Chapter 17

Chapter 17 - Putting The Arr In Revelation

Rachel was quivering from her third orgasm by the time I finally popped off.  I love the sounds and visual of a girl cumming hard and she was definitely a keeper.  I kept my arms wrapped around her, giving her a few minutes to come down.  When she seemed to have returned to Earth I called Alice back in and asked for Rachel's pokeball so we could get out of this place, but Rachel grabbed my arm and shook her head.  She went over to the line of servers by the wall and moved to several of them to remove data sticks.  She brought the sticks back to me and I grabbed my pants so I could pocket them.  She then pulled a new outfit from thin air and got dressed so I did too, adding her ball to my belt when Alice brought it in.  After that she led me, with the rest of the girls trailing us when they noticed we were on the move, out to the main hall and back to the room with the hologram of Earth.  She pointed to it and then to the pokedex on my belt.

I said, "I already took images of it from every angle if that's what you want."  I assumed she was not speaking because she knew she was in taming shock.  She smiled and nodded, then reached for my belt.  For a moment I thought she might be going for another round but instead she tapped the button on her pokeball recalling herself.  I guess that was her approval to go.

The climb back up sucked but, all praise to high gravity training, I made it on my own.  I was sorely tempted to just say screw it and ask one of the psychics to fly me up but I pushed through.  The last fifty feet were the hardest and my arms were ready to fall off by the time I crawled over the lip and rolled onto the floor.  If you think being a lot stronger than a normal person makes the rope climb easier you have to remember that I'm also a lot bigger than a normal person.  Even being in great shape, probably the best I've been in since high school football training, I was at least twice or three times a normal person's body weight because of my build.

After everyone assembled at the top we took a break for everyone (especially me) to catch their breath and to relax and stretch sore muscles. I sighed as I decided we were going to have to add rope climbing to our training regime.  I hated rope climbing but it worked the whole body too well to ignore it.  

After fifteen minutes I rallied everyone back into motion and we made our way back to the roof.  Nothing had disturbed our ride this time and since our descent in this building was nice and quiet the zombabes on the ground were still mobbing the government building. We took off and I sealed the boat before putting us into a steep climb.  Alice had put better seats and handholds on this boat in case of turbulence so everyone just strapped in and held on while I kept us heading up.  Once the atmosphere thinned enough I returned the cabin to a less inclined orientation, still rising but at an angle that wouldn't throw people to the back if they unbuckled and moved around.  

"Ladies and me," I intoned, "the captain has turned off the no smoking sign and you are now free to move about the cabin."  I got at least two strange looks and a muttered "so weird..." for this which I thought a decent exchange rate.

We settled in for another tedious flight.  I figured I'd let Rachel rest for a couple hours and then bring her out after her shock had worn off and maybe see if the girls wanted to help induct her into the hundred mile high club.  (I'd inducted the other girls on the way to New Manhattan although I was thinking about punching all their tickets again, you know, just to make sure they didn't expire or something.)  The girls were just breaking out the cards to start a game when there was a bright flash of light out the forward view port.  We all turned to see an honest to god flying saucer.  The saucer was a metallic blue with splashes of orange for accent.  There was a silver dome in the dorsal center of the craft and several squarish studs angled toward us along the edge we could see which I automatically assumed to be weapons.  (I suppose they could have been part of the drive system or even cosmetic but they didn't look like ice cream dispensers and I felt it safer to assume they were dangerous.)

I'd like to say there was stunned silence for a moment on my boat but without missing a beat Harley piped up, "I call dibs on the first ray gun!"

I found myself more stunned at her statement than at the UFO.  I might have floundered for words but just then my pokedex chimed.  I pulled it off my belt and saw I had an active call pending.  I tentatively hit the answer button and said, "Uh...hello?"

A man with black hair and brown eyes wearing a black uniform with a large silver circle on the front appeared on my screen.  In the background behind him were a couple of lit consoles though I couldn't see what was on them from this angle.

"I have enough weapons pointed at you to fry whatever kind of girl that ship is," he said.  "You will power down your engines and prepare to be boarded.  You'll be meeting me at the airlock with all your girls balled and on your belt which will be on the ground while your hands are in the air or I will kill you where you stand."

