So, Lake Valor... Sure was a lot of water? I'm not really sure what I expected to find, but, uh. Spoiler alerts, what I found was water.
So, search for my Special Pokemon continues, and I'll... probably have to actually talk to people to find him. Ugh. I'm starting off my search in Oreburgh. There's a museum there that probably has some leads for what I'm looking for, and... Dunno, just got a feeling that as a city that's all about burrowing deep into the earth and laying bare its most hidden resources, they may just have stumbled across a thing or two I'm looking for.
Currently staying at a sick hotel right above the mining site. You can hear the sounds of motors and conveyor belts gently purring deep into the night from my room. It reminds me a lot of home.
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Sinnoh's fucking cold, huh? I didn't think the temperature would be quite this different, but... Damn, I'm shivering.
So, I'm sure most of the people reading this blog have already heard my plans up here in person, but just to recap: Goal of this trip is a field stress testing for a new product aimed at trainers. There is a very specific regional pokemon that I'm looking to pit up against my new toy, but he won't be the easiest to find.
I'll be documenting my travels throughout Sinnoh up here partially because it's Interesting Content and clickbait, partially for historical memorandum (because this product is going to change the world if it works), and partially because it's always good practice to document your process when you're trying to demonstrate the reliability of a new piece of tech~ This won't strictly be a Pokemon League run like the last field test I did... damn, almost ten years ago now? But I am expecting to be making a lot of visits to the local League Gyms for other reasons, so... Fuck it, might decide to get my badges while I'm at it.
Currently my team consists of my Cubone, Annabella, and my Shedinja. Equipment on hand is:
The 2.0 model of my old NFC-enabled pokeball and portable PC system (now with much better failsafe procedures in case of transmission error!)
A holocaster with the PkDX open-source pokedex app (shout outs to Jimmy at Self-Instructive!)
A custom recon quadcopter with a pair of hand-built FPV goggles
A laser sintered, stainless steel 3D printed club for Annabella~
Checking into my hotel tonight, and I think tomorrow morning I'm going to head out to Lake Valor to start my search.
A lot's changed in the world since. Makerspaces were a lot more common in the world - and a lot more toothless. A lot less disruptive. A lot of the places she's helped her friends build since -the spaces full of creative minds that wanted to change the world with her own two hands, the spaces she considered comrades - have become nothing more than products. Workshop spaces for rent at a monthly membership rate, where people went to have a small amount of chit-chat with their fellow "Creatives" and then put their head down while they sawed at their next woodworking project. That wasn't a bad thing to have in the universe, but... it lacked sauce immensely. They were still cool alternatives to working in your backyard shed, but they lacked the drive to provide an alternative to oppressive systems. What happened to the anti-student lectures? What happened to the hit lists of corporate and political IP addresses taped to the walls? What happened to the good stuff?
It wasn't quite as bad, but it reminded her of watching many of her brethren in the tech industry fall from grace, becoming the system they once rebelled against. Friends she worked side-by-side with on cracking AACS encryption becoming crypto bros and AI shills. People she used to have late-night chats with on a TOR-protected IRC going on to build social media algorithms that pushed rage bait and fascist agendas to your feed. It felt like watching another part of the Wild West of the internet mutate into Western Exceptionalism.
Self-Instructive Tendencies wasn't the only true hackerspace left, but it was definitely one of the last few. Her and her people didn't just work on projects, they worked on change. Last year she helped one of her cohorts gain access to a copy of Unova's No Fly List. She had a team of people who went out of their way to coordinate with local protestors in Hoenn, watching unsecured traffic cams to track police movement and feed activists information that would help prevent kettling. She was proud of all of them, and she was elated to have a small little workshop of people who understood the way she did.
Her personal projects have always been about corporate disruption, though, and she had recently hit the motherload. After months of poking and prodding, she managed to yank open a backdoor into Silph Co.'s servers, and find schematics for the Master Ball. She spent another month learning how pokeballs worked, researching what gives different types of pokeballs different strengths and resistances to different situations, and how the original Apricot Balls were built. Armed with that knowledge, she started dissecting the stolen schematics she had, and realized that it was actually really simple - The Master Ball had 100% resistance to pokemon struggling against capture because it worked on principles similar to a Focus Sash or a Shedinja's Wonder Guard. And, funny that, she just happened to have a Shedinja who could help her build this within arms reach.
And with that knowledge, that meant she could replicate it. That she could modify it for DIY. Soon people would be making these pokeballs in their garages with crap they bought from their local electronics stores, and knowledge and power that should have always belonged to the people would no longer live behind a paywall.
