Chapter Text
The Door
Dr. Strand watched Giovanni sit back in his chair, the leather squeaking loudly in the dark conference room. Other high-ranking members of the Sliph board flanked him. Most were curiously young—relatively speaking, of course. She guessed that the average age was somewhere in the mid-forties. The fact that they all looked like they were in peak physical condition helped, and it made her feel even more out of place. These men looked like they ran marathons or something in their free time. In her free time she continued her research into ancient Sinnoh.
It was something she had to get used to when she joined the company. There was the traditional older men heading up departments and C-suite that she was used to from working in academia, and then there was Giovanni and the rest of his group. It was like she was working for two different organizations, and perhaps that was the case. She never saw much of the rest of his group around the building she worked at, and she didn’t bother prying too much into who they were. That would be a bad idea, as far as she could tell.
“This ‘Door,’” Giovanni said. “It exists?”
“We are reasonably sure,” Dr. Strand said. “We’ve gone through a vast amount of research and primary sources.”
“Define ‘reasonably.’”
Dr. Strand swallowed, then gestured at the slide currently being projected. “As you can see here, sir, we’ve triangulated a possible location for the center of the p-field.”
“It’s just a tree.”
“It’s referred to as the Life Tree in most of the sources we’ve found.”
Giovanni hummed. “Is the tree the Door?”
“It’s more likely that it contains the Door. All the references we’ve found describe it as being made of white stone.”
Giovanni’s eyes focused on something far away and he cupped his chin in a hand. “If it truly contains power beyond anyone’s imagination, how come we don’t have any accounts of people trying to use it?”
“It’s only assumed that people entering the Door will receive power beyond imagination,” Dr. Strand said. She wanted to go back a couple of slides to that specific quote and point out all of its issues but didn’t want to get sidetracked. “It’s said to be locked to all those except for a ‘Lady in Green.”’
Giovanni chuckled darkly, his eyes refocusing on the satellite photo of the Northern Forest. “Prophesies,” he spat. The other men chuckled in response. Dr. Strand felt like she was on the other side of an inside joke. “How are we supposed to get in?”
Dr. Strand felt relief at the question—it was something she had a concrete answer for. She paged to the next slide. “We’ve recently come into possession of a text from a Sinnoh dig site which detailed a location close to the Life Tree. It was a place of ritual significance and supposedly contained a prophesy about the Door. There’s an implication that the site contains the key to the Door, but the translation is shaky at best.”
“That sounds like the place we should be going,” one of Giovanni’s men said.
“I like the sound of that,” one of the other men said. He had a military look about him, from the short-cropped hair to the square jaw. “Been a while since I got to stretch my legs.”
“With all respect, sir,” Dr. Strand said, “I have already picked out the team for the expedition.”
The man raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth. Giovanni waved at the man. “Let it go, Smith,” Giovanni said. “You wouldn’t want to go there. The p-field completely removes all of a pokémon’s willingness to obey humans, even those that were raised from first sight. They might not attack you but you wouldn’t be able to rely on them in a fight.”
“I wasn’t aware that it was that bad,” Smith said.
“Obviously nothing you see or hear leaves this room.”
“Of course, sir. I always assume as much.”
“Either way, it’s best that we stick to science-types. Keep it official-looking.” Giovanni turned back to Dr. Strand and fixed her with his dark eyes. “Who have you selected?”
She went to the next slide. “Gary Oak, the pokémon professor,” she said. The other men muttered among themselves. “Maud Thorton, a biologist. Then Kathleen Donners and myself, along with the tester from the powered armor division.” She stared into Giovanni’s cold eyes and didn’t think about how long the trek would be through the forest or the dangers of encountering a wild pokémon.
“No,” he said. “You stay. Pick someone else from your team.”
She exhaled. “Sir?” she asked, trying not to sound as though she was grateful to be asked to stay behind.
“We’re still not sure how pokémon will react to humans inside the forest—it’s been a long time since anyone went in there. Your priority is the Door. We wait until we receive confirmation of it, wherever it might be, and then we send a team in with you.” Dr. Strand felt a little awed at how highly the man seemed to think of her, but only until she thought that it might not be the best thing to have so much of Giovanni’s attention on her.
“The others aren’t aware of the situation—”
“Even better. They’re there to gather data and nothing more.” He turned away from her and she felt herself sag, as though his glare had fixed her in place. “What’s the status on the armor?” he asked the other men. They looked at each other, their glances worried and unsure.
“We have the first prototype ready,” one of the men said, leaner than the rest and sporting a pair of rimless glasses. “The energy source is still unstable but we’ve already started human testing.”
“Are they any good with it yet?” Giovanni asked.
The man adjusted his glasses. “They’ve progressed quickly. As quickly as they could with the energy source issue.”
“Who’s the tester?”
“Orin Burke. He was—is a pokémon ranger. He was on a hiatus when we scouted him—there was some issue with his partner.”
“Will that be a problem?”
“He hasn’t show any problems during testing.”
“I’ve asked Kathleen to check in with him after the armor tests,” Dr. Strand said, “under the pretense of checking for mental strain from the suit’s neurological interface.”
“Anything to report?” Giovanni asked, eyeing Dr. Strand and stroking his chin.
“No sir.”
“Good. He’ll make the rest less afraid of going in without pokémon, even if he can’t do much.”
“Oh, he’ll be able to do much,” The lean man said, smiling. The projector light flashed off his glasses. “The gen five energy emitters are more powerful than any psychic pokémon alive today.”
“And they’re still completely useless against dark-types,” Giovanni said, turning to the projector screen and leaning forwards.
“There are ways around that.”
