FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Are we agreed, then? You provide me with as much information about the Pokénomics HQ as you can, and I'll help you catch enough pokémon to allow you to defend yourself. We're headed up into the mountains as soon as we hit Arget."

The five of them - Glen, Enya, and the three pokémon - were standing just barely hidden by the trees by the side of the road, looking at the low, welcoming walls of the city a mile or so away. The pavement stretched about ten yards wide between thick forest on either side. It was late in the afternoon, the same day the two humans had met. There was little traffic on the road, both because cars were not tremendously popular in that era and because it was not a busy time of day, or even a huge city. Birds, both mundane and pokémon, were singing in the trees, and crickets had started chirping. It was a peaceful time, like the rest of what Glen had spent with Enya.

He wasn't quite sure what to think of her, still. He continued to suspect some sort of mental manipulation from his abra, or even from some other, outside source; the feelings for her had come on fast, strong, and with little rational basis aside from her unquestionable beauty. She wasn't smart. She wasn't talented, as far as he knew. Synapse liked her, but he liked most women. Ambrosia hadn't tried to run her off. Allanon, as usual, made no comment on his relationships. She was only beautiful, and admired his pokémon. That was all, and that scared Glen. It was too little to base his infatuation on; too little for someone of his mental stature. Even so... he was determined, now that she had changed sides, to keep her with him, and protect her from employers who would execute her for the simple crime of not being dead.

Enya nodded slowly, unfocused, and drew his attention from thoughts of her to her, herself. She traced the ‘R' on her uniform - That'll have to be removed soon - with a quivering finger, her features hard and angry in their glazed-over appearance. "All of my pokémon until now have been Rocket-issue. They took my own away when I joined, but that was okay with me, at the time. I don't know what happened to them." She shook her long hair all around and started towards the road ahead. "Anyway. I don't know any of the specifics of the headquarters, but I can at least give you an idea of the defenses they'll have in place, and a general sense of direction. I've been there once before, but it wasn't enough to get a good enough picture of it. I'll tell you more once you have your ab- hck!" A shot rang out through the air and she twisted with the force of the blow, her eyes wide open and her hair trailing her like a comet tail. Glen watched, horrified, as blood bloomed across her chest and she hit the dirt, her staring eyes flat and dead.

"Enya!" he barked. "No!"

She's dead, Allanon informed him in a smooth, shocked tone. Immediately, Glen bared his teeth like an animal and leaped up into a tree, Allanon quickly landing on his back while the other two fanned out, murderous intensity shadowing their faces. The abra telekinetically moved Enya's body out of the road and behind the screen of trees. Glen climbed through the branches like a spider, having already determined the bullet's trajectory and headed that way.

Fifty yards away, a loud and guttural "CHUUUU!!" shredded the bright air and a blinding flash of electricity incinerated a patch of trees, leaving nothing but the smell of vaporized sap and burning flesh to sift in with the sensation that night had suddenly fallen. Glen dropped down and sprinted to the site of the damage, hardly even noticing as trees on the other side of the road shook with sounds like a lawnmower, the cacophony nearly drowning out the scream of Ambrosia's victim. Nearly.

As Glen neared the site of the explosion, he put his hand over his mouth to avoid inhaling the odors in the air and slowed to a fast walk, taking in the destruction without expression, fully ignoring the looks he was getting from the rare passing driver. A bare-chested, heavily scarred man wearing an abra and inspecting scattered fires apparently caused by an incensed raichu is bound to draw attention, but no one stopped.

Four trees had been reduced to smoldering trunks, ashes and smoke swirling in the wind, ozone making the air almost unbreathable. Synapse was standing on his hind legs, panting heavily and glaring at a black, man-sized rag doll that was once a recognizable human being. A warped shotgun lay in its claw-like hands where it reposed almost peacefully against a long bit of charcoal that had once been a pine tree. Glen touched the chu's shoulder and motioned to him to turn around so they could survey Amber's handiwork.

They crossed the road and saw the saur heaving and growling at a smear of blood on the ground. A tree was barely supported by its close-grown brethren nearby. A mostly-intact montage of meat and bone lay among the blood, covered in a fine layer of powdered poisons. One arm was missing, probably deep in the woods. Glen still just looked on with cold fury. He had known his pokémon were capable of dealing out this kind of punishment. And he would be leaving these two corpses here, as reminders that he was not to be screwed with. He whispered some instructions to Amber, then cocked an ear, listening for others. It seemed unlikely that there would be just two snipers.

