Mikhail sat quietly for a moment. They had already said that they were going to do it tonight. They shouldn’t put it off much longer. A camp and supplies was waiting for them when they returned.
“You ready?” Mikhail asked.
Charles nodded. “And you remember it precisely?”
Mikhail chuckled. “I remember every place I’ve ever been, probably a side effect of my little gift,” he stated, “I remember it as I did when I was first there. It has been years however so things will be different…”
Charles nodded. “Yes, but it’s the best we have, and so we shall work with it.”
Mikhail grabbed onto his two ‘girls. They had grown since he first acquired them. His Eva was now something called an Umbrea, and his newest addition, what had originally been a bizarre normal-type known as a Salexis had evolved into a plant-type called a Mossmelon who now was even more invisible in the wilderness.
It was time to leave though. Things had to be done, so Liz brushed against Mikhail’s mind as she grabbed on to Charles, Daniele, and Chrissie. In a blink, all of them were elsewhere. It was a dreary place with high fences and floodlights shining several bright, judgmental glares in various directions. No one was in sight.
Charles tried to think at Liz, to ask her if anyone was near. She picked up on his thoughts and conveyed the location of what she determined to be numerous humans and five pokégirls. Six of them were asleep apparently. Silently, Liz transported herself, Charles, Chrissie, and Daniele behind a League official, a Tamer and his two ‘girls. Fantastically, Liz managed to get them into a spot out of each of their lines of sight. In a flash, the human’s brains started to leak out of his ears, Daniele pounced on the cat-type and got her in a chokehold, and Chrissie’s vines snaked around a very-near-human type also cutting off her air supply.
Charles retrieved the red and white balls from the dead human’s body and recalled the two captured ‘girls into them. Liz then teleported the body elsewhere to serve as feral chow. Soon after, Mikhail’s ‘girls scaled the wall with Mikhail clinging to one of them. They were soon with the others.
“The other Tamers are asleep,” Charles whispered to Mikhail, “Let’s kill them and take their ‘girls before they can do anything to inconvenience us.” Mikhail flinched at the idea of killing them, but steeled himself and nodded. These people represented everything that had made his life thoroughly hellish. What had to be done had to be done.
It was not long before they made their way into the small barracks. Two men were asleep on opposite sides of the room. Two pokégirls were visible but asleep. A nudge at Liz and she mentally confirmed that they were the only pokégirls that she could detect. Again, the humans died before they knew what hit them and the pokégirls found themselves unable to breath, struggling futilely. Once again, they were recalled into their balls. A third ball was found. After a bit of fiddling and almost releasing a confused pokégirl out into the world, they had determined that all the guards were disposed of and their ‘girls secured. A bit of searching later and the closed-circuit video surveillance system had its recording mechanism destroyed and its magnetic tape records destroyed and their remains spirited away back to their camp by Liz for good measure.
Before they left the room, Charles felt something odd in the side of his head kind of like when Liz communicated with him except… different. He turned to her questioningly. She seemed to not know what it was or its origin. This worried them both. Suddenly, he had the urge to reach into a cabinet. In it was a pokéball. Liz mentally conveyed that she felt no mind within it. Odd… either it was a free pokéball or it was one of those types of pokégirls like Mikhail’s Umbrea. The later seemed more likely. Best treat it with caution.
A quick teleportation via Liz- not by Mikhail since he needed his strength- down to a prisonlike area, revealed a horrid stench and several gaunt, fearful figures. Boys, mere children, and men alike all shied away into the recesses of the room. Some carried pick-axes while others looked too weak to do much of anything, and then a few seemed almost catatonic. It was truly a pathetic sight.
Charles then smiled widely. This apparently was not taken well by the people in the cell and they all shrunk away further. “Good news, everyone!” Charles’s rumbling bass reverberated throughout the area, “the Tamers are dead. How’d you all like to leave this place?”
No hope shone in their eyes. The life had been sucked out of them. None of them dared think such thoughts. Sighing, Charles motioned to Mikhail to come closer to him. “Let’s just get them out of here. We don’t have time to explain things and every second counts,” he commanded.
It took a while. While most of the people were seemingly resigned to whatever fate lay before them, there were a few who still had a little fight in them. Apparently they thought that Charles and Mikhail were League Tamers which was probably rightfully so considering that they each had pokégirls following them. The uncooperative ones just had Liz teleport behind them and transport them back to their camp. Before long, they transported a whopping 36 men and boys back to their camp and cleared out all of the supplies stored at the internment camp. They were a breeze, and without their surveillance footage, no one would have the slightest clue as to what happened.
