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[17:55 - 30 July - Tamorna, Nocet]

Although by themselves they could have gotten there faster, the recall drones' rotary engines were relatively slow; so it took well over an hour before they reached what was left of Tamorna.

"Remind me why we couldn't have just dragged these along with us?" asked Dex over the radio.

"Because they weren't designed to go as fast as you two can. You would have literally ripped their wings off," replied Flint, sounding a little disgruntled as the wet cool clouds made his tail-flame flicker. He always found being carried everywhere by these two cats a little undignified, but his steadfast wish to hold off his evolution until after this war meant he wouldn't be getting wings of his own any time soon.

As they broke through the cloud layer, the charmeleon tapped a little control on the side of his helmet. His magnification lenses clicked down and let him see the scope of what had happened. There was smoke and flickering flame, and melting pools of ice. The ground was torn up everywhere.

It was clear from the pattern of the attacks that Rocket had targeted trainers first, knocking out the command structure and causing confusion. Pokémorphs in the battle groups had coped better than pokémon in returning fire, as expected, but in the end they had all just been overwhelmed.

"Screw the other mission, they should have sent us on this one," the charmeleon growled as they skirted the buildings, looking for a good place to set down.

"I'm still getting plenty of yellow tags, they'll be okay," said Seraph, ever the dog looking for a silver lining as she reviewed the incoming data being scanned by the recall drones. For the most part however red tag markers, indicating a loss of vital signs detection by the human or pokémorph's under-suit or the pokémon's collar, had filled her display. Splashed here and there were more positive yellow markers indicating a loss of energy but not heartbeat, the fainted or injured; and dotted about rarely were just a couple of green markers that indicated awake and still active. In Flint's opinion, it was a silver lining only microns thick.

"Start picking them up, looks like we don't have any humans to evac," ordered Pebble, his voice was grim and flat. Flint knew the cat was an empathic creature. Their species had an affinity that tied to every species of pokémon and every being on the planet, and right now he was putting on a brave face to help try and reassure them all. If he could do it, then the rest of them could do it too.

"J, set down and find the wartortle. He went ahead towards the enemy's side. Be careful."

The rattata nodded his green helmet to Pebble and the mew released him from his telekinetic grasp, dropping him a good 50 feet. With just a few seconds to spare, the little keyring pokémon hanging from his back plate glowed and a Protect field spread across the armour as it too pressured to absorb the impact with a soft thump. The rodent tucked into a roll and then set off at a blur as he himself dashed into cover and shadows with a Quick Attack, disappearing from view.

"Ready to go," announced the lucario as she and Mortimer finished plotting a route for the recall devices to follow, a route would hopefully grab everyone still alive without putting the devices themselves in too much danger. Flint brought up his arm and took a look at the route, there weren't any obstructions she hadn't noticed either. He gave a thumbs up to the plan.

Pebble gave a nod again and stood ready as Seraph tapped a little holographic control on her wrist and red beams of light began to shoot from emitters on the hovering drones, six at time they targeted pokémon and pokémorphs on the ground and enveloped them in dematerialisation beams. The fallen heroes vanished in and were drawn up in to the devices from which a set of transmitter aerials deployed and they began to upload the captured patterns safely back to the base.

For a moment, Flint considered that there might not actually be much for him to do on this mission. The fight was well over and it seemed even Rocket had given up and retreated as well. Or so he'd thought, right up to the point that a glint of light in the reflection of frozen ice caught his eye as it was flying towards them. "Action!" he screamed across the radio, as razor sharpened leaves and a hailstorm of ice particles shot towards them all and targeted the drones.

In a flash of light, Dex was already there, glowing with an angry red halo of light as he simply held up his paw and the projectiles pancaked against an invisible force field. The magneton in his suit disengaged and moved between the mewtwo and the barrier, letting off a powerful sound blast that a quick temporary muting of their suit microphones censored out as the hail and leaf storm stopped.

"You guys have seriously pissed us off today and now you're not even letting us pick up our dead?! Oh I have had it!" snarled the cat as it shot down towards the source of the incoming fire, behind a wall of smoke.

Flint watched as flashes of light, snarls and screams came from behind the smoky wall. Watching Dex fight was like watching a raging storm, nothing could stop him. He glanced over and Pebble had done the opposite, looking away from the action below and floating close to Seraph. He could see a faint glow around the back of her helmet as she was watching for the auras of those around them.