Her heart was racing. Most people haven't even seen a Master Ball in their lives, and the moment she hit upload on these schematics, Joe Schmoes from Suburban Littleroot were going to be pumping them out by the dozen. This was going to change the world. This is what it must have felt like, right? When Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and gifted it to mankind?
---"Prometheus" wasn't a bad project name, actually. Had a punch, had some zing. Something that would turn heads, make people click links, get them through the door long enough to see that she was offering something real and not just snake oil.
And while she was on that train of thought... She had to be able to prove it was real, right? That her shitty-ass Master Ball, made out of cheap 3D printed plastic and scrap components, was just as good as the real thing. Maybe she could film herself capturing a pokemon with it. Not just like, a diglett or something. Something grand. Something you could only catch with a Master Ball.
...Stealing fire from the gods, huh?
Kitty hit ctrl+s in her circuit board designer, and spun around in her swivel chair to address her baby Cubone.
"Hey Annabella, do you want to take a vacation to Sinnoh and go catch God?"
Kitty had... Seen things, on her trip to Alola. She saw a machine that she realized had the power to revive the dead. And she saw that it was not meant for her. She saw a woman who refused to let her Pokemon leave her side, and the mania that consumed her.
She saw, in a way, why her shadow always felt so heavy.
She didn’t say much once she had come back home. She just laid her gun down on her desk, and took a pair of pokeballs out back, to a small tree in the community garden.
<Finally allowing them to join the dead at last?> Came a voice from within her own mind.
She shook her head. “No. I’m not giving up on them. Never. They’re just... They’ve earned a rest.
I’m conceding I don’t have the technology to bring them back at this time. Nobody does. They don’t need to be probed and prodded unnecessarily like I’ve been doing to them. They need sleep.”
The girl took out a box - A time capsule - and placed the two balls inside, before sealing it up and putting it underground. She thought for a minute as to how she might mark the grave, but... She thought better of it. She wouldn’t forget.
There was a hollowness in her chest and a lump in her throat. But she would not cry. This wasn’t goodbye.
“Well. I did it. Sins have been cleansed and all of that, and I’ve come to learn that the reaper takes what it will.” She flourished, raising her arms up in the air in hallelujah. “I am once again a pure spirit, right, Shedinja?”
<Hmm. You are... laughably naive. The darkness in you is not in the things you do, Kitty, but the way you think. You are arrogant, egotistical, and megalomanic. And you know this well. One good deed does not a good person make.
Still. I will hand it to you. Your shadow is that much lighter. You have changed. Grown. A bit.
But be honest with yourself: You don’t even want to become a good person, do you? It’s more fun living by your own rules. This world doesn’t exist for you to contribute to, but as raw components for you to create something better out of. You take before you give, but give you always do... In your own way.
I’ve lived in your shadow for a long time, child. You’re a terrible human being, and you always will be. But, by some irony of fate, you’ll do great things for this world anyway. For better or for worse, you will be remembered when you die, just as you always wanted.>
“Pssh. Thank you, Sigmund Freud. Like, the fuck do you know anyway? You’re just a pokemon.
I’m Kitty motherfucking Hart, after all. And I cannot be killed by anything.”
Makerspaces have been and always will be the havens of the neurotic, the obsessive, and the sleep-deprived, but even the good community there at Self-Instructive Tendencies seemed to think Kitty might have been taking things a liiiiiittle too far.
Using some old, leftover parts from the robotics lab, she had set up a new machine next to the bank of seized Team Aqua servers. With the help of a burly, tattooed man from the auto shop and a repurposed Kinect, she was able to take mo-cap data roughly approximating the moment Pointdexter’s Grovyle tried to wrestle her RFID ball away from her, and upload it to a mechanical arm.
An automated workflow controlled by a computer in Kitty’s workspace looped the following commands to the machines:
1. Using the reproduce.exe file Kitty found on the Aqua server, create a fresh copy of Shelly’s Sharpedo.
2. Transfer this new Sharpedo to the robotic arm’s PocketPC.
3. Robotic arm, run mo-cap data, automatically beginning and interrupting a file transfer between the PocketPC and the RFID ball.
4. Transfer the resulting MissingNo to a separate partition on the Aqua servers.
5. Scan MissingNo collection for any patterns or similarities in the corrupted data
6. Return to Step 1.
She understood it was a longshot, but she figured that the best way to save Clarice and Elizabeth was to actually open them up in a hex editor, and repair them by hand. But to do that, she had to first understand exactly how they broke to begin with.
Kitty hadn’t left her computer for at least a good three days. She had Annabella venturing out to get food from the vending machine as she needed it, while she remained at her desk watching raw data scroll by. The chances were less than a billionth of a percent that she might catch something the computer wouldn’t, but she needed to make sure. This was her babies on the line.