Back at the camp in the middle of the woods on Isla Sol Naranja, things became clearer for the former prisoners. They were actually free. Many grown men actually wept. Most did not comprehend that they had been whisked away from a prison on Basshead Island and transported miles upon miles away, but it did not matter, something had changed, there was a light on the horizon.
Using rations they had looted from the camp, they were able to at least partially fill the holes in the people’s stomach. They could only give them quarter rations though. Anything more would probably make them violently ill judging by their gaunt appearances.
After they had chowed through the meager amounts of food provided for them, Charles stepped towards to the center of the large group all huddling closer to the fire. “Friends!” he called out to them for their attention, “It is a crime against humanity, what you have all suffered.” It was always best to start out with a bit of rhetoric, especially if it was true as it was in this case. “Here, we are away from the eyes of the Tropical Confederacy, here we may rest for a time!”
A few whoops and hollers cried out from raspy voices, and Charles paused to let them get accustomed to the idea. “Here we have resources I the wilderness, most importantly there are pokégirls which we may arm ourselves with and take power into our own hands!” While some seemed intrigued by the idea, most shrank down at the mention of pokégirls and darted their gazes around to check their perimeter. “Here, we can gain strength. Every able bodied man can have a pokégirl to call his own, to fight for and Cherish him. They are not mere savages to be afraid of, but useful and productive and hold the key to our future. Look at where you are now. We brought you here with the aid of our pokégirls, something we could not have done alone. It is pokégirls who saved you under our command.”
Charles paused. For a moment. They all looked at him. Many already showed deference to him. It makes sense, Mikhail and he were miracles to them. The people here, even the children, bore scars that told a story of their time in the prison they had found them in. Some weren’t exactly visible. “Come,” he began again, “Tonight, rest. Tomorrow, we shall lay down our roots and carve ourselves a piece of the world where we can be free.” A wave of emotion choked the people. It was strange, the effect mere words had on them. He could almost feel their spirits already starting to build. It was a whole new world for them. It was strange how easy this was for him. Charles had been raised for this kind of thing, and yet here he was trying to undo what had created him. Kind of funny actually.
The next morning, bright and early, it seemed as if everyone was awake. The rescued prisoners were curious about their surroundings and a tad anxious. Most everyone had slept outside the previous night with the youngest children piled together in the two canvas tents that Charles and Mikhail had for their own safety.
Now, it was time to find more about the people he had whisked away from the internment camp. The prison had been a place that those with Blood Traits are sent to. Some are owned as slaves, but the majority gets sent to small, isolated facilities where unknown and unspeakable things happen to them. The traited population was a growing one and a pool which Charles could access since they were both downtrodden, and he appeared like one of them and was so capable of posing as one quite easily. It was almost… too easy.
Charles began strolling up to individuals and making idle chitchat. Eventually, he managed to talk to them about their traits, making sure to flatter them for their gifts. One child born with strange, pokégirl-like ears and a tail smiled shyly at him before trotting off elsewhere. The older ones were harder to pull out of their shells, but he eventually got a couple to discuss their abilities. Some were quite interesting while others were dead useful. To his mild surprise, there were a few individuals that obstinately declared that they were, in fact, not traited, but had been thrown in the camps for being opponents of the wrong person. No matter, they were just as welcome as the traited and already gave him a leg up on recruiting non-traited individuals.
It was not really time efficient to talk to everyone, but he managed to talk to enough to not be some distant individual segregated from them. Moving on, he gathered the most able bodied men and explained that he was going to equip them with pokégirls as soon as possible and that they were, in fact, beginning as soon as possible. Mikhail would stay behind to guard the main camp while Charles went off to capture pokégirls. As he would bring them back and grab men to tame them, their force would expand and they could bring back more pokégirls to the rest. It would also give them all able foragers capable of giving them some rations until they could find another way to sustain themselves.
It happened almost like clockwork. The ferals were curious about the strange intruders into their land. Various ‘girls were bagged ranging from common cats to a couple crocodilian ‘girls, to feathery flyers, to all sorts. One of their most interesting finds, was a comatose pokégirl that they discovered to be an Elf who had apparently been around since Sukebe was still directing pokégirl armies against humanity. Apparently the comatose state was some sort of variance of the feral state and allowed her breed to await to be awoken indefinitely like some kind of endospore. She actually seemed rather surprised but accepting that the war had ended decades ago. Fortunately, she proved to be knowledgeable about pokégirl breeds and their abilities; although, she was disconcerted by the behavior of uncivilized ferals. After Charles filled Mikhail in on what he knew of the breed of super farmers and the Elf proudly filled in the gaps, the younger man eagerly took her for his own. It seems as if the dream of self sufficiency had not left him.
