C-Sealed in Another Body Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Inky-Black Hearts

A grunt of pain escaped from my lips as I regained consciousness. I sat up rather slowly, as the throbbing headache that filled my head would only let me go so fast.

"Ugh... Did someone get the species number of the Pokemon that just hit me?" I moaned, rubbing the back of my head gently with a vine.

I glanced around the room I was in. It almost looked like a stereotypical office complex, but something definitely looked off. The walls, windows, and floors were all of such a quality of clean, it was if the entire building had been submerged in bleach five minutes ago. Yet, there wasn't a single piece of furniture. Only a labyrinth of cubicles remained.

How did I come to end up here? I had never even been in an office before, much less one that seemed so off-kilter.

Another groan attracted my attention to the being sprawled out beside me. Sammy! Somehow the Sigilyph had ended up here as well! Sammy grunted once more before prying his eye open. He shook his head slowly as he retook his normal aerial stance.

He quickly scanned the room. "Where are we?"

I shrugged. "Beats me. I don't suppose you remember how we got here, do you?"

"No..." He resumed his examination of the floor. "This place slightly resembles a  Pokextinction R&D lab, but it appears to be quite deserted."

He pulled out a small, red, PDA-looking device and fiddled with a few of the buttons. "Heart scanner shows only three major life forces coming from within this entire building. We are two of them, but there is no telling what the other could be. With any luck, it will just be a rat."

I turned my attention to the lone door visible in the building. "Let's just get out of here. This place creeps me out." I motioned towards the exit.

I grasped the doorknob and twisted it. The knob itself freely spun with the turning, as if it was not actually attached to the door. I shoved on the frame, but it refused to budge.

"Apparently one does not simple walk out of Mordor." I said.

Sammy engulfed a window latch with Psychic and visibly strained to move it. After a minute of struggling, he gave up, and panting said, "The windows seem to be jammed as well..."

"Blarg..." I muttered. I glared at the wooden door. "I'll get us out. With Rock Smash!"

Lowering my shoulder, I slugged the door like a football tackle. Normally such a blow would have contained more than enough power to crumble even a mighty stone, but this sheet of wood didn't even splinter.

Suddenly, the lights started flickering vigorously, and the ground quivered violently, as if the the structure itself was angry that I had tried to break a part of it. But as quick as it had started, the odd phenomenon ceased.

"Whoa.. Let's NOT do that again. Intimidating." I shuddered.

Sammy leered at me intensely. I could only stare back at him with an equally strong look, but mine was of nervousness. "Er... Should I try again then?"

Sammy shook his head. "No, there is something taped to your leaf." He grabbed it and yanked it free.

I winced at the sting of adhesive trying to pull the surface along with it. It seemed like the leaf couldn't be a source of pain since it wasn't of animal origin, but I guess to Bayleef, it might as well be akin to hair.

"It is a note. I think." Sammy said. Sammy unfolded the sheet of paper and studied its contents. "Find the Black Heart. What is that supposed to mean?"

Shrugging, I answered, "I don't know, but I have a bad feeling we'll find out before we're done here."

A rodent darted through the shadows, remaining almost utterly invisible except for a small portion of tail that couldn't manage to squeeze in. Sammy noticed the movement. "See? I was right, just a rat."

I strained to see the animal's face within the darkness. "I... Don't think that's a normal mouse."

Boy, was I right. Suddenly, a Rattata pounced from the shadows, hissing as it launched itself at me.

I managed to catch it around the waist only inches from the huge rodent slicing open my face with its razor-sharp fangs. It struggled to free itself from my vine's grasp. The Rattata was surprisingly strong and fierce for something of its stature; I could barely keep it still.

"I am not sure if this thing is Pokextinction or one of us." Sammy said upon examining it. "If it was a Pokextinctionist agent, he would not have attacked, he would have sounded some kind of alarm. And if he was one of us, he wouldn't have had any reason to attack."

The Rattata was turning out to be quite a handful, so I had to pin it against the floor. "Well it has to be a Pokeuman; I mean, there aren't any real Pokemon left!"