"Uhh...we don't have an airlock," I replied.  "This thing was never meant to be opened in space."

He stared at me for a second before cursing, "Fine!  Fuck it!  Power down your engines or you will all be getting really chummy with the vacuum."  He turned and walked away calling, "Mystic, bring them on board,"  as the screen blanked out.

"Well...fuck," I stated for everyone.  "Alright.  Ladies, gather round.  We can't risk a fight out here.  I don't know how good the armor on the boat is, but I'd rather not risk our lives to find out against a faster and better armed opponent.  I do have an idea though..."

A few moments later I shut off our thrust as directed and the boat almost immediately started to slowly tilt downward.  We were well above the thickest part of the atmosphere but still well inside the Earth's gravity well and at this altitude we didn't have nearly enough velocity to maintain orbit.  We started entering free fall but everyone was already strapped in.  The saucer moved toward us and as it did the front reshaped itself into a giant maw which swallowed us and resealed itself.  If I had to guess I'd say I was seeing my first Starlight Express.

Once we were onboard, the ship's gravity took over and the sense of motion dropped sharply.  We were set down on a landing pad that appeared to be gray-painted metal through the windows.  A door ahead of us slid open and the man we'd seen before walked in.  He had some kind of alien-looking long gun pointed in my general direction.  My pokedex buzzed again.  When I answered he said, "Now open up and come out with your girls balled and on your belt.  You will have the belt in one hand above your head and the other as far away from it as you can reach."

I deactivated the armor which folded back into the boat leaving me standing there, belt above my head in one hand with the other stretched away to my left.

"Good," he said.  "You can follow instructions.  Toss the belt over here."

"I'll do what you want," I said as I threw the belt over near him, "but I want those girls back when you're done."

"Hah!" he guffawed.  "You got guts.  I'll give ya that."  He looked me up and down, taking in my size and physique.

I sneered back at him and said, "Look, I don't care if you want to borrow my bitches for a while, hell, they're worth a try or two, but you WILL be giving them back when you're done or there will be trouble."  

"Heh," he said.  "I like yer attitude.  Tell ya what, you might make a decent lieutenant.  If your girls satisfy me I'll make you a member of my new Team Overlord.  We're going to take back the planet and rule over every single person we find.  They'll do things our way or we blast their defenses and let the zombabes in.  Then you can have whatever girls you want too.  We might even find some pure blood bitches that survived and breed em," he said with a wicked grin.

I mastered my revulsion and gave him a nasty grin in return.

"First, though, yer gonna have ta prove yer loyalty."  He gestured me to move and marched me at gun point out of the bay and down a short hallway to a holding cell.  After he locked me in he held up my belt with the five balls on it and grinning said, "I'll see ya in a bit."  As he walked away from me I nodded toward his back.  Nothing left to do at this point but kick back and wait.

Half an hour later Scarlet came to release me from my cell.

"Did he fall for it?" I asked.

"Hook, line, and sinker," she replied as she cut the bars.

"Which ball did he open?" I asked.

"The BrassKit."

I cringed.  I never thought he'd go that way but I always hoped.  It was a one in five chance, not that any of the balls on that belt had been my girls.  They were all some of the nastier ferals I had captured or scavenged.  My girls had been safely tucked away on the belt which Alice was carrying.  

"Did you girls have to finish him off?"

"Nope.  Apparently the BrassKit was randy.  She flattened his Domina in one punch and took his Arachnae's head off before she forced him to fuck her without restraints.  He tried but her pain field turned him off pretty quick.  Then when he couldn't seem to perform she just grabbed his arm and started fucking herself with it.  He flopped around like a rag doll screaming the whole time.  Jane said she's pretty sure he had an aneurism from the BrassKit's internal pain field overloading his pain receptors before she ripped the arm loose to reach better."

Even if the man was scum that was a nasty way to go.  Still, the plan came off without a hitch.  Alice had gone intangible as soon as we landed and slipped through the wall at the back of the boat.  She released Friday and Seren behind some cargo crates in the bay and Friday scanned him to make sure that he wasn't going to shoot me out of hand.  She signaled me before I dropped the armor.  In the meantime Seren concentrated on keeping the Starlight Express's mind occupied so she didn't realize anything was wrong.  Both of them stayed in the bay to concentrate on keeping the Starlight from noticing anything we didn't want her to while Alice followed us.

