bots and auto cannons and such they'd had to sneak around on their way in.
Some time later, the duo sat back at the Pokemon HQ Lab, exhausted from running and lack of sleep, but safe at last, and staying up for the time being to wait for Datan's word on what was in the folder they'd snatched. At last, the researcher came into the room, looking thunder-struck.
"It's horrible..." he said. "Absolutely horrible. They have a new Grand Master, somebody named Ardos. He's...He...These new XD Pokemon have had their hearts even more tightly bound than the Shadow Lugia you purified. And there's so many of them...So many...He isn't bothering to steal them anymore, he's breeding and Shadowing them en masse..."
Michael sighed sadly and replied simply "What's the damage?"
"Assuming this list is up to date...One thousand nine hundred and three Shadow Pokemon, every one of them with safeguards placed upon them for every method of purification I could possibly think of..."
Michael's heart sank.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, that's it for this chapter! Don't worry, I'm not forgetting all you horn dogs out there. The yiffy stuff's coming starting next chapter. But I need to know what you all think, so far...From now on, each chapter only comes after I have at least five reviews for the each of the current ones.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some hours later, Michael and the girl who'd found the Shadow Zangoose (she'd insisted on coming along and hadn't allowed the helicopter to take off until he agreed to take her) stood with Lily Horner, Professor Krane, and the rest of the Pokemon HQ Lab staff in the room of the Purification Chamber.
"I know you want to get the poor Pokemon purified right away, sweetie," Lily was saying to her son, "but that's exactly my point. It's proven quite fortunate that you took that detour to check the woods, because it gave us time to discover the trap Cipher set."
Michael blinked as he heard this, the rant he'd been preparing to let loose vanishing as he heard the third to last word of his mother's statement. "Trap?" he repeated it, blinking. "What trap?"
"Well," replied Lily, "it appears that they've done their homework, because they must have heard from the news how you managed to purify Lugia and taken steps to prevent a similar occurrence. Our simulations indicate that if you were to attempt to use the same method, it would cause the Purification Chamber to utterly and completely crash, to the point where we'd have to build an entirely new one from scratch."
Michael swore under his breath. "Cipher," he growled. "They'll use any sort of nasty tricks, won't they?"
There was a general murmur of agreement, and then the girl who'd unintentionally pointed out the current problem to Michael said quite suddenly "Well, maybe if we track down their new lab and hack into their computer systems, we can find some way to disarm the trap, or else an alternate means of purifying XD Pokemon."
Everybody in the room turned to stare right at her. "What?" she asked, somewhat weirded out by the sudden, intense attention.
Michael laughed a little and said "Well, what do you know! She actually came up with a good plan for once! Allright, mom? Now that I've switched Arcanine for Alakazam, I'm heading back to the forest to try the tracking again. I might not be home on time for supper, so don't wait up for me, okay?"
His mother just nodded, looking grim, and gestured for him to get going, as if to say "Go on, time's a wasting."
"So," Michael inquired a few minutes later as the helicopter was taking off, "I don't believe I caught your name..."
Smiling at him, the girl who'd found the XD Zangoose replied "No, you didn't. I never gave it to you. It's Lucy, though. Lucy Kuro."
Michael smirked. "Nice," he said. "I've always liked an English first name combined with a Japanese last name."
Lucy giggled softly and replied "I know. I was quite excited when I read about that on your website." Blushing hard, she added "It...It made me think that perhaps I had a chance with you."
The Horner boy's smirk changed to a soft, warm smile and he replied "Well, you're quite lovely and you seem like a nice enough young lady...You never know..."
Lucy blushed even harder, but did not respond. For several moments, the helicopter ride continued on in an awkward silence, then she finally blurted "What if we get there and there's a lot of trainers with Shadow Pokemon? Did you bring along plenty of Pokeballs?"
Michael chuckled softly and replied "I've been keeping a decent supply of Pokeballs ready this whole time, just in case I should need them again. Don't worry, I'm more than ready for whatever happens over there."
The rest of the trip was spent plotting all sorts of plans for every possible outcome they could imagine. Once the chopper had landed, they headed straight to the place where Lucy had discovered the Shadow Zangoose.
"Alakazam, go!" shouted Michael as he tossed the Pokeball that held his favored Psychic Pokemon.