Something registered out of the corner of my eye, some sort of motion.

"Look out!" I shouted at Sammy. A Koffing flew out of nowhere and fired a bit of Sludge at him.

Sammy moved his head at the last moment, and the goop zoomed past only inches from his face. He smashed the Koffing into the wall with a Psychic.

"What is going on here! Life scanner only showed ONE other being. Not two!"

I grunted with the effort of keeping the Rattata pinned. "Is this really the time to be worried about that?"

The Rattata sunk its fangs into my vines. Yelping in pain, I did the first course of action that entered my head. Which happened to be slinging the rodent at the Koffing.

They both fell to the floor, and after shaking off the blow took off towards the opposite side of the floor.

"After them! We have to figure out what is going on here!" Sammy commanded.

We bolted after the duo, dashing down the isles of cubicles. We managed to keep up with their pace until they ducked into a stairwell. Everyone bounded up the stairs, but the Rattata and Koffing reached the top first and rounded the single corner out of our sights for only a moment. We sprinted around the corner ourselves, but...

"They're gone..." I muttered.

Around the corner was an extremely long hallway without any doors, windows, or anything else that could allow them to exit prematurely. Yet, looking around, it was obvious that the fleeing 'mons had simply... vanished.

"That is impossible! They can not have simply dissolved into midair."

Looking at the lights, I pointed them out to Sammy. "All the bulbs are going bad,and it's really dark at the other end of the hall." I motioned towards the other end, drenched in shadows," They must have gotten far enough down to where we couldn't see them." I reasoned.

He shrugged. "I suppose it is possible. Let us press on; perhaps we will find some hints on what is going on in this place."

At the other end of that hallway was another corner, and around that was ANOTHER corridor. This one; however, was very short and merely lead to a singular door.

Sammy spoke as he yanked the door open. "Only one way they could have gone."

The room revealed to be inside appeared to be old, dusty lab of some sort. Tools of all sorts were scattered randomly about the tables. Spoonulas, bunsen burners,  and miscellaneous papers were to name a few, but the most interesting items were the test tubes.  A few were filled with chemicals of various colorations, but the large majority contained samples of a dark-purple, viscous gunk.

"What IS this stuff?" I asked disgustedly as I pulled the vile up to my face. I swished bottle around, but the goop was so thick and so plastered against the glass that it completely ignored the motion of its container.

"I am not entirely sure, perhaps sewer grime?" He glanced at a journal laying atop the film of papers. "Perhaps the answer lies in here?"

Sammy plucked the notebook from the pile and started flipping through the pages, skimming each as he went. He paused momentarily on a page before announcing "Listen to this.", then started reading aloud.

"Month IX, Day XX
Our trails, tribulations, and experimentations have finally paid off. This new, semi-liquid gel has the properties the boss has been looking for. This gel, labeled F.E.A.R., or Forced Engagement of Atomic Reconstruction, can revert any of those pesky Pokeuman freaks. The gel can easily be administered via a gun-propelled shot into the subject's blood stream. Once there, it begins to spread throughout their body, locating the genes that caused their original transformations, and deactivating them.  When the genes are switched off, subjects should revert back to their original human forms. However, we have examined an unfortunate side-effect. It appears that those who have said gene, but it has remained dormant, the gel will actually cause them to activate, transforming them instantly, as shown by one of our own lab workers. A machine will soon be put into production to mass produce more samples of F.E.A.R."

He looked up from the book with a grimace. "This certainly is not good. If they managed to make a machine to mass produce this substance, then we can all kiss our Pokeuman existence good-bye."

I whipped around to the rest of the papers. "Come on! There has to be something in here we can use to stop this!  A way to destroy the junk, blueprints to the machine, something!"

I was only turned away from him for a moment, if even that, when Sammy yelled out, as if in pain. I casually glanced over my shoulder, expecting to see him suffering from a paper cut or something, but instead found him collapsed on the ground with a Venomoth gnawing on his scalp.

