From: Karnivax (karnivax@my-deja.com) Subject: [PW!] Anime-niacs, Part 2 Newsgroups: alt.games.nintendo.pokemon Date: 2000/07/10 (OOC: San Francisco is great! If the cost of living there weren't astronomical, and if there weren't such a language barrier, and if there weren't the threat of the occasional earthquake, I'd move there in a heartbeat! ^^) Tired from chasing after Shard Fields, Grendel the Aerodactyl made a clumsy descent through the broken skylight in the ceiling of the Saffron City Convention Center. Most of the otaku in attendance at Manganicon 2000 looked up in awe at the rare beast. Kyle Richter, clad in an elaborate Bolt Crank costume, quickly looked up at his returning Pokémon and shouted, "Did you get him?" Grendel landed a few feet in front of Kyle. He weakly nodded, then shook his head. Kyle looked perplexed. "What's that supposed to mean?" "Aerooooo," Grendel whined. "Dactyl...daaactyl. Aerrrooo..." Jessica Sullivan, wearing a rather tight facsimile of Asuka Langley Soryu's plug suit, walked up from behind the giant prehistoric avian. "I'd say that's a 'no.'" Kyle threw his hat on the ground. "Goddish damn it!" he snarled. He angrily spiked Cathode's empty Pokéball. "Now he's got Cathode! How does that miserable little punk keep escaping?!" "Well, this is the only time Shard's actually *escaped* per se," Jessica pointed out. "The first time we met him, in the Celadon Gym, you gave him a bunch of money and walked away. The second time, in Bill's lighthouse, he stormed off grumbling about Sabrina." Kyle glared at Jessica. Jessica shrugged and responded, "You asked." Kyle slowly picked his hat back up and put it on his head. He let out one last angered growl and said, "All right. I'm good, I'm good. We'll just...go and partake of the various goods here. And I can simultaneously dream about several of the more gruesome 'Mortal Kombat' fatalities being inflicted upon Shard." Kyle beamed Grendel back into his Pokéball. He then fiddled with his Pokédex until Grendel's Pokéball went back to cyber-storage and Espio's Pokéball reappeared on his belt. "Come on, Jess, let's see if I can't find a copy of 'Vampire Hunter D' around here." Meanwhile, Morpha the Ditto, disguised as Sailor Mars, had long since lost the extreme subtlety that had been asked of her by her trainer Vincenzo Larufa. Having been accosted by a horde of rabid fanboys not long after Shard's impressive entrance to the convention, Morpha was spending much more time and energy than she had anticipated needing on her mission to capture Jessica. It was just now that she finished repelling the fanboy horde with an impressive array of martial arts moves and started to close in on her target. As Kyle and Jessica weaved their way through the otaku swarm and toward the aisles and aisles of anime and manga vendors, Kyle pointed at a table behind which a young man dressed up and painted as Piccolo of "Dragonball Z" sat. On the table were numerous anime videotapes. Kyle approached the table, and in flawless imitation of Piccolo's voice from the dubbed version of the show, the vendor queried, "What can I do for you?" Kyle quickly asked of the spiky-haired man, "Y'got any 'Vampire Hunter D?'" The vendor then answered in a very poor imitation of Piccolo: "No, sorry, I sold that one earlier." Jessica then headed toward the table. The vendor greeted her exactly the same way as he did Kyle. "What can I do for you?" "What happened there?" Jessica asked. The vendor raised one eyebrow. "What do you mean?" Jessica responded. "Your voice. It was like...a good voice quit, and then a lousy voice took over." The vendor just shrugged. "It's a Piccolo thing." Kyle sighed and continued on to the next table, and Jessica closely followed him. Right behind Jessica, Morpha quickly raised the pace of her pursuit from a showy strut to a lively dash. As Kyle reached the next table of anime videos, Jessica heard the sound of quick-moving high heels directly behind her. She turned just in time to receive a sharp kick in the midriff from Morpha. Jessica fell backwards. Kyle paid no attention. The second vendor was a corpulent middle- aged man in ordinary clothes. The very floor seemed to be buckling under his immense girth; his table was sloped toward him quite a bit. He saw the fight that was emerging, but his only concern at the moment was his potential customer. The vendor said to Kyle, "Can I 'elp ya?" Kyle silently browsed the vendor's selection of videos. Jessica righted herself. "All right," she growled at Morpha. "Let's go!" She quickly grabbed Morpha's head and slammed the Ditto's face into one raised knee. Morpha punched Jessica away, backed off a bit, then went for a running jump kick. Jessica dodged it, and Morpha went flying past. Morpha landed right behind Kyle and stood up. Still Kyle took no notice. As soon as Kyle repeated "Y'got any 'Vampire Hunter D?'", the vendor started to rummage through his collection. Jessica took hold of Morpha's neck and brought one fist back. Morpha struggled quite a bit, but Jessica's left cross landed on the right side of Morpha's face nonetheless. Jessica then let go of Morpha's neck and struck her in the chin with a high right kick. While Morpha's head did snap back, and her face did take on an expression of profound agony, she did not make a sound. Recovering with impressive speed, she launched a left roundhouse kick which nailed Jessica hard in the side of the head. Jessica went flying to her left and crashing into an unoccupied table. The table capsized. At last Kyle took notice of the situation. "...The hell?" Acting immediately, he rushed Morpha from behind and got her in an amateurish sleeper hold. "Jessica, just rest there! I'll handle this!" "Yup, I 'ave it!" the vendor finally answered Kyle. He held the "Vampire Hunter D" video up in the air. "$12.99." "Ring it up!" Kyle responded as Morpha thrashed about and tried to free herself. "Will ya be payin' for that with cash or credit?" the vendor wondered. He pressed a few buttons on his cash register. Morpha slid her head out of Kyle's hold. Kyle quickly spun Morpha around and hit her right