She reached up and pulled off her helmet, shaking out those glowing dreadlocks as she wanted to speak off the radio. "You should stop him, he's... ripping them apart down there," she shuddered.

"Much as I dislike it, better he takes it out on them than us," replied Pebble, having also pulled his helmet free, the breeze up where they floated blowing his fluffy maroon hair. "Plus after all this here, I'm inclined to say they deserve it."

Flint watched Pebble and the sway in his tail; unlike the lucario he wasn't even slightly nervous about the mewtwo's behaviour.

The newer mewtwo and their morphs that had been made under the care of the League had had their genetic profile lightly tweaked from the original mewtwo commissioned by Rocket nearly a two decades ago. While it had been agreed it was right to grow this new species so mewtwo could exist self-sustaining just as Porygon and other human influenced pokémon had before it; maybe it would be wise to reduce the native aggressive tendencies that had been deliberately put in place by Rocket genetic engineers.

The result, combined with a much kinder childhood, meant a whole new breed of Mewtwo that, like the Mew before them, were far calmer individuals. Still, now and then, nature rolled some dice and a few still were natively more hot headed and volatile. Dex was one of them.

"Don't you worry he's going to do that anyway some day?" she said as she monitored the recall devices. Pebble didn't get a chance to reply as from out of the smoke Dex rose like a demon out of hell, carrying with him two humans dressed in dark uniforms, who hung barely still conscious in his grasp as he actually held them with his paws by the scruffs of their shirts.

"Do we need them?" he asked, panting in his breath as the other two slipped their helmets back on.

"Just get rid of them," ordered Pebble as he cast Dex a look.

There was a long pause as the two cats stared each other down, and Flint exchanged a nervous glance with Seraph as they both knew what was happening. Left out of the loop as for all they knew, a flaming argument was taking place between the two psychics over exactly what would happen to the lackeys.

After what seemed like forever, the Mewtwo finally let go. The screaming Rocket trainers fell till they were inches away from hitting the ground before a flash of light surrounded them and they vanished. The mewtwo looked towards the cliff top and the coast.

"Hopefully they can swim," he remarked callously and then zipped away. "Flint, with me," came over the radio as a red glow enveloped the black charmeleon and the two of them set off to follow and protect the second recall drone. Now was maybe not the best time to argue.

---

J checked his compass and looked around him. Burned books lay around his feet as he stood in what he now realised was the ruins of the library. He tapped the little panel on his arm and grumbled to himself as the radio signal he had been trying to home-in on had cut out again.

There was a jingling on his back. <Come on silly ratty, use your nose!>

The rattata glanced over his shoulder. "Well, keep an eye out for me!" he told Klep as he reached up and unclasped his helmet.

<Always do!> it jingled in reply as with a little hiss and a pop he shook his ears and whiskers out from under the protective plastic and glass and took a deep inhale of his surroundings.

Their suits' air supplies were filtered for obvious reasons. Rocket loved to use poison-types and being immune through technology to poison gas attacks was a major plus. But to the tracker rat, sometimes the only thing he had to go on was that sense of smell.

There was smoke, charcoal, burnt flesh, very unpleasant. He could taste the sea too, that was unchanged from how he remembered it, a salty breeze that even now was helping to clear some of the nastiest scents from the air in the ensuing calm after battle. He sniffed about, anything more... specific, more unusual... There. He could almost taste it, a strange burnt electronics scent, ozone and a certain flavour that could only be a water-type reptile.

With a quick click and hiss he returned his helmet back in place and sprinted in the direction his nose had told him to go, the jingling behind him going quiet as his klefki companion took a firmer grip of its keys so not to break his silent approach.

As he got closer to where he thought Crash might be, his tracker flickered in to life again and he paused to check it, and what he saw made him stop still. He was... right on top of him? A few possibilities as to what this meant crossed his mind before he felt a shudder below his feet, the rattata wincing as the ground gave way and with a tumbling smash of broken masonry he landed in a heap.

His ears flicked inside his helmet as out of the gloom a bloodied blue scaled paw extended to his half-buried armoured one.

"So which one of us was the cavalry again?" asked the turtle.

---

Pebble had finally been able to relax from the tension of their first encounter as things seemed quiet for now. The drones continued the work of recalling those morphs and pokémon still alive and transmitting them home. Eventually Dex and Flint had circled back around as the team moved towards the fallen front lines where they'd run head to head with Rocket forces.

The level of destruction pokémon and pokémorphs could wreak when not constrained to the rules of sport or natural law was terrifying, and in some cases nothing but their suit systems could tell what species some of the bodies had been. A sense of regret sat heavily in the mew morph's mind.