Eventually, Charles felt comfortable unleashing the pokégirls captured from the guards of the death camp. They were easily intimidated by the large force of pokégirls surrounding them and were very suggestible on accounts that their masters were dead and Liz’s mental probing against their psyches. The pokégirls weren’t stupid and quickly bonded to members of the growing force, forever losing any care they had about the Tropical Confederacy.
Charles was, however, hesitant to open the ‘ball that he found in the cupboard, the one that gave off that odd feeling and that Liz could not detect a presence inside of. An anxiety built within him, and sweat gathered on his brow. He licked his lips and pressed the release button on the ball. Just as he suspected- no, knew- a red light exited the ball and coalesced into a form unfamiliar to Charles.
A pokégirl 183cm tall, tall enough to tilt her head up and look Charles dead in the eyes. He did not know this woman; he knew he didn’t. She was the tallest woman, pokégirl or otherwise, that he had ever seen. Her eyes were like a hawk’s, yellow and fierce. An x-shaped scar crossed her face intersecting on the bridge of her nose and dividing it into four almost even quadrants. She had a dull, steel blue hair. He knew he did not know this woman. He did not know the woman whose fierce posture relaxed at the sight of him nor did he know the guard that dropped.
“Master?” she asked almost disbelievingly, hoping beyond hope.
It couldn’t be. He knew it couldn’t
The woman stepped towards him. Her arms raised up to embrace him.
There was no way… “Yvette?” he asked, not wanting to believe, not wanting to risk the crushing disappointment. She then leapt up and embraced and kissed him. Yes, it was Yvette. No one asked questions. Something told them to wait, to put their curiosity aside for now. The two simply stilled their and basked in one another’s presence. The world had just gotten a little brighter for them. He wanted to stop for a while and ask his most loyal servant and oldest friend where she had been and how she had been, but it had to wait. For now, he was content to have her by him. What an interesting evolution she had though, the form of the tall and powerful Moon Maid. It must be quite the tale.
Regardless of his personal desire to rest or to become… reacquainted with Yvette, work was to be done. Much work needed to be done. People needed to be fed and sheltered. In the mean time, some food could be provided for the people as they all discussed how to best construct a home. The water types were able to catch large amounts of fish for them and many other pokégirls could scavenge edibles such as wild fruit and small game. It seemed as if they were self sufficient… for now. Such a time would come where they would exhaust the land. They needed a place to plant their base.
Still, that sleepy little town that Charles had found himself at not too long ago got stuck in his conscious thought. It hadn’t sat well with him that he needed to bide his time rather than gutting Francisco before he left, but things needed to happen. For now, it was better to lie and wait, bide his time. Even stationed in the woods, because of the large force of pokégirls they had amassed, it was unlikely many ferals would be too much of a threat. Still, Francisco should be taken care of as soon as possible. The sooner he was gone the sooner that bastard would stop influencing that village. Even if Charles never went there again, he could rest easily if he knew that Francisco was gone. Just a little bit more time…
None of the people he had assembled were architects by any means. Charles did have a rudimentary understanding of structural integrity and such, but that meant very little in the face of the kind of task that he wanted to pull off. They needed a base, a home that could be quickly expanded as more people joined them. It wouldn’t be long.
Because of the size of the undertaking in mind, construction took months even with their labor force. They had to divide their labor up in order to both keep the construction steady and keep everyone fed and alive. Water type owners were transported out to prime fishing areas by Liz and Mikhail early in the mornings and returned in the evenings along with the rare few teleport capable ferals that had been picked up by luck or happenstance. Many of the plant-type owners under the direction of Mikhail and his Elf went to work on clearing, plowing, and fertilizing land that would later be needed to support them. The rest of the laborers were all busy with the construction of their new home. Incidentally, the Elf had a strange ability to ‘ask’ plants to move out of the way. It was an odd sight to behold but one that saved laborers from having to fell any more trees than necessary, something that made everyone, the laborers as well as the Elf and other plant-types, very happy.
The building he wanted needed to be very large. A section and a half’s worth of land had been plowed and enriched by plant-types. He wanted something big to house a very large number of people efficiently. What had been decided upon looked like some sort of oversized longhouse with a dug out cellar. It was large enough to house three hundred cots without piling people on top of each other. Overall, it seemed structurally sound and could easily hand additional wings added to it later as expansion was necessary. They had a home and fertile land awaiting some sort of crops- many the Elf claimed she could find and produce much of using her ability to quickly age plants. For the first time for what some of them could remember, the Tropical Confederation’s former prisoners of blood had a home.