Act 1: Logs 4

Act 1: Logs 4

Nigel Birch settles into his office chair, wiping sweat from his brow. It's been a hot one today under the Hoenn sun, and helping his aides with a young Magby in the middle of a temper tantrum certainly didn't help things.

The regional professor ignores the stack of paperwork on his desk and jiggles the mouse of his computer, waking the machine up. Just as he does so, he sees that there is a new email waiting in his inbox.

New mail from: [email protected]

"Ha, it's about time." Birch grins and opens the email, finding several audio and document files attached. He clicks on the first audio log and leans back into his chair.

"Log seventeen, day seventy."

"The last few days have been a whirlwind of ups and downs. Just as you wanted, professor, I spoke to that therapist, Mable, yesterday. She's good at what she does. I won't go into detail because I know that's not what these logs are for, but I think things will work out with her help Thank you for pushing me, Nigel. I don't think I would have voluntarily gone myself."

There's a pause in the recording, followed by a sigh.

"The most important bit I think is my Corvisquire ran away."

Nigel blinks. 'What?'

"I came clean about everything to my pokemon sans Shinx. Grovyle accepted what I said and swore to take the secrets to his grave. I'm still thanking my lucky stars for that. Corvisquire eventually followed suit, saying he would keep everything to himself as well. He even gave me permission to give him a proper physical so long as it was just he and I in a secluded location. Why he wanted this, I can make several guesses, many too ghastly to say. I know I shouldn't be assuming the worst, but"

"After making it to Mauville, he and I went out into the woods for his physical and he took off without any warning. I figured that he was simply scouting the area to make sure there were no prying eyes, but seconds turned to minutes and minutes turned to hours, and he was nowhere to be found."

"I've I've contacted the Rangers and put up a notice online to try and find him, but Corvi is smart. He won't be found unless he wants to be found. I don't really understand it. I'm sure he knows that he only needs to ask, and I would release him. He was approaching evolution, only weeks away. Is that why? Were we only a means to an end?"

Nigel pauses the recording. In the faint reflection of his computer monitor, he can see that his own face is troubled. A pokemon that knows is loose. A pokemon intelligent and determined enough to find a way to communicate one-to-one with humans should he wish.

Before going any further, Nigel writes a reminder on a sticky note in all capital letters and sticks it to his desk phone.

'CALL RANGERS ASAP TO UPGRADE LEE CORVI CASE'

Note written, he returns back to his computer.

"Grovyle and Vulpix netted us a win against Wattson. His Jolteon, a beautiful example of her species, was obviously on her way to her elder years, but she put up a monstrous fight. Jolteon was by far the fastest combatant we've ever had to face, beating out the Absol we faced in Dewford. Not only was she fast, but she could also turn on a dime as well, instantly halting her momentum and then accelerating back to top speed in a single step. I can't imagine the sort of strain it must've put on her ankles. If not for one of Grovyle's new moves, Seed Blast, injuring one of her legs, I think we would've been up shit creek."

"I may have lost my temper slightly when Wattson pulled a Baton Pass trick with Jolteon, swapping in his Magneton, who then got the Agility stat-boost Jolteon cast a moment ago. Magneton took out Grovyle, and it stung. I sent Vulpix in and we wasted no time pulling out all the stops. After two or three Flamethrower attacks, Magneton was down for the count. Even with an injured leg, however, Jolteon proved to be just a little too fast to nail, so I pulled out another trick."

"I fueled Vulpix's attack with my own stamina."

Nigel sighs and leans back into his cozy office chair, becoming resigned to the fact that every time he views these logs from his lab trainer, there's going to be something worthy of a migraine.

"The little connection between Vulpix and I, I seized it and pulled it deeper within myself, deeper than it's ever been before. I can't accurately describe the sensation of doing so, as I think there just aren't words for it, but I took that little psychic line from Vulpix and jacked it directly into my own stamina. The resulting flamethrower was unreal. It was more like an orange-white beam than a stream of flames, and it was so fast that Jolteon was taken out before she could dodge, winning the challenge and landing us a Dynamo badge."