A radio call from J cut through the stony silence the team had kept.

"Pebble, I've found the wartortle, his name is Crash. He's found something down here."

"What is it?" asked the mew.

"Some intact computers that weren't wiped or destroyed. They're still on Rocket's network. Maybe Flint or Seraph could take a look?"

This was good news; if Rocket retreated they generally self-destructed or erased anything that could help anyone trying to work out their plans. This was a big find.

"Definitely, and send Crash back to us, we can recall him back to base," Pebble replied and gave a nod to Seraph. "Head down there, take Flint with you."

The charmeleon and lucario acknowledged and dropped to the ground, sprinting across the terrain as the Mew floated up to the Mewtwo, laying a hand on his shoulder.

We need to stay alert but, try to keep calm. We'll recover from this, he thought to him.

This is me calm, replied Dex, trust me, nothing calms me more than watching some of those conniving, despicable Rocket bastards getting... what?

The mewtwo's train of thought derailed when he saw Pebble's eyes going wide behind the glass of his visor. The mew suddenly charged at him and Pebble pushed aside the confused Mewtwo as he threw up his arms, and a clear blue bubble enveloped him just before a massive explosion erupted around him, blowing the red tailed cat away.

Pebble shook himself out, he was still floating and unharmed but his ears were ringing. His bubble had popped as it had taken the force of the blast, shrapnel from some kind of missile falling to the ground below. "Where did that come from?" he called out, louder than he really needed to, but he could barely hear his own voice.

An image of Zero appeared in his HUD. "27 degrees northwest Commander! Projectile came too fast for suit systems to register initially; I am recalibrating the sensors now!" chirped the porygon-z.

"I can't sense anyone that way, not even pokémon, it's just empty ocean! Can you?" asked Dex.

"Negative," replied Pebble and kicked away in the air, "but I have a theory as to what." He just rather hoped he was wrong.

Dex dusted himself off and was about to follow when he heard a voice from below.

"What in sweet hell on earth was that?!" It was the wartortle.

"Trouble, tuck your head in, you're coming too," shouted down the mewtwo as a red glow enveloped the water-type and yanked him off the ground with a yelp, and the pair set off after the mew.

---

Homing in on the stronger signal from J's suit, it didn't take as long for Seraph and Flint to find the collapsed entrance to the sewers and scramble down to find the rattata. Emergency lights still flickered every few feet and Flint's tail-flame helped provide a good enough light to see by.

"So what exactly did you find?" the lucario asked as they plodded through what appeared to be nothing more than the ancient sewer system. The jackal found herself glad yet again for their suit's air filters.

"Hold on, it's just around here," replied the rattata as he pushed past a metal hatchway and into a room just off the main sewers.

It was filled with pipes and valves. Most looked decades old, clearly originally just a nexus point for the fresh water system, so nothing especially interesting. At the back of the room though, brickwork had been stripped away and a crude tunnel had been dug into the wall beyond. Cables with light bulbs hung from hooks in the roof and the whirr of a generator motor echoed from up ahead.

When they made their way in to the next chamber, there was the sight of broken electronics everywhere. Seraph had been part of several pokémorph and human teams prior to joining 151 who had been sent in to try and recover data from Rocket strongholds. Normally even a few scraps of text in those were considered worth hours of effort.

The room here didn't match the rooms she'd been in before. There was a common protocol the Team followed when clearing a base to make sure everything had been gotten rid of. Here it seemed something had surprised them or just maybe they'd been caught off guard with just how many and how quickly the league had attacked, so in the mutual destruction, things had been missed.

J reached down to the floor and, digging through a stack of laptops, he brought up one where a blinking light still pulsed on one side. "Here, I spotted this light, it looks like the missed one."

Seraph's eyes went wide and she quickly pulled it open and drew a data cable from a reel on her suit, connecting it to the machine as it woke up back up and displayed a dark unassuming login prompt. "Oh my goodness," she exclaimed. "Mortimer, quickly bring up the security pack. We might not have long if they realise this box is still live."

<Of course madam,> came a softly haunting voice as little holographic projected around her paws and across her HUD as she began to work at them and then tap at the computer's keypad too.

"You guys have fun; J keep an eye on her. I'm going to see if there's anything else worth checking out in here," growled Flint as he made his way deeper in to the dugout caves.