A bullet stopped beside his head, still spinning from the chamber. Glen glared at it and watched it drop to the ground. He and Al turned in the direction it had come from as seven more met the shield Allanon had set up around them. The sounds and smell of fear could be heard as sniper rifles were reloaded. Al grunted a little, and two hapless men were suddenly hurtling out of the treeline, guns dropping from their hands as they slammed face-first into the ground, struggling to rise. Glen knelt down next to them, whispered another order to Synapse, and turned his focus on the two men while the chu ran off. The steady impacts of wood on flesh could be heard from Amber's direction. Not much later, a sound like a blowtorch was issuing from the other side of the road, which had emptied of cars. It was before lunch, so traffic would be scarce.

Letting the ambience go on for a moment while Allanon passively kept the captives' lungs from inflating too fully, Glen pulled out his knife and looked at one of them. This one had short, red hair and bright, blue eyes that were filled with the fear of God, at the moment. His face was blocky and freckled, but fit. These were higher-quality goons than the first six had been; the haircut belied a military background. In a voice reserved generally for funeral processions, Glen said, "You won't live to see the sun set, today. Which makes you the lucky one. Because you don't have to see what Al here is going to do to you."

Their cameras are still on.

"And I want the people who are watching me to understand exactly what is going on, here." He toyed with the blade, very close to the red-head's face, which was quivering and starting to host a trickle of tears.

"Don't kill him!" shouted the other. He was of similar complexion, but with darker, brown hair and the same blue eyes. His face was wider, his chin stronger; he was the older brother. "Kill me instead!"

"No!" the other whispered fiercely. "Don't be a fucking hero!"

"So you're brothers? And you think that I'm really the bad guy," Glen mused. "Makes this even more fun for me. You see, I am not what you're used to." His hat partially shaded his eyes. He seemed perfectly calm; far from the fury of a moment ago. It was decidedly more frightening. "You're used to little up-starts who want to take on an organization because it hurt them some way when they were little. But me? Oh, no." He chuckled softly. "You're not ready for me. I can tell. But that's enough monologueing. I want you," he said to the older one, "to see of what I'm capable, and then report it to your bosses in person. Maybe it will teach them not to fuck with me. Maybe it will tell them that if they don't get Zach back to me, I am going to rain on their corrupt little asses like a hurricane. They will burn, and cry, and scream, and beg for mercy that they will not get if that little boy is harmed. Most of all, I want them to know that if they keep fucking with me, I will get even more creative with their cannon fodder jackasses than I have today. I will put your heads on stakes outside of your mothers' homes. I will gut you and crucify you on your fathers' bedroom doors. I know ways to kill people that take days, if not weeks, of shrieking agony; things they don't put in horror flicks because they still want to attract audiences." By the end, he was looking at the one he had chosen to live with a darkness witnessed often in graveyards under a new moon.

"So," he said by way of conclusion, somewhat lightly, "say goodbye to your brother."

"NO!" they screamed, but Allanon snapped the younger one's neck and was already busy contorting his body with sickening crunches and cracks. Glen roughly rolled the living one onto his back and slashed open his shirt, then began carving in the man's chest with his knife while the victim bellowed, held down by Allanon's heavy hand.

He didn't smile while he did it. He treated this like a masterpiece-to-be, putting in flourishes and little, spiralling tails, slowly ensuring that the man felt every little twist of his artistic side. He shuddered in what appeared to be pleasure whenever the man screamed again. When he was done, he booted the human-turned-canvas in the ribs and commanded, "Get up. Go back. Tell them anything. But it'll be best for you if you just tell them the sick and twisted truth." He flicked his gaze over to where the brother had been laid, limbs at crazed angles, eyes staring and mouth open in a horrific scream, his body in the shape of an ‘R' and his chest psychically stamped with Enya's name, in a font that matched the one bleeding over the older one's chest, that matched the pattern of seeds sunk into the remains of Amber's victim, that matched the cracked, blackened lines now adorning the bleached skull of Syn's prey.

The Rocketeer ran, then, weeping and shaking, and the four walked back to Enya.

She was sprawled gently in the spare grass beneath the canopy, the sunlight scattered on her face like grain. Her chest wasn't moving under the stained uniform. She was beautiful in death, her bright hair in a tremendous arc around her head. Glen knelt by her, trailing one finger across her smooth features. He abruptly withdrew the hand and sneered.