Giovanni ignored the lean man and gestured for Dr. Strand to continue.
===
The lights came back on and the men stood up. Dr. Strand turned to her laptop and disconnected the display cable. She closed the lid and looked up to see Giovanni standing in front of her. The other men were gone. The room was quiet, and she couldn’t hear anything from the hallway. How had they disappeared so quickly?
Giovanni had a sad look in his eyes—genuine, as far as she could tell. She gave him a quick nod and a “sir,” stuffing her laptop under her arm and stepping out from behind the podium.
“Your sister,” he said, and she froze. “She had an incident with a wild pokémon, correct?”
“Yes,” she said, glancing at the exit. When had he learned about her sister?
He lowered his head. “I don’t mean to pry or dredge up painful memories, so please tell me if you’d rather not talk about it.”
She glanced at him, once. The laptop tempted to slip from her sweating hands. She didn’t want to talk about her sister, but she didn’t want to tell Giovanni what to do either.
“It was why I was surprised to hear you volunteering for the expedition,” he said. She couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at him. Where was he going with this? “I had a similar experience. My wife,” he said, taking a breath. “My wife was involved in an incident as well. She’s never been the same since.”
“Sir?” she asked, surprised to hear actual pain in his voice. Still, she wanted nothing more than to get back to her lab and work out who to send in her place.
“You joined us to help study ways of making human-pokémon relations safer, correct?”
Dr. Strand nodded carefully. Why was he asking her this? She remembered her first interview with him with perfect clarity, surely he would remember at least part of it. Right?
“This ‘Door’—if you could open it right now, what would you change about the world?”
Mouth suddenly dry, she struggled to swallow. She forced herself to look him in the eye and took a deep breath. “I would make it so that no pokémon could ever harm a human again,” she said.
Giovanni smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “That’s exactly what I would do,” he said. “Exactly.”
He turned and strode out of the room. Dr. Strand let out a breath and leaned against the podium. Every discussion with the man made her feel as though she was chopping months off the end of her life.
But it would all be worth it after she found and opened the Door.
===
Dr. Strand walked into her lab and felt the tension in her shoulders drain away when the door clunked shut behind her. She mind was already shot and there was still so much to do—coordinate with Gary Oak and Maud Thorton, review the latest data on the p-field, and go back over the texts on the Door to search for anything that she might have missed.
Eric was hunched over a prototype of the pokémon energy signature generator at the electronics repair-slash-build station. She nodded at him and made for her little workspace in the corner before thinking better of it and turning back. It was probably best if she broke the news that he would be joining the expedition out of the way first.
“Eric,” she said, stopping next to him. The generator was a mess of wiring that sprung from a metal sphere that housed the antenna. Eric was working on the control board, peering intently through a lit magnifying glass.
“Dr. Strand,” he replied, not looking up from his work. “I should have the board working in an hour for testing.”
“Never mind that.”
Eric looked up from his larger-than-life view of circuit traces and components. He quirked an eyebrow—to her that meant he was extremely interested.
“Sliph’s board has authorized the expedition into the Northern Forest,” she said, watching his face carefully. His eyebrow remained raised, but that was it. “You’ll be leading it.”
His other eyebrow joined the first. “I thought you were going to be in charge of the expedition.”
“Change of plans. It’s going to be a simple data collection deal, and they didn’t want me going. I assume it’s so they don’t lose the ability to give me a call whenever they feel like it to ask about projects that don’t belong to me.” She gave him a weak smile.
Eric shook his head and turned back to the control board but his eyes remained still. He made no move to continue working on it. “Who else?” he asked.
“Kathleen, Orin Burke, Maud Thorton, and Gary Oak.”
“The Pokémon Professor?” He turned to her again with a raised eyebrow. She could not remember the last time she had received two eyebrow raises from Eric in a single day.
“Yes. He was quite excited about the prospect, actually. Ms. Thorton is an eminent pokémon biologist, and Mr. Burke is a product tester here at Sliph. I trust that you already know Kathleen.”
Eric nodded, though his eyes were far away. “That’s a big name to be sending on a simple data acquisition trip.”
Dr. Strand took a breath. “He and Ms. Thorton were asked to come along to record and analyze the behavior of any pokémon the expedition runs across. It was a condition we had to accept for the government to allow us access to the Northern Forest in the first place.”
“Of course.” Eric threw a calculating glance at her. Out of her entire team, Eric was the one that knew the most about the true nature of their work. He had never come out and directly asked her about the Door or why she was always so drained after meeting with the Sliph board, though she had a nagging feeling that he already knew why—it was those silent eyes of his.
“You’ll be going along to set up a base station at what we’ve predicted as the center of the p-field. Then we’ll be able to collect much cleaner data compared to now.”
A small smile graced his lips. “It’ll be just like my work back when I was a graduate student. Have you told Kathleen yet?”
“I haven’t seen her.”
“She’ll be happy that it’s finally happening,” Eric said, looking up from the board. “There isn’t much around here for her to do.”
Dr. Strand nodded. If she had a polar opposite, then it must be Kathleen Donners. Kathleen loved pokémon and the outdoors, so much so that at times Dr. Strand wondered how the woman managed to end up working at Sliph instead of any of the myriad occupations that involved pokémon. But Kathleen had proved invaluable at collecting pokémon energy signatures, and Dr. Strand had a hunch that they would be the key to everything.
“Who is this Orin?” Eric asked. “I haven’t heard of him.”
“He’s a tester for the powered armor group,” Dr. Strand said. “He’ll be providing security for the expedition, since pokémon won’t be allowed.”
“I hope he’s up to the task, then. Being a pokémon can be rough at times.”