Seraph ignored him. True Flint was smart and knew his way around technology, but he could be so moody at times. She'd worked a long time on developing software that she hoped would let them grab as much data as possible from Rocket's networks if they ever got a chance; it was time for a field test.

J took up a position by the entrance and crouched down. While he was the weakest of the group and in many ways the helmet of the suits prevented him using his strongest natural weapons, his teeth, Seraph always appreciated the rattata morph's steadfast and attentive nature that she herself shared. She figured it was why, out of all those who'd applied to be 151's scout, it was J that Pebble had picked.

Within a few minutes she'd begun finding and downloading all manner of internal reports, manifests and written orders. As her software burrowed deeper, Mortimer brought to her attention a file.

<I have something that you may wish to see madam,> intoned the chandelure a file name appeared on her HUD and she requested it from the computer.

"Oh... just as we suspected, Plasma, they've hmm..." she mumbled as J glanced her way.

"Who?"

"Team Plasma, the criminal organisation in Unova. Rocket's scientists and theirs exchanged information. But, this letter doesn't say exactly what. Plasma have done stuff with robotics, synthetic pokémon engineering, we'll have to study that later."

Her instincts tugged on her. She knew there was something important there, but it would have to wait.

<I believe we have been discovered, we have only moments remaining madam,> came the hurried sound of Mortimer over her radio.

"Quickly! Get everything we can! Download everything!" Her paws raced over the keyboard, getting as much of the data off the servers and down that cable into a secure store within her suit as she could.

Her breath quickened as displays on her holographics indicated something beside the requested files was coming down the line as well. Her hack promptly halted when, rearing out of the screen, half digitised and half strange fuzzy holograms itself, a boxy head of a red and black Porygon appeared and screeched at her like a broken modem. <ACCESS DENIED!>

It opened its maw and a blast of rainbow coloured psychic energy slammed into her chest and knocked her backwards and a few feet across the room, yanking the cable free from the computer as well. The lucario whined and held her head as she looked up to see the Porygon disappear back into the computer.

A few seconds later, and by the time she'd scrambled back to the system, the screen went blank and there was a whine of electronics. Something inside went ping as the machine followed an instruction to head crash its own hard disk and a little smoke drifted from the laptop's vents. She slumped against the table as J ran over and helped the jackal back to her feet.

She checked her wrist. Two terabytes downloaded, that would have to do.

---

Dex ducked as he brought his arms together, channelling another ball of energy between them as he narrowly avoided another small missile as it shot over his shoulder. He felt his Extension suit amplify and pump more power into his hands as he formed an aura sphere, wheeled around and lobbed it at the dragon-shaped mechanical beast before him. The energy ball collided with the robot, making it crumble and then explode, pieces of it bouncing with the pings of metal on metal as his suit protected him from that as well.

He felt a static prickle along his back as his magneton partner shot off a thunder wave behind him. Another one of the mechamon shuddered on its impact and locked up, ready for him to tackle next.

There were at least ten of them still left. They were huge machines shaped like dragonite but made of metal and plastic; and armed with missiles, guns and deadly shrapnel that flew everywhere when they exploded.

The fact these things existed alone offended Dex. They were there to destroy and do nothing else. A crude attempt by Rocket to counter 151 and the other Extension enabled pokémorph teams with entities their Mew and Mewtwo leaders couldn't sense.

A few feet away floated the other cat and the turtle. Dex's powerful red aura around the water-type help keeping him aloft while a blue bubble of protection from Pebble helped keep the unarmoured wartortle safe in the hailstorm of weapons fire. The valiant turtle was sending off attack after attack, bubbles and water jets knocking back the dragons and stopping them from swarming them as the two cats worked together to destroy take them, one on one.

If it was one good thing about these soulless robotic enemies, Pebble didn't hold back on unleashing the full destructive power their kind could actually command. When it came to other pokémon, humans, and pokémorphs, even though they were the enemy, the mew never had gone as far as to seriously hurt them. He preferred to simply disable and incapacitate them, even though a few times this had let them escape later.

Dex didn't agree with this. Even if Rocket scientists were originally the origin of his species, what they had done before and since then were simply unforgivable. Dex knew there was a natural order to things, and that order did not include Rocket and their desires for world domination.

Catch! came the mew's voice in his head as one mecha dragon was lobbed towards him by the pink cat's kinetic fields.

Dex did similar and grabbed a bot of his own, flinging it the opposite direction. The two collided head on and both cats disappeared briefly as the units exploded, sending parts everywhere through the space the two had been in before they reappeared in opposite positions and resumed their attacks.