"Why do I care?" he fumed. "I knew her for a day. She got sucked in by those jackasses. She doesn't deserve me. She doesn't deserve life." He was clearly speaking to convince himself and stood up, pacing and gesturing violently, but careful not to touch her. "Just some stupid whore to a stupid organization. Doesn't matter. One life in billions. Doesn't matter." But she was beautiful. "Damn it!"

Allanon's voice, unexpectedly timid, snaked its way into his mind. Glen, I... I'm sorry.

"Sorry? You're sorry? Why? Why are you sorry? Did you shoot her?"

No, but... if I had evolved...

Glen snatched the creature off his shoulders and set him on the ground, kneeling again to be eye level with him, and put a finger in his face. "Don't give me that shit. Don't you dare. You didn't do this. You're not a some fuck-twit murderer with a badger up his ass. You. Are innocent."

But... I can...

"You can what? Necromance her? Didn't we just talk about this, recently? Nothing can bring something back to life. We can put things into comas, resuscitate drowning victims, even defibrilate stopped hearts, but there is nothing you can do once she's dead, and there was nothing you could have done to keep her alive." He was both venting his anger and, in a volcanic manner, attempting to reassure his abra. He calmed himself down for long enough to say firmly, "Am I clear?" He was veritably foaming at the mouth, but his features were like granite. He would not have one of his pokémon take the blame for this. Ambrosia nuzzled up against his side, as did Syn, while his breathing slowed. "Now, we're headed to the mountains, after we bury her. Let's do it by the river." He swallowed once, and his voice shook. Damn it. Tears for a whore.

I'll... I'll carry her, Glen. Please? Let me... do something. The abra's expressionless face was frought with sorrow and frustration. I'm supposed to be the one able to keep an eye out for people...

"Ivy! Saur!" _"Oh, don't be a dumbass, dumbass! If one of us is to blame for this, all of us are. If you think you should have had your psychic field up, then Syn should have had a magnetic one up and Glen should have tackled her as she went into the road, or I should have grabbed her before she could go. What is with you all of a sudden?"

I just..._

"He's right. I'll carry her. You rest; I know you're all tired from that." It was true; all three pokémon were exhausted from the tremendous power they had exerted in their fury. It was why Glen generally had them act with total calm in battle. He knew how quickly they could expend themselves, otherwise. He had always been proud of their power.

With that, Glen moved to the body and lifted her. She was surprisingly light in his arms, and delicate. She was still warm, but he could feel the heat quickly radiating from her. "We are going to rip those people apart. For her; for Zach. Even for Rachel. They will suffer, and they will die." For a long time, Glen had wanted revenge on Pokénomics for ruining his career. He had wanted to get into their laboratories and find the whole truth behind the so-called "eevee" experiments. It wasn't until now, though, that he had really wanted to kill anyone. Sure, he had done murder before; it was a part of having gangs sent after him to remind him that Pokénomics was watching him every time he hit a major city. It was a part of defending himself from the ones who thought they could take advantage of him and his pokémon in dark alleys. It was a part of hating every last one of them for the single one of them who slhivved a waitress who tried to protect him, and for the dozens who jeered at him in the next six successive attacks for the way he reacted. It was a part of making the world a cleaner place to live by cremating the trash that soiled it.

The pokémon nodded and Al teleported himself to the straps on Glen's back. The abra wasn't convinced, even if the others were. As they walked into the forest, he knew he could have done something. Maybe not to prevent it, but certainly to fix it once it was done. He was sure. There was nothing a psychic pokémon could not do. There was nothing he could not do. Even death was not a boundary.

Not for him.

After delivering the boy, Rachel made her way back to the last campsite they had been at. She had been granted a new pokédex (which she had immediately shut off, never to be opened until she met Glen again), and been given a fifth her reward. She remembered the encounter with a growl.

"But I brought you the boy! Gimme my money."

"Status quo has changed. You made some suspicious movements while in the field. Glen Terrian is still alive. I want you to find him and kill him. If you don't, you won't get your money, and if you do anything that does not directly lead to his death, we will hunt you down and make you watch us kill your parents. That's as simple as it is." The arcanine by the man's side had growled threateningly at her, but she had bared her teeth right back at it and fingered her one pokéball nervously. It was company custom: inside the walls of the compound, only one pokéball was allowed per human being. Why people weren't stripped of all pokéballs was not certain, but Rachel was convinced it had something to do with a disgustingly fake sense of honor.