"Another one? Really?" I thought as I charged towards my friend's attacker.

A swish of air followed the swing of a purple-hued spike. If I had been any faster or started earlier, the needle would've torn straight through my chest. A natural response to the astonishing assault meant I quickly stumbled over my own feet and smashed my face into the floor.

Peeling my head off the ground, I came face to face with a very irate looking Nidorino.

This was getting ridiculous. Now I was fully on board with Sammy, where were all these other Pokemon spawning from?

I gulped. "You're on your own buddy," I called out, "I've got my own problems here."

The Nidorino made a lunging headbutt in an attempt to skewer me with its horn again, but I managed a rolling dodge.

"It wouldn't turn out very pretty if one of those Poison Jabs manage to land. Getting impaled would be horrific enough, but the type disadvantage would probably put me out of commission." I thought.

In one swift and fluid motion, I leaped from the floor onto my feet and bashed an Ancientpower against the Nidorino's face.

The Nidorino staggered from the blow, but quickly shook it off and made a charge. I fired a volley of Magical Leaf, but they managed to do nothing more than bounce off it's thick hide.

In a split moment, the purple beast was upon me, raking my skin with Fury Swipes. Each swipe stung worse and worse as each progressively dug deeper into my skin. Quickly, I knocked him off utilizing a well placed Rock Smash to his stomach. One last blast of Ancientpower smashed it into a wall and it crumbled to the flooring.

I looked over to Sammy just in time to see the Venomoth wither to the tile floor as well. The two of them struggled up and scampered off, but we were too busy catching our breath to even consider chasing them an option.

When I finally had the energy, I pulled my head up to look at Sammy. "H-How... You ok?" I clumsily asked between gasps of air.

"Could... be better." He motioned towards his back. A closer examination reviled the Venomoth had been fairly successful in its attack, as Sammy's back was littered with bite wounds and other smaller, assorted cuts.

I raised my leaf to a near ninety-degree angle, aiming it at the injured Sigilyph. "Hold still, I got this." I assured. A pulsing beam of pink rings began flowing from the leaf, coursing through the air, and finally cascading over the battle-scarred Sigilyph. As the energy careened across Sammy's body, the wounds began to slowly mend themselves, and before too long it was almost as if they had never existed. Ah, I had been told how useful Heal Pulse would be in the field, and now I was seeing how true that was.

Sammy inspected the handiwork before triumphantly flashing the closest thing to a thumbs-up he could. He began to rise up from his rest, but as he did, his hand bumped into one of the glass vials, sending it rolling across the floor.

The clatter of glass on tile caught his attention long enough to see a strange reaction occurring inside. Sammy scooped it up and presented it to me.

"Take a look inside!" The tube was one of the many which contained the suspicious ooze, but something was odd about this sample. The little that actually remained in the glass at this point was smoking and shriveling up into nonexistence.

"Something that we did during the brawl must have disturbed the chemical make-up or something." I guessed.

Sammy glared intently at the vile with an askew face, when the look abruptly morphed into one giving the impression that he had discovered that the solution had been in front of his face the entire time.

He snatched up the journal he had been previously reading from. His 'hands' careened across the pages as he eagerly flipped around the book for the passage he suspected was in there. And he apparently found it, for he halted unexpectedly and began reading.

"Month IX, Day XXVI
We seem to have encountered a small kink in our plan. Further field testing of project F.E.A.R. on attacking or captured Pokeumans shows that some of the freaks seem to have the ability to resist or even overcome the gel's inner-bodily assault. Closer examination seems to confirm that those with a natural ability or move to heal themselves will purge their systems of the gel as well. Lab tests conclude that the atomic structure of the gel cannot remain stable under these intense conditions of induced self-regeneration. Our lab technicians are currently working on a solution for this dilemma; however, until such time as they are successful, this information should be treated as top-secret and not be allowed to leave the lab building under any conditions."