in the face with two strong jabs. When he went for a third jab, however, Morpha dodged the blow, grabbed Kyle's right arm, leaned backward, and threw Kyle over her shoulder. "Caaaaash!!!" Kyle shouted as he soared through the air. He landed on his knees, and his legs became virtually paralyzed by the impact. "YEEEARRRGH!!!" he bellowed. He slumped to the floor with a muffled THUD. Morpha ran to the stunned Kyle and then helped him to his feet...only to take him down again with a mighty axe-kick. She then stomped on his rib cage with her high heels. Kyle let out an agonized gasp. Wanting to impress her master, Morpha then swiped Kyle's belt, along with the Pokéballs and Pokédex it carried, and put it on herself. While Morpha was temporarily occupied with Kyle, Jessica slowly got back to her feet. "Augh!" she cried as she tried to stand. She could see blood running down the lower left leg of her suit. Seeing that Morpha's back was turned, Jessica heard opportunity knocking. As Morpha lifted Kyle up again, Jessica limped as fast as she could toward Morpha from behind. "Hey!" Jessica shouted. "Sailor Mars! Ignite this!!!" At close range, Jessica took a mighty hop off of her right foot and landed a reasonable imitation of a Mega Kick on the left side of Morpha's head with her left foot. The kick was so strong that Morpha's head burst in a cascade of pink goo. Kyle fell back to the floor. Jessica landed flat on her back and let out a pained cry, as she had used her injured leg for the kick. Trying to calm herself down to avoid all degrees of Scyther transformation, Jessica sat up and looked at the pink ooze that was now splattered all over her plug suit. "...A Ditto?" she realized. The ooze melted off of her suit to the floor where the headless Morpha now lay. Jessica watched in amazement as all of the scattered bits of pink automatically ever so slowly crawled back to their source. With great care, she took back Kyle's belt. After that, she painfully got back to her feet and helped Kyle up. "It's going to take a few minutes for her to pull herself together. Come on, let's get our clothes and get out of here!" "Just...leave me here for now," the woozy Kyle groaned. "I'll only slow you down..." "Don't argue!" Jessica told him. Holding Kyle up, she started to limp back in the direction of the clothing lockers. "Jess, you're in worse shape than I am," Kyle remarked, taking note of Jessica's limp. "*I* should be carting *you* around." "Well then, go ahead!" she told him. Kyle put his arms around Jessica and tried to walk forward, but his wounded legs buckled, and he would have collapsed were it not for Jessica catching him. "All right, you made your point," he conceded as Jessica continued with him toward the lockers. As soon as Morpha was whole again, she returned to her basic Ditto form. She quickly took on a spherical shape and started to bounce after Kyle and Jessica like a ball of Silly Putty. By the time Kyle and Jessica reached the locker area and retrieved their normal clothing, Morpha was within twenty feet of the duo. Jessica propped Kyle up against the wall of lockers and made an attempt to kick the bouncing Morpha away like a soccer ball. She missed completely as a result of Morpha's erratic motion. Bouncing about in front of Jessica wildly, Morpha sprouted numerous pseudopods and then tightly bound Jessica's wrists together with two of them. Jessica's normal clothing and Kyle's belt fell to the floor. Before Jessica could even think of trying to free her arms, Morpha rapidly threw a few pseudopods around Jessica's legs, and then several pseudopods around her midriff. Morpha tightened her grip on Jessica's midriff until the trainer fell unconscious from the pressure. "I won't let you take her!" Kyle roared at Morpha. He dropped his street clothing and purposely fell away from the wall. He reached for his belt as he fell, but Morpha very rapidly snatched the belt away from him. "Nooo!!!" he shouted. Desperately, he crawled toward Morpha and tried to squash her with his fists. The slippery Morpha dodged the attack and slapped Kyle away with his own belt. Kyle's Pokédex came loose and fell to the floor. Then, in an impressive display of strength, Morpha lifted the motionless Jessica into the air. The nigh-crippled Kyle was powerless to do anything further. Wanting to be thorough, Morpha used one more pseudopod to pick up Jessica's street clothing. Then she bounced through the costume shop, back to the escalator, and up to the main lobby with her cargo. The weakened Kyle lay flat on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. He tried to grasp just how awful the situation had become. _Jessica's gone. All my Pokémon are gone. My credit account is gone. All in one day...I...I've lost everything except for my street clothes and fourteen dollars in cash..._ The fallen Kyle suddenly noticed the obese anime video vendor standing next to him. Indeed, the floor was bending underneath the vendor's weight. The vendor held in his hand the copy of "Vampire Hunter D." "Total comes to $13.77," the relentless vendor told Kyle. Kyle reached into his wallet, handed over his remaining fourteen dollars, and took the videotape. "Keep the change," Kyle groaned. As the pleased vendor danced away with earthshaking steps, Kyle let out a pathetic sigh and stared off to his left. It was then that he saw his Pokédex sitting nearby. A faint glimmer of hope came into Kyle's eye. He grabbed the Pokédex and sat up. _This means...that I can still access my reserve Pokémon!_ he thought. _Just hold on, Jessica...I've rescued you before and I'll do it again..._ He stood up...and then instantly fell back down as his injured legs were unable to support him. _...just...not as quickly this time._ (OOC: There is an illustation to go with this story, but I'm holding off on that, for reasons involving my intrusive pain-in-the-ass older brother being home from college. That asshole makes me pray for the end of summer. >_<) --K * A * R * N * I * V * A * X-- "Some have said there is no subtlety to destruction. You know what? They're dead." --Jaya Ballard, task mage