"Did we recapture the BrassKit?" I asked.

Scarlet paused her cutting.  "You really want that thing?  It's untamable!"

"Not really," I said.  "It just seems cruel to leave her here.  If the Starlight was at all loyal to him she'll probably kill everyone on board as soon as it realizes what happened."

Once I was free we walked back to the bay where our boat was and I checked on Friday and Seren.  "How's it going?" I asked.

"Fine," Friday said.  "Seren managed to slip into her mind without the Starlight noticing so she hasn't been fighting back.  As far as she's concerned you're still in a cell and her master is taming the hell out of a Ria."  She smiled at me.  "Shall we loot?"

I smiled back as I said, "Let's loot."

Seren interrupted us.  "I've been delving the Starlight's mind.  There are several other factions they've encountered since they left the planet."

I paused as the smile left my face.  "What are they?"

"Well, there are a few other tamers who had Starlight Expresses.  That Team guy tried to rob a couple and succeeded in one case although they tricked him and escaped before he got much more than some supplies.  He saw others leaving the planet but didn't manage to reach them before they jumped away.  The Starlight thinks most of them headed towards the asteroid belt or even left the solar system if they could teleport far enough although there might be a small group that hid away from them on the moon.  They've picked up stray signals occasionally from somewhere in the vicinity but could never pinpoint them.  ...and then there's the Limbec's.  A crew of them somehow got ahold of a Starlight of their own.  Team-guy didn't want to tangle with them so they've been keeping the planet between themselves and the pirates.  He told the Starlight that he thought they'd kill themselves off one way or another soon although he didn't say why.  It might have just been wishful thinking."

"Alright," I said while I took a moment to process.  "Is the Starlight salvageable?"

"I don't think so.  Team guy had her a long time and she was completely in love with him and adjusted to the way he did things including the abuse.  The instant she realizes what happened she's probably going to try to kill us.  I think we may have to use our emergency exit.  Even with Friday and I working together I don't think we'll be able to hold her mind at the distance we'd need to reach to be off her radar."

"Damn," I said.  "Alice is not going to be happy about abandoning another boat."  I sighed.  "Well, nothing for it.  I prefer our lives to fighting a Starlight Express in an unarmed fan boat.  I'll let her know.  If you start feeling strained let me know and we'll abandon ship immediately.  I do NOT want her waking up while we're on board."

Friday and Seren both nodded and Scarlet and I went to join the looting already in progress.  I don't know where this guy got it but there was an entire hold full of boxed food, enough to last us for months if we could take it all with us.  A ton of it was MREs.  They were not the best food but they would keep for years, a useful trait after the apocalypse.  There were also many cases of canned goods, pasta, and the like.

I had Alice go intangible and enter the dead man's cabin to retrieve the BrassKit's ball to recapture her. It was necessary to do so both to retrieve the belt with the rest of the ferals and so we could search the room.  She went up through the floor under the bed to avoid having The Brasskit attack her before she reached my spare belt.  I snagged Team-guy's raygun (it's his own fault I call him that since he never even told me his name) for Harley and found a box of oval cartridges that looked like they fit into an opening on it so I assumed they must be ammunition or power for whatever it shot.  He had a closet full of those uniforms with the O on the front and another full of skimpy lingerie and ladies' wear which I fervently hoped was for any pokegirls he got ahold of and not for his personal use.

Surprisingly there was not a lot else of value on the ship.  Perhaps it's less surprising when you consider the kind of thought process that came up with his cockamamy Team Overlord plan.  He probably just grabbed what he could, same as we did, but with less consideration than we would have had for any people he came across.  Once we had everything we could find carried down to the storage area with all the food I asked Alice to set up our emergency exit while I went and grabbed Friday and Seren.  She didn't ask why.  I guess she knew the score from our psychics.