The Alakazam burst from the Pokeball in a flurry of white light, then stood up, stretching out, getting used to being out of her Pokeball once again, looking back at her trainer as if to ask "Yes?"
Holding up the Ultra Ball holding the Shadow Zangoose, Michael said "Read her memories. Find us the path she followed and lead us back to the lab that made her."
The Alakazam nodded, then closed her eyes as she bent forward to rest her forehead against the Pokeball. After a moment, she stood back up and gestured for her trainer and Lucy to follow her.
As the Pokemon hovered deeper into the woods, Michael and Lucy followed shortly behind her. The trek through the woods took hours and the sun had already set and a bright, full moon had taken its place in the sky by the time the brightly-lit building that could only be the lab for which they'd searched came into view.
Michael stared, utterly awed by what he saw. The thing was HUGE! It had to be miles across! He already knew he had his work cut out for him and he didn't even have a clue where to begin.
Lucy's arm suddenly grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back behind a nearby tree. "Wha-?!" he began, but she cut him off by shushing him.
"I think somebody might have seen you," she whispered. "Just sit back and wait for a moment..."
Several moments passed by in silence and, then...Sure enough, somebody peaked around the tree at them. Michael instantly recognized the uniform of a Team Snagem goon from his run-in with the troublesome gang during his last adventure.
The man grinned and said "Hey, kid. I've been hoping to get to meet you for some time, now. I heard about how you managed to purify that strangely-colored Shadow Lugia, so I knew that if anyone could help this Pokemon I Snagged, you could."
It was then that Michael recognized the man. It was the Team Snagem deserter that had stolen the first portable Snag Machine and ruined Cipher's first attempt at world domination. The man left a Great Ball and a strange, arm-shaped machine on the ground in front of Michael and after a briefly-muttered "I'm sure you'll make better use of them than I could," he disappeared into the forest.
As the Horner boy picked up the peculiar machine, comprehension dawned on him. It was an older, cruder design than the one currently resting on his right arm, but some of the similarities in parts were unmistakable. This was the original portable Snag Machine, the thing on which the designs for the machine that helped him succeed in his own adventures had been based! He couldn't help trying it on. To his surprise, it fit quite snugly over his left arm. And, then, it hit him. With this thing, he'd be able to make successful Snags of two Shadow Pokemon at a time, rather than having to wait for a Snag Machine to cool down between each Snag Ball production!
Now, he was eager to go start some Snagging. So eager, in fact, that he almost forgot about the Great Ball the man had left with him. But when Lucy caught his shoulder again and reminded him of it, he said "Oh, yeah!" and snatched it up, immediately opening it up to see what was inside. From out of the Ball emerged a Nidoqueen. But it was instantly obvious she was another XD, because most of her scales were a deep, dark, almost indigo blue. The ones normally a cream white color were, instead, a light blue hue.
Returning the Nidoqueen to her ball, he set the ball onto his belt, which currently held only two normal Pokemon, the XD Zangoose and, now, the XD Nidoqueen. Gesturing for Lucy to follow him, he then began to sneak his way through the forest toward the lab. As he did so, he took a careful scope of the security around it and tried to figure out a way around it all. To his delight, he found that the only security he'd be unable to bypass was a pair of trainers standing guard on either side of the entrance to the lab.
The duo slowly worked their way up to the entrance, slipping past security bots and cameras and automated defensive structures along the way. At last, they could sneak no more, so they slipped out of the shadows and approached in a would-be casual manner.
"Hey!" declared the thug on their left. "Stop right there! You're not one of us! You're not allowed in here!"
The other thug looked up and gave a startled grunt of recognition, then declared "That's Michael Horner! If he's discovered us already, we're in trouble!"
"Well, let's stop him now, before he can do anything about it!"
Each thug tossed a Pokeball and Michael, already ready for battle, immediately responded by tossing the pair of balls holding his two normal Pokemon.
The Alakazam from before and an Electabuzz emerged from Michael's Pokeballs and from the thugs' came a Charizard and a Raichu. Given the track record for this place thus far, Michael was unsurprised to discover that both of the Pokemon that emerged from the thugs' Pokeballs looked drastically different from normal Charizards and Raichus. The Charizard's colorations were almost normal, except that all of its scales were considerably darker than a normal Charizard's and the orange part covering its main body had a slightly brownish tint to it. Raichu's fur was also almost the same as a normal Raichu's except that the normal electric yellow was more of a dark, grayish yellow and the brown was so dark it almost looked black. Equally unsurprising to Michael was the way the Aura Reader responded, alerting him to the Shadowy auras around both of the opposing Pokemon.