I got the idea. "Oh! So, when I used Heal Pulse On you-"

"The sample of gunk beside me was within the regeneration radius as well." Sammy finished the sentence for me. "Do you see, Cecil? That weapon we needed to rid us of this epidemic is YOU!"

A broad grin spread across my face, but it quickly melted as I came to another bitter realization. "Wait, if this information was so valuable, why would they just leave it out in the open without anyone around to protect it?"

Sammy shrugged. "Does it really mater? Maybe we got lucky, perhaps they forgot. What's important here is that we can destroy the samples here!"

He swiftly nabbed all the flasks containing the goop from the lab and carefully arranged them into a pile on the floor. He backed away slightly before announcing, "Fire when ready!"

Aiming my leaf again, this time at the tubes, I released the beam of glowing pink rings once more. The blobs of gel hissed and sizzled the moment the Heal Pulse made contact. It bubbled up and shriveled away into nothingness as I poured the energy on. Within the minute, nothing remained inside the glasses.

Sammy beamed at the the rousing success, or at least, would have been if he had any traces of a visible mouth on his face. "Excellent. But we can not stop now, we should do a thorough search for more samples, or the mass production machine."

I nodded in agreement. "Yes, I suppose you're right. Then we can figure out how to escape from this horrible building. You know," I chuckled, "I would've figured we would have encountered that 'Black Heart' the note talked about by now. Could that goop have been what it men-"

A deep, rumbling roar emanated from the depths of the building, shaking the whole foundation and effectively killing my statement. I winced as I realized we were not done here.

Slowly, I sighed. "We're going to have to find out what that was, aren't we?" Sammy did not need to answer, in the back of my mind I knew we did.

Groaning, I sarcastically muttered "Murphy's Law, yay!..."
<hr<
The roars persisted and only increased in volume as we charged down the stairs. The first thing we noticed when we landed at the bottom was another set of stairs leading down into what could only be the basement.

I glanced at Sammy. "Were... Those stairs there before? Before we went up?" He shook his head. "I didn't think so..." I sighed.

Common sense was practically screaming in my ear to stop right there, but my sense of duty almost literally dragged me down the staircase.

The roaring drastically amplified the moment we stepped into stone-brick walled subterranean corridor. But not only that, their was an audible screeching and whirring of machine gears mixed in to it as well. As Sammy went for the doorknob, I was half-scared some kind of tv villain, a galvanic mechomorph or something, would be waiting for us on the other side.
The room was not illuminated enough to see three inches outside the glow of outside the doorway. However, as thick as the shadows were, they couldn't mask the auditory working of factory machines.

There was a slight raspy gasping for air from somewhere within the mechanical ticking, and an equally vulnerable voice came afterwords. "Who is it that dares to intrude upon my lair?"

Sammy called out a demand into the pitch-black. "How about you tell us who you are to set up base here?"

As if responding to his request, the lights ever so gradually turned on, revealing the sinister setup that the room housed. A large machine was in fact the central point of the room. Actually, it was the only point of the room, as it was devoid of anything other than the colossal device. The design seemed to match the descriptions of large printing presses I had heard about, and there seemed to be a great glob of a purple-black goo plastered on the front panels.

"I am the force in control of this building! Anything beyond my anarchy must be eliminated!" The voice from before echoed through the room.

Except, now that the lights were on, I could clearly see that the voice had no recognizable origin point. No one seemed to be in the room other than ourselves, and there was nothing to hide behind, as the only object inside was mounted to the wall. There wasn't any sort of speaker system set up, I highly doubted anyone would stow away in the machine itself and risk a smashing from the gears. So then where was the voice coming from?

Sammy grew rather defiant in the face of this unknown tormentor. "You will not be eliminating tonight! We are men on a mission, and we refuse to be taken down!"

The machine whirred back to life as if it actually resented Sammy's comments. The reboot was quite jarring, as nothing was even near the control panel that adorned the front.

"They... They did this to me... The lab workers. Made me into this... monster... Then left me here to die for their screw-up!" The stain covering the mechanism's front began to move. Two pairs of three-fingered hands morphed from the gunk, and a faintly head shaped mound rose from the top. That stain definitely was not the ink it had first been thought to be, it was alive! That mound of goo was a Muk!