The emergency exit was something she and I cooked up after we'd both read the books on spatial magic.  I couldn't perform the magic (yet, I hoped) but I could understand the theory on how it could be used.  The exit was a piece of wood one inch wide and an eighth thick grown into eight inch long segments with flexible connections so that the segments could fold against one another.  In it's collapsed form it looked a bit like a thick folding ruler.  When unfolded the edges would lock in place so that, once assembled, the device could be moved around and they remained stiff.

It set up into a rectangle that was seventy-two inches by forty inches on the floor.  Then Alice picked it up and placed it against the wall.  It stayed in place when she released it.  She grabbed a wooden crate and used her plant control to shape the wood planks together into a single sheet with a handle from the crate on one side.  Then she grew part of it into hinges before moving it to the exit and attaching it to the frame.  This activated the magic.  She waited a moment for full potency before opening the door.

Instead of a blank wall the door now opened onto...another door.  That door opened in the other direction into darkness.  Alice walked through and a few moments later the lights on the other side flicked on to reveal the basement of our home.  I was momentarily surprised to think that I had begun to consider that camp home but shook it off.  There'd be time for introspection later.

Even with super strength we spent half an hour humping all that food through the door and into our basement.  This would definitely keep us in kibble while we planned our next move.  Once we had everything cleared out Friday and Seren finally came through.

"We'll hold her until the connection is severed," Seren said.

I nodded to Alice.  "You're up."

She stepped forward and closed the door.  Then she made several motions over the doorway.  Nothing happened.

"Is that it?" I asked.

"No," she said.  "It doesn't seem to want to shut down.  Maybe if I..."  Choosing action instead of words she summoned her energy blade and stabbed through the door.  Then she sliced sideways with the blade at an angle so it would strike the other side of the frame before this side.  There was a loud CRACK and her blade winked out.  When she opened the door we saw only our basement wall.

"Well, I'd call that a successful field test," I said.

"Yup," Alice agreed while examining a notch she'd made in the door frame.  "I think the receiver is undamaged so I'll just need to make another transmitter and we're good to go again.  It's a shame we had to leave the boat though.  ...You know, folded up the frame wasn't that big.  Maybe I could make a door big enough for the boat to go through."

"That's not a bad idea, but remember to put the exit somewhere with more driving room," I said as I twirled my finger all around to indicate the basement with the human-sized door.   If it ended up down here we'd have a hell of a time getting it back out.  Even getting it back through the portal would be a pain in the ass.

Alice nodded and continued examining the gate so I left her to it.

Now that we were safe I decided it was time to let Rachel out.  I gathered the girls and went into the living room.  I had to interrupt Alice as well as Seren, who had enlisted Friday to help her sort our new food.  As the unofficial head chef around here, Seren was the best person to do it.  Given the growth in our group of late I made a mental note to talk to Seren and see if she'd like us to take turns playing sous chef for her.  I wouldn't recommend rotating head chefs as she really seemed to enjoy cooking and took pleasure in our enjoyment of what she created.

Rachel appeared in a flash of red light and glanced around the room before her eyes settled on me.  She smiled and stepped forward to wrap her arms around me.

"Thank you for getting me out of there," she said.

"Any time," I replied with a smile as I returned her embrace.  "Welcome to our temporary home.  It's a camp ground in west Indigo.  This is the former owner's house.  Come on," I said as I took her hand.  "I'll give you the grand tour."

I introduced her to the girls.  Then, after I'd shown her around the house, we took a short walk outside and ended up sitting on a wooden bench overlooking part of the nearby river.  The sky was just beginning to lighten.

"So," I said, "your message said you had several important pieces of information for me?  Before we get started there is one misconception I wanted to clear up.  My name is not Wilt Chamberlain.  That was a joke from an old TV show I'd seen that I put in the dex when I thought I'd have to be dealing with people.  I would've told you sooner but I figured telling someone you're using a fake name is more of an in-person kind of conversation."

She looked askance at me.  "So what's your real name then?"

"Sean Abbott," I replied.

"...never heard of you.  Are you wanted or something?"