"Don't screw with me," she had snarled. "I'm a mercenary, not an employee. We had a deal. A written contract." She fished it out of Glen's bag, where she had put it. The arcanine had coughed and immolated the document, making her drop it with a yelp and suck her finger.

"Your use of the past tense amuses me," the man had chuckled.

"Bastard!" Her teeth and fists had clenched as she removed her hand, but she knew that even Ceres didn't stand a chance against the forces that would be levelled against her. She had to follow this man's instructions. Her decision was made, then, but Ceres had taught her a thing or two. She had already walled up her mind through a series of mental exercises, so the psychic informants scattered around wouldn't get wind of her plan.

"I'm giving you a new pokédex. This time, if you decide to use it as a last-ditch effort, make sure it works, hmm? Now get out of here. You can get your money from Van at the front desk."

The money was now rolled in a wad and stuffed in her pockets. Pokénomics had confiscated Glen's shoulder bag and all of the materials in it were scattered on the floor of some kind of examination room. Rachel was sure they would know everything he knew. She had not seen the firebomb that went off in that room, the one that had been compressed in a shampoo bottle and whose timer had been started the instant it no longer felt sufficient pressure, paused the countdown once put back in the bag, and started up again in the room. It had burned every paper and made recovering any information in the pokédexes an ordeal that would take weeks.

Now, she planned on finding him and getting the money transferred to her parents' bank accounts. She knew he was headed to the mountains, but she wanted to see if he was okay. At the tree she had left him under, there were bloodstains, but not many. The van and bodies nearby... there was one fewer body. She gasped as she realized this and ran over to the battle scene, ignoring the noisomeness that rose up in the heat of the day. "Fan out. Protective formation. One was still alive." Immediately hearing the tension in her voice, they made a triangle around her, facing out as she tried to read the battleground.

In the windy silence that breathed against her back, she scanned the earth. "Glen came over... looks like he squatted for a while. He talked to..." She saw a piece of red hair. "Enya." Something fluttered briefly in her stomach. She ignored it and continued. "He managed to get her up. Two pairs of human footprints leading away." She looked in the direction they went. "If she was walking, he swayed her to his side. Evenly spaced... he wasn't leading her. I think we're safe."

They all relaxed. A feather blew into Rachel's long hair. She snatched it off her ear. "Oh, right..." she murmured, getting up. "That fearow... should probably bury that." They all wandered to where it should have been, but Rachel was forced to let out a disappointed sigh. Some animal had come along and dragged it off somewhere. And since it had bled out before being dragged, there was no blood trail. It was a little strange that even the head was gone, but a small scattering of feathers had not yet been carried off by the wind. Something must have been hungry. "Oh, well. No reason to waste time following footsteps. Let's head to Arget; I'm pretty sure that was his goal, before the mountains. Ceres, do you know a good route to teleport us there?"

The hypno nodded sagely. I do. I'm proud of you, Rachel. This is the right decision.

She harrumphed. "We'll see about that. He's already forgotten about me and picked up some floozy, the scoundrel. Heracles, Demetre?" They nodded, and she put them in their pokéballs. A moment later, the scene was as deserted as it had been seconds ago. Brown feathers drifted against the wind, twirling through their tortuous path from a site of death, escaping, escaping what should not have happened.

Evening flew on its great wings over the sky, silently draining the sun away behind the gossamer, star-struck feathers of a lunar angel. As the diurnal world drifted away, creatures of the night amplified their songs, creaking and calling out their superiority; among the hosts of species, understanding was scarce. A cold wind bolstered the evening angel's flight, giving to her wings a beautiful, hair-raising ethereality that drenched the world in mute, numb regret.

At the gates to the city, Glen looked up at the sound of a crack. The gray stone, broken in places for the roads, was only a few feet high, but that was still the platform Ceres and Rachel had chosen as their dais. Glen glared up at them. Again, it was a relatively quiet time, after the rush home from work and before parties had begun. The still-pale moon looked down on the two of them as they stared at one another, Glen in Rachel's shadow. Blue lights from police cars a mile away blinked in the fleeing light. The stone sucked in the lunar orb's cold countenance, rising up out of the earth as though to say, "Stop! We may be a friendly town, but we are not you, and you are not us." There was not a fault to be seen; the people of Arget respected their independence and held it dear to them.

