2024-04-22: You Wouldnt Download a Pokemon
- Cutscene: You Wouldn't Download a Pokemon
- Cast: Azoth
- Where: Silph Co. HQ, Saffron City
- Date: April 22, 2024
- Summary: During Solaris' investigation of Silph Co., Azoth wanders the building while others do battle to gather information on Solaris' behalf. But he ends up downloading something... odd.
Azoth pauses in his inspection of a group of computer terminals when he detects an unprecedented level of energy in the floors below... one with a familiar, disturbing signature. It's pointless to run the possibilities of it being a Pokemon when he's already been made familiar with the ways Drive alters his readings of Ether. "He's destroying himself. And for what?" Azoth frowns, because he's not alone, and even a Pokemon without an expressive face of his own looks for such signals.
"You get it now, right? Why I didn't want you to follow? I don't know what they'll do to you if they ever discover you with me."
Ceruledge meets Azoth's gaze with his own burning eyes, and their argument takes place in the small details between the android and the possessed suit of armor. Their respective LED and flames losing or gaining brightness... a digital beep or ghostly echo... a shift in the body, from tense to relaxed and back again... It's Azoth's more animated sag marks his loss in this social battle.
"What do you mean, you're already a ghost? I'm not sure it works that way. No, you're right. I'm not sure that it doesn't."
Azoth ignores the blaring alarms as he pulls a cord from the back of his neck and plugs himself into one of the Nedian computer terminals, light steadily flowing through in pulsating rings. Ceru stands vigil, looking out over the empty offices. Azoth again wonders if being complicit in this can truly be worth it to Ceru. Or to anyone who chooses not to end his life when they could, for that matter. But perhaps how anyone exercises their free will is not something Azoth can ever understand.
"I feel like I'm this close to remembering something whenever I travel with you," Azoth muses, partitioning himself for conversion while the rest of his awareness crawls through the data, downloading anything that passes tests of interest. "...But in the end, it still eludes me. Maybe those feelings are still stored somewhere else after all."
Ceru sets its ghostly blade gently on Azoth's head. Hot, but not painful. It might be to someone who wasn't a robot. For Azoth? Pat. Pat. What a human gesture... But 'human' is the mutual second language they've both learned to speak. Nede is a planet that exists on the cooperation of the unlike. Not only between Nedians and Pokemon, but Pokemon themselves, all so wildly different yet still building teams and families together. To Azoth, it looks like hope. ...And now Solaris is here making a mess in it.
"I know, I know. I'll keep trying. But it may not even be the other programs' regrets you sense, you know. It could be those who created me in the first place, or those who sought to wield my power only to succumb to it, or... you know, every other life I would have destroyed as a weapon of war. I'm a choose your own regret adventure."
Ceru persists in the reassuring gesture. A Ceruledge would gain power regardless of the regret fueling its flaming blades, Azoth supposes. This Ceruledge remains insistent that the lamentations haunting Azoth's broken shell will make Azoth's blades stronger, once he gasps them again, and that they already exist within him to find. The feelings left behind by Azoth's own 'family' of programs like himself... One he can remember existed, but not who they were to him. Not how he felt. Not yet.
"Hey! Don't treat me like a little kid!" Azoth complains, cheeks puffed. "I'm at least a thousand years older than you! Maybe two!" But Ceru smiles with his eyes and does not take back his sentiment. Azoth adopts his own faint smile in good humor just before every one of his limbs convulses with a stuttering beep. Ceru flinches forward, eye flames flaring in alarm as Azoth's gaze becomes yellow and swirled.
Without lifting his lulled head, Azoth raises a finger. "Could you ERROR excuse me a minute?"
Ceru receives only this cryptic warning before Azoth retreats into himself, eyes losing all their light and leaving the Pokemon to catch Azoth's inert chassis before it collapses.
- - -
Deebly beep~. Dididi~. Skreeeee beepeep~. Worble beebeebeep~.
A bright fuchsia and blue Pokemon with an egg-like body and a head in the facsimile of a duck twitches its way through fun new code. What delightful avenues of oscillating data blocks floating by! What amusing grid lines to slide and spin along! What adventurous gaps in fractured programming to hop over, zip under, and hide in! Oh, oh, a game of tag has begun! It can sense it, the presence within this virtual space looking and searching and seeking!
Porygon-Z fluctuates constantly on its journey, dancing to the beat of a very peculiar and inconsistent drum through data space colored so much like itself. Pink! Blue! Purple! Yellow! Everything mixes and blurs! And then red sometimes! The red is bad, don't touch the red, stay on the neon! Faster, faster, faster! Catch Porygon-Z if you can! A massive shadow blots out the bright, vibrant data, and all Porygon-Z can do is look up before it is captured -- pinched delicately between the claws of the massive data beast it has made its playground.
Beep whoop weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!
"ERROR ISOLATED."
Porygon-Z wriggles in joy and vibrates in greeting. The game is ended, but a new friend is discovered! Maybe this one will not be taken aback! Maybe this one will accept it! It has weird code, too! They are alike! Do not fear Porygon-Z, it is a friendly error! Is the beast a friendly error, too?
"A LIVING GLITCH?"
Porygon-Z does not understand the nature of this data beast entirely, but Porygon-Z is not lonely anymore, so it writhes every limb in vibrant happiness. The pinch of the beast's claws eases, and movement is freed, yes! Porygon-Z dives for the beast's giant thumb and nuzzles before settling contently on its palm.
A tiny jumble of data... erroneous, bugged, and just as alive as the Azoth.
"...UPDATING IDENTIFICATION. UPDATING AUTHORIZATION."
Beeeeeeep woo~!
- - -
Azoth pushes himself back up as Ceru cautiously supports his weight, still wary. "Sorry about that. It was a harmless intruder."
Light pulses through Azoth's arm in brilliant blue as he presses his fingers together. With a snap he summons not a blade of ARM energy, but manifests the data hiding within him into its pre-programmed physical form. A Pokemon.
"Beeeeep dididididi!" sputters Porygon-Z, spinning and twitching in a delighted dance, as if being called this way is a game it's winning. It stops to look Azoth up and down, then crackles out another set of beeps conversationally.
"I'm having trouble getting through to it. Can you tell it that it needs to go back home?" Azoth asks of Ceru, pointing to the computer he's still plugged into. Ceru and Porygon-Z look to each other. Ceru lifts a blade in greeting. Porygon-Z flails its arms and tail in a disastrous simulation of a wave. In unison, they turn to look at Azoth expectantly.
"No, no no no, I can't take it with me." He points at Porygon-Z. "I can't take you with me. What part of 'I am a danger to everyone around me' does no one seem to understand?"
Porygon-Z spins in place, beeping and whirring and disappearing in blocks of data as it uploads itself back into Azoth with such exuberance that Azoth is knocked back into the desk, smashing a response on the keyboard. He stares to Ceru in shock, and it doesn't take any practice with Pokemon to Trainer communications to know he means to say, can't you do something about this?! Ceru shrugs and vanishes in shadow, and Azoth is left with a glitch cavorting in his code and a specter haunting his steel.
"...Pokemon sure do befriend each other quickly."