"Electabuzz, Thundershock the Charizard!" called Michael. "Alakazam, Psybeam on the Raichu!"
"Charizard, Shadow Wave!" called the first thug.
"Raichu, Shadow Hold!" proclaimed the second.
Electabuzz dodged the blob of Shadowy material that sought to hold him in place, but Alakazam wasn't quite so lucky. So it was rather surprising when the dodging luck was precisely the opposite when it came for the balls of damaging Shadow that came at them in a waving pattern. But both of them were successful in striking their targeted foes with the attacks that Michael had told them to use.
The effectiveness of Electricity on Charizard's Flying side wiped the cocky smile from its face and left it ready for Snagging. The Raichu was clearly low in level, for it, too, was already about to be defeated if another attack was given.
With a grim grin, Michael loaded an Ultra Ball into each of his Snag Machine, sent them through both, and tossed them with a shout of "Snag Balls, go!"
Seconds later, the thugs stared in numb disbelief as both of the Ultra Balls that now held the Pokemon that had once been theirs flew up to meet Michael's hands, which instantly set them into his belt.
"We gotta' get out of here!" proclaimed one thug and the other just mutely nodded his head in agreement. Both of them vanished into the lab they had been guarding.
Turning to look at Lucy, Michael nodded and she nodded back and the both of them immediately followed the thugs into the lab. The hallway beyond the door the two grunts had been guarding was long and dimly-lit. With what little light the room had, however, it was pretty clear that this corridor was still under construction.
"Perfect!" Lucy said, pointing through the studs of a wall that had only been framed in thus far at a single computer set up in a corner of the room beyond. "With this place still under construction, odds are that the security won't be up on that thing, yet. Let's see if we can use it to get into their system and find out what this place is."
Michael nodded and followed her past the wooden beams and across the room to the computer. Lucy immediately set to work, her fingers flying across the keyboard as she ticked and tacked away, searching for some clue on what this place was for.
"Got it!" she said. "I've found a huge folder that looks like it's heavily encrypted. Since nothing else is coded at all, I can only assume this is what we're looking for. But I'm no good with decoding..."
Michael shook his head and answered "That's just fine, if you can get a copy of it, we have people back at the lab who can decode it."
Lucy said nothing and just immediately pulled a laptop out of her backpack, hooking it up to the Cipher computer. She downloaded a copy of the folder in question onto her laptop, then took it a step further. Michael gave her a questioning look as he saw that she was uploading something into Cipher's system. Seeing his expression, she explained "I'm giving them a virus a friend of mine made for me. It'll shut down their system long enough for us to get out without worrying about the security we had to sneak past the first time."
"Good thinking," said Michael with a grin.
Once the malignant code had been uploaded into Cipher's computer system and given a chance to work, they fled. Thankfully, the virus worked and they were able to just run straight past all the bots and auto cannons and such they'd had to sneak around on their way in.
Some time later, the duo sat back at the Pokemon HQ Lab, exhausted from running and lack of sleep, but safe at last, and staying up for the time being to wait for Datan's word on what was in the folder they'd snatched. At last, the researcher came into the room, looking thunder-struck.
"It's horrible..." he said. "Absolutely horrible. They have a new Grand Master, somebody named Ardos. He's...He...These new XD Pokemon have had their hearts even more tightly bound than the Shadow Lugia you purified. And there's so many of them...So many...He isn't bothering to steal them anymore, he's breeding and Shadowing them en masse..."
Michael sighed sadly and replied simply "What's the damage?"
"Assuming this list is up to date...One thousand nine hundred and three Shadow Pokemon, every one of them with safeguards placed upon them for every method of purification I could possibly think of..."
Michael's heart sank.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, that's it for this chapter! Don't worry, I'm not forgetting all you horn dogs out there. The yiffy stuff's coming starting next chapter. But I need to know what you all think, so far...From now on, each chapter only comes after I have at least five reviews for the each of the current ones.