"My hatred for them grew with each moment that passed as I remained imprisoned here. I learned to use this new, hideous body for things even I thought might have been extreme. But as I quickly concluded they weren't coming back with any kind of antidote for me, I also decided such actions were entirely appropriate. I myself couldn't leave this cage, but I found ways around such trivial things. I figured, if they weren't going to correct their mistakes, they had no meaningful purpose to me, and as such, had no reason to continue existing around me. I made a name for myself as I slowly took them all out, one by one, making sure each was more gruesome than the last. I am the inky-dark menace! I AM THE BLACK HEART!" The conclusion of his rant boomed loud enough to rattle the building above us once more.

"Wait, you're the Black Heart?" I gasped. When the note we found said to destroy the Black Heart, I assumed that if we had to deal with it, it would be an object, not a living person! I wasn't sure I could bring myself to kill anybody.

"So you must be the worker who was tainted by that project F.E.A.R... The other scientists locked you away for their own protection, so you up and killed every last one of them in retaliation." Sammy concluded.

"You certainly catch on pretty fast for a freak. I've been observing you for quite some time now; I know what you're doing here. And I'm afraid your petty games must cease here." The machine began to clunk and clatter as the Black Heart talked. "I cannot allow you to stop me, so I'm afraid that this shall be your final rest!"

The mechanism revved into high gear as he belted out the last threat. Pipes that ran from his Muk body into the machine began pumping, as if they were draining grime or something from his body. The insides of the mechanism rumbled as it proceeded eject several large blots of a purple hued-black ink onto the floor.

The gasping I produced must have been audible when the grime started moving and morphed into the shapes of a Crobat, Weezing, Venomoth, and Nidoking. "It's... Making it's own minions?" I bitterly growled under my breath.

"Now it all makes sense!" Sammy blurted out. "The heart-scanner only detected one other living thing because the Black Heart was the only living being. He's created the others out his own body mass using that giant printer!"

The group of ink-pokemon split up, the Nidoking and Weezing charge after me, and the Venomoth and Crobat made a beeline for Sammy.

I lept back to avoid a Horn Drill from the Nidoking, but the Weezing blasted a Sludge Bomb across my back as I did. I turned to deal with the Weezing, but then the Nidoking hit me with a Fire Punch.

"This isn't working very well!" I shouted at Sammy as I bolted from my two aggressors. Sammy didn't have the time to answer, as I caught him beating down the Venomoth with a Smack Down.

"Ok, guess I'm going to have to be on my own for this one." I grunted. I twisted around on the dime and fired off a round of Magical Leaf at the Nidoking. The attack slowed him down enough to allow me to take on the Weezing by itself. I smashed it to the ground with a Rock Smash.

That is when the weird started happening. The Weezing collided into the floor with a great amount of force, then popped like a water balloon, spreading ink across the stone floor. And as soon as it happened, the printing press booted to life and produced another Weezing.

"Sammy, we can't keep fighting like this! Every time we defeat one, the press just pumps out a new one!"

Sammy broke away from his group and floated to me. "You are right. We have to put stop to the machine itself." He glared up at the press, examining its individual visible components. "Got it. I will cut off the piping feeding the print, you jam up the inside gears."

"And how am I supposed to do that? I irritatedly asked .

He simply smirked as he took off for the Black Heart. "You are smart, come up with something."

I didn't get much time to think, the Nidoking and Weezing were on me in an instant. I could see that the Venomoth and Crobat were continuing their assault on Sammy as well. I blasted an Ancientpower at the Nidoking's torso, but it instead barreled straight through. The ink dissolved into a puddle without its core supporting it.

The machine whirred to life once more as the Black Heart started to produce another ink-pokemon. Thinking on my feet, I grabbed the Weezing and thrusted it into the opening the ink was being expelled from.