Without a sound or an expression, Glen snatched Rachel's leg and yanked her down to the ground. She flung her pokéballs out with a yelp, but Amber caught them in his vines and held them closed. The raichu zapped Ceres just enough to paralyze her, and Allanon threw her to the earth, as well. Wordlessly, Glen twisted the girl's arms behind her back, immobilizing her and scanning the roads and woods around the walls. If neither of them had been shot yet, they weren't going to be.

Once he was certain of this, he seemed to shake for a little bit, then abruptly broke into a grin. "You're back!" he chirped.

"Ow. Yes, I'm back. Thanks for the welcome." Her voice shook from the sudden adrenaline and she didn't dare ask him to let her up. By all rights, he should have killed her.

"No problem! How's Zach?"

She winced, both from the extra pressure he put on her as he asked and from the fact that "I don't know. They took him off somewhere. They took your stuff, too." She closed her eyes, facing the dirt. "I'm sorry."

"No biggie. You get paid?" She was afraid, because she couldn't see his face. Was he smiling? His words said he was, but his tone was unreadable.

She nodded, her ears turning a bright color of red. "Not all of it, though. They want me to kill you before I get the rest."

"Not doing a great job of that, are you?" He sighed and looked at Amber. "They don't get it, do they? That guy must not have gotten back to them, yet. But they should have the video feed..."

She opened an eye, trying to look over her shoulder. "What are you talking about?"

Glen giggled. The sound made every muscle in Rachel's body tense up in terror of what he may have done. "They murdered one of their own because I got her on my side, so we murdered the hell out of some of theirs and sent back a messenger."

"So Enya's dead..."

"Yep. Dead and buried. It happens, I've heard, to the best of us." He flicked the subject away like a crumb on his shoulder. "What are you doing here? Obviously not trying to kill me, or at least not trying very hard. You must not have slept very well. I haven't, either. I woke up with a pretty nasty headache, actually."

She didn't respond to his goading. "Couldn't sleep. Kept dreaming of that stupid bird." Her face blanked at the memory of those dreams. They had not been pleasant.

"Ah. I would suggest not investigating what those cops are up to, then. Might make you squeamish." He finally got off her and looked her in the eyes. His own were as smiling as his face. He looked like a little boy. "Wanna go to the mountains?"

She pulled herself up into a sitting position beneath the low city walls and met his gaze, trying to ignore the urge to massage her sore shoulders. He was too hard to read, now. He had been strange before, but... now that she had betrayed him, the little boy in his smile, the hardened criminal in his arms, and the wild animal in his eyes were all lobbying for recognition by her psyche. "I'll follow you anywhere, Glen. I made a mistake. I know I did. I want to know why my brother is dead. I want to save Zach."

There was a pause, as the smile broke into uncertain consideration. She was hurt, but she knew she deserved it. He had trusted her. Whether or not she would ever get that trust back would be in the air forever. "How's his dad?" Glen asked, his face dark and shadowed as he turned away.

She hesitated. "Dead."

There was a second pause, full of a rippling silence. It was a moment, in honor of him. The man was a martyr and had tried to be a savior, but been unable to fully redeem himself in the end. Maybe they could do that for him. Glen licked his lips, wetting them. "He was going to die, anyway."

Rachel sighed. "I know. Doesn't mean I like it."

"Lots of people are dying over this," he said quietly, with somber mien.

It's not your fault, Allanon shot fiercely before Glen could let his thoughts travel any farther down that path. _Be a savior. You can't do it with that kind of baggage.

He's right,_

Ceres chimed in. The two of you must loose such heavy burdens and free your hearts.

Glen smirked beneath his grimace. "Thanks for the poetics, witch. Let her up, Al." He gave the two of them one more cautious, calculating glance. "I think we can trust them. This time." Ceres slowly stood and bowed to Glen in gratitude. Glen also stood, and Rachel with him. Amber gave her the pokéballs back and she let the other two out. "We should go." He touched Allanon's head and brought thoughts of searching Rachel for microphones and other chips to the forefront of his mind. A few seconds of awkward staring and a satisfying sanguination of Rachel's face later, he heard from the Abra, She has a pokédex and she's almost certain there are wires in her clothing. She also apologizes profusely for losing your bag.