"Not exactly.  I come from another universe, a parallel dimension if you will.  In my universe pokegirls don't exist except as stories people write on the internet.  That said, those stories were eerily accurate.  To the point that I now know that what they were writing was actually something they saw in another universe.  That idea was kicked around as more story fodder, but apparently it was not a fantasy.  Anyway, some of those stories were about people being delivered from my world into one of the infinite number of pokegirl worlds and the authorities there did not treat the world travelers well.  So, I thought it would be a good idea to use a different name as soon as the opportunity to acquire a pokedex came up...any questions so far?"

She blinked at me for a moment.  "Okay.  I suppose that makes sense...  You are still a human right?" she asked with furrowed brow.

"Yes.  In fact I'm probably more purely human than any so-called pureblood.  There probably aren't...weren't a hundred people on the planet before the zombabes took over that had DNA without any pokegirl genes at all.  Even the purest of the purebloods were still mongrels by their own standards.  They just had ancestors who liked purging records, assuming there were any to begin with.  Or they just made up a family tree and called it a day.  Ultimately the entire...bigotry, I guess I'd call it, was just another way of raising one group of people above another, or maybe at the expense of another."

She smiled at that.  "So you are a believer in parity?"

"Uh, not as such, no.  Parity is a pipe dream because even ignoring the pokegirl genes that separate us, men and women have never been the same.  We have millions of years of genetics shaping us.  This leads to one sex or the other being better at things like math or spacial comprehension.  With hard work and training it is possible for one sex to excel at something the other is dominant in, but it is not a level playing field to start with.  Additionally our biology affects our psychology.  Ultimately each sex wants some different things and where opinions differ on priorities there will always be friction as each jockeys for their position to win out...and now you've got me preaching.  Sorry.  Let me just say that I'm an equalist.  I believe everyone should be judged on their own merits and I'll leave it at that."

She smiled again.  "I think I can work with that."

"Sorry we kind of went off on a tangent there.  Any other questions?"

"Well, I'd like to know a bit about you," she said.

"Okay.  I'm a gemini.  I like tasty food of most kinds, especially cheese.  I have very eclectic tastes in music.  I love sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, and horror stories, although above all I like stories that are well-written, and I sleep on my back.  Oh, and I also find smart girls very sexy."  I finished with a smile.

Her smile widened.  "Interesting.  Alright, your turn.  I've got info you want from two angles and world-shattering news from a third.  Pick your poison."

I took a moment to parse that before replying, "I guess let's save the world-shattering till we're done using it?"

She fake-pouted for a moment before her smile returned.  "Alright then.  I managed to track down the possible locations of several magical libraries or grimoires which might help you learn magic.  Based on our GPS coordinates one of them would be within two hundred kilometers of here if the owner was home or wasn't carrying it with her.  There are two more candidates in Indigo that would be in more rural areas.  I assume you want to avoid major cities when possible which rules out most of the other candidates and universities. I found mention of a professor at Tenochtitlan who was working on dimensional portal spells but no indication on the progress of his research.  The entire region is now shrouded in dust, which patterns indicate was due to a massive explosion of some kind, so it's possible the university isn't even there anymore anyway.  I have a few other possible locations abroad although they were harder to pinpoint."

"I also tracked down two labs that were working on dimensional portal tech.  One was in Blue, the other in Ruby.  I found enough evidence that I know Indigo had a lab but couldn't find any trace of it's location.  I only got the Blue League's location because there's noone guarding their systems anymore.  Their lab is on an isolated island off the coast.  Ruby's is in the city of Sheissengruber, that's in the west, towards the Noir border."

"I'm glad one of the grimoires is close," I said.  "We'll have to plan a trip."

"Sounds like fun," she said.  Then her smile faded.  "Can you pull up the images of the holographic globe you took?  It will make explaining the next bit easier."

I led her back inside and ran a cable from my pokedex to the TV in the living room so we could see the images on a larger screen before I handed the dex to her.  She started flipping through images until she found what she wanted to show me.  It was one of the images where I stepped back and caught an entire side of the globe.  It was focussed over the series of green triangles in the Noir league.