I normally wouldn't do something so violent, but this was a rare occasion: I knew it was only a remotely controlled ink blob. Which was actually what I was counting on. The Weezing crashed into the inner workings of the mechanism and splattered everywhere, gumming up the press.

I knew the solution wasn't permanent, but would buy me the time to figure out what to do next, without having to deal with the annoying poison-types.

I paced back and forth, trying to come up with something I could do. A minute later, and I still had no plan, and it was quite obvious the gears would soon break free of their gooey bindings.

"Come on, come on! I'm running out of time! Just need one idea. Gah, why do I have to be so dense sometimes!"

My face illuminated as I realized I had given myself an excellent hint. I summoned an Ancientpower rock and held it above my head, positioning myself for a perfect throw. "Alright, just like in dodgeball. Let's see just how dense my rocks are." I hurled the stone into the machine. The rock wedged itself in between several gears just as they broke free and started spinning again. Try as they might, the cogs just couldn't break the stone, and the entire machine screeched to a standstill.

Sammy fought with the flying foes for a moment where he could sever the pipes. He flung the Crobat across the room with a Psychic and clipped the Venomoth's wings with Smack Down. The two plummeted to the ground and spattered on impact.

A gruesome metallic grinding noise made him look over at the machine. No more ink-pokemon were coming out of it, and Cecil was doing a little victory dance. "Heh, looks like the kid pulled it off." He murmured.

"Hey, do not get cocky, we still have more to do before we are done!" He shouted. He turned his attention to the Black Heart once more. "Alright, now it's time for my end of the bargain. Let's see how tough you are, Mr. Black Heart."

He soared up to the Muk's height and prepared to slice at the pipes. As he had anticipated, the Muk swatted at him, trying to keep him away, but nothing was going to stop Sammy now. With a flap of his wings, he sent an Air Slash flying. The Black Heart tried to block it with his hand, but the razor of air easily tore right through the gooey mess and and the pipes as well.

The Black Heart screamed out in anger. "MY MACHINE! You broke my precious press!"

Sammy slowly descended to my side. He gave me something resembling a thumbs up, but it was a little hard to tell with the three-pronged hand thing. "Hmph, that was not too bad." He said.

"You're right. If this is the worst you have to deal with, I don't see what the big deal is." I replied.

He chuckled. "If only everything were this easy. But sadly no, this just happened to be a relatively tame mission. So, what should we do about this joker?" He pointed over to the Black Heart. Except... He was no longer there. Not anywhere, actually.

Sammy scanned the room with a disgruntled look. "Where could he have gone? I only looked away for a mere moment, he couldn't have possibly run off."

The press made a slight groaning sound that drew our attention back to it. "I thought we shut it down for good?" I gulped.

"We did. But not the Black Heart."

The machine creaked more as ink began to pour from every possible crack at an alarming rate. The paneling bulged until the entire thing erupted in a mass of ink.

The mound of grime now laying on the floor rose up, drawing in all the remaining ink and metal shrapnel.

"What is that?" I nervously asked.

"I think our mission just got a lot less tame." Sammy muttered.

The mound reached its way up to the ceiling  nearly 15 feet up and sprouted arms, a mouth, and eyes. "I've told you before you simpletons," The blob gasped with the same raspy voice the Black Heart had, but it sounded a bit more sloppy now, "you cannot stop my rampage! I won't be satisfied until everyone of you freaks and those traitorous Pokextinctionists have been eliminated at my hand!"

Sammy shook his head in disdain. "Somehow the Black Heart has combined himself with the parts of his printing press and transformed into some kind of super Muk." He turned to me with a look of stern determination. "We have got to stop him here. If he gets out there is no telling what kind of destruction he will cause."

Without so much as a nanosecond to register what he'd said, Sammy took off without me, soaring directly at the gargantuan Muk. He fired a few Air Slash at the mound, but they did little more than make a small gash that regenerated in a heartbeat.

The Black Heart, who had been ignoring the two of us and was focusing on trying to break through the door, turned to face Sammy as he attacked. The Muk flung a Gunk Shot at the Sigilyph, barely even taking enough time away from his door breaking to even aim.