Glen smiled mischievously. "I got some funds off the Rocketeers; you go do what you need to with your money once we're there." There was so much he wanted to say, but since Pokénomics was doing a constant psych evaluation on her, trying as hard as he was to determine whether or not she was acting through whatever means possible, he held back. He wanted to yell at her, to remind her how much of his life was in that bag, even if he had employed counter-intelligence maneuvers. He wanted to tell her how stupid she was.

But he didn't, because he knew that it wasn't what she needed to hear. She needed to be totally convinced that he was in the right, so that she would help him get in that complex and get that little boy. And, of course, so he could experiment on her pokémon. That was secondary, though.

They didn't plan to rest in the city except for long enough for Rachel to buy entirely new clothes and Glen to start restocking his provisions and get a shirt, meaning they stayed mostly in the downtown area. He hadn't been in public so long, he had forgotten that just because he was getting stares did not mean he was an incredibly attractive human being. Granted, the hat/abra combination was intriguing, but in a society where shirts have evolved as daily garb and shirtlessness is actually immediately considered barbaric, primal, and sexual on strange, strange levels of the human psyche, he was drawing far more attention than he wanted. Most importantly, Glen had totally forgotten the "No shirt, no shoes, no service" signs on nearly every store.

This led to his adopting several tactics. First, he tried having Allanon project the illusion of a shirt over him. There were two problems with this. First, most stores are equipped with a Mr. Mime or three who start hooting uproariously when they detect psychic activity, to prevent theft. One would think that a pokémon would be relatively easy to reason with, but these Mr. Mimes were hired usually specifically for their unbridled singlemindedness. Second, Allanon passed out from the effort required to deceive that many people after just two minutes, especially considering how little he had slept on the way there. Glen sprinted out of the first establishment they went to with bright, red, Mr. Mime handprints on his torso.

Next, he handed Synapse a fifty dollar bill and told him to go buy a tee shirt. The first time, this was nearly successful except that at the last moment, the store's manager came in and snapped his underling out of her braindead stare at Syn's sickeningly cute performance trying to get the shirt in question on the counter. The chu hopped away from an incoming flyswatter with a squeak and a barely-restrained attempt to shock the man into complacency. At the next store, the girl at the counter was laughing so hard, she couldn't ring up the purchase. Syn almost zapped her cash register to death, but Amber ran in and snatched him with vines, hauling the incensed, squeaking animal as fast as he could past a dozen guffawing customers.

After briefly considering getting Amber to just gas an entire shop so he could go in and steal the merchandise, Glen bumped into Rachel, who had managed to get herself in the skimpiest outfit she possibly could, which meant that the furiously blushing Syn had to be put away in his pokéball to avoid public humiliation. He pulled her into an alley and whispered irritatedly, "You just incapacitated my only chace at getting people to look at me without giving me the 'what a sexy, hot, jackass that guy is!' smile!"

"Just because your rat is horny for me is no reason to make a scene!" she shot back just as fiercely, slapping his hands away. "You need clothes? I'll buy you clothes." She grinned. "I'm your only hope."

"I wouldn't trust you to buy me a loaf of bread, woman." He fixed her with the angriest stare he could come up with at the moment. "But you're right. Here's fifty bucks. If I don't have tee shirts in my hands in the next fifteen minutes, I'm letting Syn out of his pokéball when you're off watch tonight."

Her grin cracked and vanished as she heard that last. "You are a sick bastard." She took the money, flicked her head around to hit his face with her hair, and stalked off. Glen sat down against the wall of the alley, jerked as though he had been knocked to the side, and stabbed his knife through the hand that had just tried to put a dagger through his heart. He sighed as he pulled slowly towards him, seemingly unaware of the muffled grunts of pain coming from the dark end of the alleyway. "You people just don't ever learn, do you?" With a twisted smirk, he disappeared into the alley's mouth.

Fifteen minutes later:

Was it worth it?

"I thought you were asleep," Glen mumbled from where he sat by the wall. "What do you mean, this ti-? Oh, no." His jaw dropped as he saw with what Rachel was approaching him. There was only one shirt, but it had clearly cost the entirety of what he had given her. The shirt would have dimmed rainbows. Hummingbirds would have tried to mate with it. It would have illuminated black holes.

But it was silk. Rachel looked him dead in the eyes and spoke with the same voice she would use to negotiate with a terrorist. "There's a Poké-Spa two blocks away from here. I will pay for all six of our pokémon to get their best treatment if you agree to wear this for the next six days."