"That's not a bad idea at all" Birch murmurs, rubbing his chin. "Huh. That gives me an idea for a study of my own. Now, where to find places with pokemon around natural Sitrus groves? I might have to see about a permit to enter a reserve."

"I've also taken the time to meditate on what exactly I'm wanting to do after this run of the Hoenn gym circuit. The Rustboro Trainer School accepted me into their university-level courses and I'll begin my attendance next year. There, I plan on majoring in either pokemon nutrition or psychology. After that, I'll probably take up a position with the League, buy a house with a plot of land for my pokemon, and who knows from there? Hard to say. None of this is set in concrete yet, so maybe I'll take a different major or go on another journey. I heard Sinnoh in winter is beautiful, and although I'm getting used to the tropical weather of Hoenn, life in the U.S. north-east made me accustomed to mild weather year-round."

"Now that I think about it, maybe I'll take nutrition or psychology as a minor study rather than a major. I've been digging deep into the topic of Infinity Energy here recently."

The Hoenn Professor leans forward.

"I'm not sure if RTS offers any courses relating to Infinity Energy, but the more I learn the more fascinated I become. I guess Devon Corp coined the term, but it's also known as aura in some small religious circles and just pokemon 'lifeforce' or 'stamina' to the layperson, aka the fuel for pokemon moves."

"In my efforts to build a diverse arsenal of moves for my team, I keep having to research different ways for pokemon to build and mold different types of Type Energy, and all the sources I keep finding can't seem to agree on how Type Energy, or TE is generated. The most common theory seems to be that pokemon generate 'stamina' or Infinity Energy in some sort of poorly understood biological process, then the IE is then consumed by the cells of the pokemon which then spit out Type Energy. At first, I wanted to scoff at this, because every single study explicitly stated that the Infinity Energy is consumed and destroyed in its entirety by the cells of the pokemon, then the overblown mitochondria of the pokemon produce the TE."

"Then I remembered pokeballs."

"So obviously you know how pokeballs have been used for centuries, right? To the average person, it just looks like the pokemon shrinks and is sucked inside the ball, and they really don't give it any more thought than that. They really don't need to if it works, right? Professor Laventon, a Galarian researcher known for his work in Sinnoh well over a century ago, accidentally perpetuated that myth. To me, though, that makes no sense. Where does the extra mass of the pokemon go if that is the case? Why doesn't a pokeball containing a Wailord weigh countless tons?"

"How early apricorn pokeballs, which for all intents and purposes were colorful coconuts, accomplished the absolutely mind-bending feat of converting matter to energy, and vice versa, I have no idea. I'm not even going to get into the storage and encoding of information into pure energy. That can wait for another day."

"I guess to people used to living with pokemon, that's kind of mundane in comparison. To me, though? I guess I always knew that was the case in a peripheral sort of sense, but seeing one-to-one matter to energy conversion being casually glossed over in official academic texts really just I don't know. It just messed with me. I could rant and rave about the seemingly inconsistent development of tech over the years, but I'll spare you that."

"Back home, there are a pair of ironclad rules in science. Normally it's laughable to call anything in science 'ironclad', but these rules have stood the test of time. There are some exceptions, but by 'exception', I mean theoreticals that require the energy output of the sun in order to create a small handful of useful matter. These two rules are known as the law of conservation of mass and law of conservation of energy. I know I'm going on a tangent here, just humor me."

"Both of these rules state that in a closed system, both energy and mass cannot be created or lost, they can only change their respective forms. Pokeballs just laugh in the face of this."

"The conversion of a full flesh and blood creature into a collection of pure massless energy that can be stored inside of a capsule the size of a baseball, only then to be restored back to matter again absolutely would not work in the model of science I was raised on. I did check. The weight of a pokeball doesn't change regardless of the presence of a pokemon inside of it or not."