Hey, wanna try that again? That wasn't exactly a fast ball! Dex thought back to Pebble as looped around behind one dragon, faster than it could aim and shoot as he reached out and snagged hold of its wings. He ripped them off with a snapping wrench of metal and spark of electronics as the dragon fell and tumbled out of the sky, crashing to the ground.

Pebble flicked his tail in a playful manner, the two of them untouchable as they dispatched the remaining robots now with ease. After their fight earlier it felt good to smack around the real cause of their argument, and it seemed Pebble felt the same way.

Dex smirked as he rose up and stared in to the eyes of the second to last machine, knowing somewhere the Rocket controllers would be watching and he put on a show.

Holding out one hand, the form of a red sword slowly formed in his paw, brighter and brighter and becoming impossibly thinner till it seemed to crackle as it cut the air itself. The cat snarled as he swung his hand around and carved the psycho cut straight through the most heavily armoured centre of the robot. The edge of the mental blade sliced through the bonds between the atoms themselves as the lower half of the machine fell away, its upper half hovering for a second before also tumbling too out of the sky.

As the mewtwo floated there, glowering with pride at the destruction he'd wrought and the fear he'd no doubt sown in to the Rocket operators, he heard the collective voices of W.T.F. speaking together.

<Hey!> <One> <More> <To Go!>

He spun around to see Pebble leading the last dragonite drone in a chase, making its engines strain as it tried to keep up with the acrobatic cat. As he zipped past Dex, he spun around in the air and took aim with his paws, Dex already doing the same as the two cats fired with mind synced blast of blue and red energy, the machine detonating in a beautiful display of purple light.

<Well, what a delightful display indeed sirs,> came a polite voice over the radio.

"Yeah, definitely our colours!" cackled Flint. The three of them in the air turned around to see the rest of their team waving at them from the ground.

Dex did a loop in the air himself as he took off his helmet and dropped to stand upon the ground. The air was dirty with smoke and burning electronics, but to him it was the scent of victory over these machines and the enemy. It was worth savouring.

Pebble floated down to a few inches just above it, lowering the turtle down to stand beside the rest of the ground team.

The lucario was tapping at the controls on her arm, bringing down the recall drones to their position. "We've got a lot of interesting intel you'll all want to take a look at. Rocket, I think, are on their way though."

The mewtwo didn't ask as he glanced over the surface thoughts of his team mate, those that were connected to what she'd said and were unguarded. Plasma, new engineering, genetic possibly, something with robotics again.

"I'm interested," he said. "Anything that could let us know what those bastards are working on next."

Pebble nodded. "Are we all done here?" he asked, ever the one on protocol, which said they should leave before anyone else on the other side turned up. Not that they couldn't take them, Dex thought.

There was a clicking and whirring as Cogs spun on Flint's Extension suit, the others all pausing as a message from him appeared on their HUDs, which the Mewtwo had missed with his helmet off.

"Such action would be prudent Commander," chirped Zero over the radios.

"What did I miss?" asked the wartortle, out of the loop.

Dex quickly slipped his helmet back on, checking the clasp was snug around his brain stem cord, and his own HUD lit up with the message:

[Flint And Cogs Make Sure Rocket Upset. Lots Of Boom. No More Base.]

J folded his arms. "If Rocket want this place so much, they can have it, in pieces!" squeaked the rattata defiantly. The mewtwo chuckled at that, that kid always had so much spunk.

"Okay, everyone, let's go," ordered Pebble. "Sorry Crash, thanks for your help, you'll have to catch this one on download." The mew gave a nod to Seraph and she tapped a control.

"Hold on! What do you..." started the turtle as the recall device locked on and enveloped him in a red beam and he dematerialised, the lucario confirming the completed transfer and then tapping a control to send the drones buzzing their merry way home.

Dex stepped off the ground and swished his tail as he picked up J and Seraph, leaving their leader to carry Flint. The five of them rising off the ground together at speed towards the clouds again as the charmeleon came over their radios and tapped a button on his arm. "Kiss my flaming ass Rocket!"

For a few moments, the drawing-in night was washed away with the light of a thousand fire-types as what remained of the old town went up behind them. The deep sewer system that had been such a great foot hold to the Team collapsing in on itself as the ground and remaining buildings fell into them. The charmeleon had been more than liberal in laying down his charges.

"No kill better than overkill," purred Dex as they vanished in to the clouds.