"Now," she began, "as you can see before I found you I was mapping major zombabe activity areas just as something to do while I waited for ferality to set in.  The zombabes are in red.  For obvious reasons they tend to cluster around cities.  These green triangles represent areas where there is no zombabe activity whatsoever.  I don't mean they are being destroyed at the edges or something, I mean they stop at the edges and turn away.  They don't even try to breach them.  When I saw that happening I tapped several satellites, some of the few that fleeing morons didn't shoot down, and altered their orbits to get a view.  Can I see those thumb drives I gave you?"

I'd actually forgotten about them.  I dug the drives out of my pocket and handed them over.  She glanced at them, selected one, and slotted it into my dex.  After a few moments a slideshow popped up on the screen and she began cycling through images.  The first showed a forested mountainside from above.  The peaked roof of a house could be seen peeking through the trees.  The second was a small cluster of buildings surrounded by fields of weeds.  The third showed a craggy mountain but nothing more.  The fourth showed several city blocks.  The fifth was some kind of quarry, and the last looked like a long-abandoned airport in an arid area.  The larger buildings had caved in but the cracked runways were still visible.

"These are images of the areas contained in those triangles," she narrated.  "They all seem to feature some kind of interesting structure or the like.  The mountain one I almost missed because there were so few zombabes in the area for it to turn away.  There's no obvious structure there, but some of the other images showed openings in the mountain with old roads or train tracks leading up to them.  I believe there might be something underground there.  I couldn't tell much of what was going on until I got lucky and caught some activity here."

She switched to a video showing the quarry from a bird's-eye view.  There were grey-skinned people moving around and directing rock pokegirls to dig for something.

"Analysis of the video run through a pokedex gave a 93% probability that those people using the rock pokegirls are Hilds.  I'm not sure what they were looking for but eventually someone else showed up."

She fastforwarded until another woman appeared on screen.  She accepted something from one of the Hilds before vanishing again.  You couldn't see much of her face.  The scene changed and the same woman could be seen appearing near the cluster of buildings surrounded by fields.  This time the camera angle was lower and we got a better look at her smiling visage.

"I got lucky on the angle of the satellite with this one.  The standard pokedex returned an unknown with a 70% probability that she was a Hild, but when I ran her through the Blue League government's system it came back with a 94% probable match as the Legendary Hild.  I didn't even realize there was a different individual legendary but when I went digging I found enough files to convince me.  I don't know what she's doing, but apparently she can control the zombabes to an unprecedented degree.  She has established several enclaves and could be the key to turning this mess back around and recovering the planet."

My eyes had gotten slowly wider as I stared at the image and my brain churned.  "...I don't think we want to contact her.  In fact it's best if she never even knows we exist.  Hild does not like humans.  Or most pokegirls.  Or anything really.  She's afraid of everyone with power and wants to rule or destroy anything that she perceives might be a threat to her.  In fact..."

I finally turned to Rachel.  "I think we're looking at the source."

"What?" she said.  "What source?  Source of what?"

"Giant black waves don't just decide to exist," I said.

Her eyes shot wide for a moment and then her head whipped around to gape at the image on the screen.  "You mean-"

"Yup.  I mean what you think I mean.  She's one of the most magically powerful beings on the planet, constantly carrying out research century after century because of her fear and hatred of humans.  She could just be capitalizing on her good fortune, but I think it's well within her character and capability to have designed a spell to propagate Mega Zombie poison on a global scale... In fact, I'd be willing to bet she's responsible for every zombabe outbreak in history.  League scientists could never figure out how these zombabe outbreaks started, but what if they were just small-scale weapons tests?  She could have been preparing for this moment for decades.  Something self-propagating that turns humans and pokegirls alike into creatures that she, and only she, can control?  Yeah, I think that sounds exactly like something she would do.  The biggest clue is that she can control the zombabes.  If that was the kind of spell you could whip up on the fly someone else would have come up with it by now."

I pointed at the image of a clearly happy pokegirl on the screen.  "That's the monster...who killed the world."

Sean Abbott

Friday - Blessed Lazarus

Scarlet - Blessed Wolf Spider

Harley - Blessed Gun Bunny

Serendipity - Blessed Psifey

Alice - Blessed Archmage+

Jane - NightAngel

Ellie - Blessed Duelist

Rachel - Video Girl Upgrade