"Then I ran into a few other things that made me think. According to most official sources, the generation of Type Energy is a process tied to the biology of the pokemon in question. It's dependent on the mitochondria within the cells to create the energy, which then is transformed into the pokemon move. It's again here that we can observe the energy-to-matter effect, as some moves create matter, like Watergun or Rock Tomb."

"Where are you going with this, Lee?" Birch wonders aloud. Nonetheless, he pays rapt attention.

"I'm of the opinion that the generation of TE is not a process locked to biology. It's well-known that a pokemon can learn moves outside of its usual repertoire with the aid of a parent's genes, and this is used to explain why a pokemon might know a move that they shouldn't. I have a theory, though, based on my observations of past studies. All the different sources and reference material I can find regarding Infinity Energy insist that it is, in fact, an energy. What if it's not? In this world, physics allows conversion of energy to matter and vice versa with an efficiency I would normally call impossible, so we already have proof of that, so what if IE is a matter produced by the bodies of pokemon that emulates the nebulous nature of TE? Or what if IE is an undefined substance existing between the states of matter and energy? Shit, anything is possible."

"I began pondering this after realizing that Grovyle shouldn't be able to learn Feint Attack. According to the current model, the Treecko line should have little to no ability to learn Dark moves. They can sometimes learn Pursuit naturally if they have a Dark-Typed grandparent, and a Treecko knowing Crunch as an egg move is rare, but not unheard of, but Feint Attack is not in the roster of even the most trained Sceptile. Yet, Vulpix taught the technique to Grovyle even if it took weeks None of us even knew that limitation existed. According to the current model, what we did was impossible."

"So, I don't think the generation of Type Energy is constrained by biology at all, and that all TE might be available to any pokemon who learns how to properly shape their IE. I did look at the studies, and while different pokemon of the same type share genetic markers indicating a predisposition for a move type in the mitochondria of their cells, I think this has resulted in a false correlation and thus the setting of artificial limits on pokemon."

"Again, just a theory of mine, but I'm going to be studying it. I think Infinity Energy itself is not a fuel totally different from TE, but rather the starting state of the TE. Perhaps IE and its relation to TE is more akin to chemistry, where the pokemon induces a purposeful instability in the IE, which is the universal starting point, and the resulting TE is a useful decay product. The TE might even decay further, directed by the pokemon into an excited, volatile state for an energy attack, or converted into mass for a physical one. Considering the TE can end up being either mass or energy, it lends a little bit of credit to IE being it's own 'in between' state, I think. I'm hoping the more I learn of IE, TE, and the relationship between them, the better I can understand things like Vulpix's pyrokinesis and telepathy. Surely she must be creating and manipulating Fire and Psychic TE for both."

"I'm just scratching the surface here, so I don't expect any of this to be right, but I hope it's a step in the right direction. I've already got some tests in mind, but Man, I know this is going to require a lot of expensive equipment I'll be researching here and there, but I doubt I'll begin in earnest until I begin university. That's all for this one. Lee, out."

As the last audio file ends, Birch doesn't bother to look at the attached documents right away. Instead, he stands and slowly paces around his office, mind abuzz with the musings of his lab trainer. Mass and energy can be created, it can change shape, and it can be annihilated by both pokemon and modern technology. How strange that on Lee's bizarro earth, some of the tech people enjoy, pokeballs chief among them, just wouldn't work. The ideas presented in the last log are messy, but novel, and they make a startling amount of sense for being pure speculation.

'Once more, the perspective of an outsider is worth its weight in gold.' Birch bites his lip and glances back to his PC. 'If Lee's theory is even the least bit true This'll be a massive upset to the scientific community.' The professor sits back down and moves the logs to an encrypted file squirreled away deep in his computer. 'Sense sharing, stamina sharing, missing pokemon, alien theorems on Infinity Energy, this is getting to be too much. These things Lee is getting up to He's going to cause a paradigm shift before long, and all I can do is hope the world is ready'