The stack of empty club-mate bottles by her desk began to rattle as a current of cold wind disrupted the air. Kitty’s shadow began to detach and creep away from her body, and lift into the air as it resolved itself into the form of a Shedinja.
The hollow shell floated towards the girl, and did the best it could to nudge her on the shoulder with its rigid, unmoving limbs.
You are literally killing yourself right now.
Far too tired and out of it to even register the oddity of her own voice ringing out words in her mind that were not her own, she grumbled aloud, “I need to stay here. Computers are fallible. Think of it as a QA test.”
I have taken your shadow. I have taken your inner speech. I do not jest when I say you are ill. You may not yet be at Death’s Door, but neither of these things would be possible to me had you not at least found yourself in Death’s Neighborhood.
I have every intention of returning your form back to you, but I request that in return, you must get some rest. Please.
“Shedinja, you- …You understand, don’t you? If you lived in a ball like Clare and Liz did, this could have just as easily been you, and I still would have-
They’re my family, Shed. I need to fix them.”
I understand that. I am inside your mind, of course I understand. But it will do you no good, nor will it do them any good, to hospitalize yourself here.
You are a human with physical limitations. You will not be able to outpace and out-think a machine that controls lightning to simulate thought. Trust that your machine will do it’s job, please, and retire for the night. For everyone’s sake.
“…Fine. You win. Thanks for looking out for me, Shed-“
Kitty spun around in her swivel chair to face her guardian angel, but found only her own shadow cast along the ground to talk to.
She shook her head with an amused sigh, and headed upstairs to sleep.
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Self-Instructive was never really empty. At any given hour of the day, there was always at least someone burning the midnight oil, following that particular muse of inspiration that only visits the sleep-deprived and the caffeine fueled. But, as far as the Space goes, this was as close to the Witching Hour as it ever got during the day.
A bank of servers temporarily installed in the corner of the electronics lab hummed like beehives. Invisible wireless signals carried bits and bytes off of their hard drives like bees carrying pollen, and deposited them next-door in Kitty’s private workspace.
A loud crunch sounded through Kitty’s dark, PC-monitor-lit workspace as she bit down on her lollipop. That’s why those Aqua cosplayers were running a cloud server. That’s why they didn’t seem to mind shared ownership of hundreds of pokemon.
They were data cloning them en masse.
The hacker spit out her lollipop stick on the ground, and opened up a Command Prompt terminal. Keys sounded like machine-gun fire as she quickly typed out a series of filters to run against the data.
Her screen stopped displaying Pokemon, and started displaying garbled reams of text.
Corrupted data. Missingno. Enough to fill at least a good third of the servers she had back there.
Those sick fuckers. Even Team Rocket was smart enough to know that when you clone a pokemon, you’re supposed to do so genetically, not digitally.
More syntax and code scrolled onto the screen as Kitty’s fingers danced across her keyboard. This time she filtered out all of the pokemon data, looking for any system files or executables. A couple pages down the list, nestled innocuously between some system32 files and a copy of Galaga, was a program labeled “reproduce.exe”
Kitty grabbed this file off of the server, slid it onto her personal hard-drive, and canceled the rest of her operations.
She now had the first puzzle piece to resurrecting the dead.
All the other members of Self-Instructive Tendencies had expected Kitty to come home in tears. Clarice, her trusty QA tester, and Elizabeth, the only living thing in the Space that was more of a Princess than Kitty herself, had both died out there.
Nobody would have blamed her if she locked herself up in her workroom for a few days. Nobody would have blamed her if she took some time to grieve. But she didn't.
The Makerspace opened the next day as usual, and she was out and about the electronics lab as usual. When confronted about how her League Adventure went, all she ever replied with was "Don't bring your work with you on vacation. That's what I learned."
Other than that, she was her normal, busy, egotistic, head-up-her-own-ass self. The other Makers were maybe a liiiiittle worried she was going psycho or in some state of denial at this point, given her complete lack of empathy for the death of her pets, but then they noticed the new climate-controlled glass display box in her workspace.
A gun rested on a pillow, a pokeball, and a PocketPC. Embedded into the wooden stand below, in lieu of a plaque, were two USB ports.
Kitty wasn't grieving, they realized, because she had found herself a new project. One that fit her crazy manic god-complex perfectly.
They were a lot tougher than I was expecting. Took me three tries to get through, eventually I realized that stocking up on Revive Crystals was the way to do it.
It's kind of a hollow victory when you buy your way through rather than earning it with your own two hands, but... Shedinja and Annabella were my only two fighters after what happened to Clare and Liz.
...
I'm heading home. This whole thing was a waste. Didn't even get a party or a celebration or anything, I was just handed a certificate and shown the door.
I have more important shit to do in my life than waste time with sports leagues.