He narrowed his eyes and snatched at the shirt, ignoring Amber's quickly-voiced support of her offer. "Any significance to six days' humiliation?" He started removing his various trappings so he could don the shirt. A druggie shiftily made his way by them and entered the alleyway. Glen glanced at him and started shifting closer to the street.

"One hundred forty-four hours. One gross." She stuck her tongue out at him playfully.

"Jerk-face." It was stupid to put on something this brightly-colored.

Glen, it's really retarded to put on something that bright while you're-

He turned to the abra, who was now on the ground, with pokéball in hand. "It's more likely that they actually won't see me while wearing this. They'll be looking for someone who's trying to blend in. See how courteous she's being? Now get in the pokéball so I can take the lot of you to the spa. You know you want it, and I know you deserve it." Something in his eyes would have made Allanon blanch, if his skin had been a paler color to begin with. Glen was not nearly as normal as he was trying to be. But as long as he was in control, Al was happy.

Fine. But I'm not getting in that private hell; you know perfectly well that you can carry me there. I need sleep.

Glen rolled his eyes, but after donning the shirt and suddenly sucking all attention within thirty feet to himself, he put the carrier back on and complied. Amber trundled along behind the two humans as they made their way across the street, laughing at Glen's reddening cheeks as he went. The smells and sounds of city life surrounded them all, yellow lighting where it wasn't neon illuminating black asphalt and unforgiving concrete, all fed through a wash of vivacity and coming out clean on the other side, save for the stains - sweat, semen, birth, and blood - that are never purged from the woven fabric of a human life.

Enya was dead.

Glen was not the same.

"Confirm: units Blackrock and Grimstripe are dead."

The druggie's horror-stricken screams into their microphones as he found their bodies was proof enough of that. It was good to hear an honest scream after the silent gurgling that had come out of the agents and the silent, cold grin from their killer. "Affirmative."

"Confirm: targets are headed to the Poké-Spa."

"Affirmative. Agent left her microphones in the bag. Allegiance still uncertain. Should we terminate her, as well?"

A sinister grin upended a malicious scowl. "Eliminate her pokémon. Make her go through with this kill herself. Units Nightmare and Deathswitch, close on all six targets. Codename Kitsune is primary target. Codename Cleo secondary."

"Affirmative, sir." "Affirmative, sir."

A click sounded as the communication link was switched off. A fat face sneered at a thin face. "Kitsune and Cleo? You're letting your sense of humor into things again. Is he that much of a challenge?"

A dark hand stroked gently across the orange fur that breathed calmly beneath it. "I suppose he is. I'm finally enjoying myself. The girl was beginning to bore me. But this?" He gestured calmly at a computer screen filled with reports and photographs of the scene a mile outside of Arget City. "This is a side of him I only dreamed of bringing out those years ago."

Rolls of sagging, pusillanimous skin crinkled around beady eyes. "You're not suggesting..."

"Fuck off." As delicate as the fingers on the flaming fur. "I'll send you the financial report eventually. We may be experiencing losses now, but if science continues to progress, you can be assured of your... magnificent retirement. Faith, man."

The fat man jiggled once, startled, then snapped his fingers with timorous offense and disappeared. Thin lips parted in a sigh, then were filled by the glass of a champaigne flute. "I should actually propose the toast first, shouldn't I, Cinder?" he murmured. The animal at his side growled approvingly. A thin, strong hand in a trim, black sleeve lifted the vessel of effervescing gold to the largest picture on his display. "To you, Mr. Terrian." He chuckled before sipping again. Muted by the thick, scarlet carpet and the luscious, gold-and-red wallpaper, hidden slightly amidst the soft crackle of the fireplace, the deep, percussive laughs sounded almost like a heartbeat, struggling anew to be heard amidst the noise of feasting and the through barriers of beauty.

"Sometimes, I feel as though I may have made a mistake, Cinder," he mused. "If I had just hired him... but, the Rocketeers always have upstarts and traitors to feed him. No need to keep talent like that caged." The tremendous dog let out a contented sigh and settled itself. "I just hope he doesn't let his guard down." The fire merrily burned, at once greedy and patient as it waited for each successive layer of wood to be stripped away until at last it died with its final victim and smoldered amongst the scattered ashes of an oak.