The gunk rocketed through the air, clipping Sammy's arm as it went. It barely made contact with him, but the force behind the flight was mighty enough to send him spiraling to the ground.

Sammy landed on the floor, clutching his arm and crying out in agony. His side was sizzling and his arm was nowhere to be seen, instead, a very tan human hand was starting to sprout.

"Heal Pulse....  NOW!" He barked. I quickly obligated, blasting his side with the ray of pink. The sizzling stopped, the hand withered back, and another Sigilyph arm quickly regenerated.

Sammy exhaled with a sigh of relief and loured at the mass of slime. "The F.E.A.R. has not forced an evolution to this state, it is compromised him entirety." He turned to face me. "We can not touch him, or risk turning human again."

"Then what can we do?" I frowned. "Your attacks sure didn't seem to faze him at all."

The Sigilyph chuckled as if I should not have had to ask the question to know what to do. "Is it not obvious? If it is made of the F.E.A.R., we must combat it as such." He pointed to the Black Heart's head. "I will fly up and keep it distracted, while you can use Heal Pulse on the base."

I slowly nodded. The plan had a few holes in it, but it was the best idea we had, so I knew we were going to have to try it at the very least.

"Be careful..."

The Muk was pounding on the wall with great force as he attempted to break free from his makeshift prison. The walls were comprised of a thick layer of solid concrete, but the absolute force of the monster was slowly starting to produce cracks in the wall.

"Hey big ugly! Your dad was was toxic waste and your mom was a toilet!" Sammy buzzed around the Black Heart's head like a fly, taunting him.

I watched Sammy skillfully weave in and out of attacks. I snapped my focus back to the task at hand, there was no time to worry about him, I had a task to complete.

The mass of ink shriveled up the moment the ray of pulsing pink rings made contact with it. Sammy was doing his job very well, the Muk was so preoccupied fending off the Sigilyph to notice its shrinking body mass. The goop naturally tried to fill in the gaps, but residual energy from Heal Pulse stopped it short.

All was going according to plan, until the shrinking gel uncovered what looked like a... human hand. As the mess retreated more, a body slowly appeared on the other end.

The lab-coated man weakly pulled his glasses-covered face up and, with noticeable amount of effort managed to mutter, "Please.... Help me..." in a last-ditched gasp for air.

I grasped his wrist, being extra careful not to touch any of the grime he was coated in and attempted to tow him from the Muk's hold.

As hard as I tried, the sludge refused to release its captive. I grunted and strained, but I couldn't do anything. "S...Sammy! Help me get this guy outta here!" I grunted.

Sammy saw the guy buried within the gunk and zipped down to assist. Unfortunately, this also meant the Black Heart was free to notice what was going on. He roared out in anger when he saw the both of us pulling the person out.

He swung a giant fist just as the two of us removed the man from the grime's suction. I closed my eyes and waited for the impact, but... it didn't come. When I dared to look again, the entire pile was collapsing in upon itself.

"What... What's going on?" I asked.

"The man..." Sammy motioned to the slime-covered human sprawled across the ground beside us, unconscious. "He is the scientist the journal referred to. The gel must not have actually changed his body, only taken it over using the pokeuman gene as a base, transforming itself into a Muk around him. When he was removed, the grime had nothing to use as a base, and decomposed."

The whole explanation sounded a little crazy, but Sammy was good with this kind of chemical stuff, so I just nodded and assumed that it made sense.

Suddenly, the entire world was plunged into absolute darkness, yet I could still see Sammy's body and my Bayleef body in perfect light. "W-What's going on?" I timidly asked.

Sammy did not answer, but chuckled slightly into his hand, head lowered and shaking.

Streams of electric-blue light shot across the dark sky before everything faded to a harsh, searing white light. When the blinding faded away, I was face to face with a silver-white Ninetales.

"Mi-Miss Vivian?" I stuttered at our base's head of PRT operations. Alright, if any of this made sense before, it certainly did not now.

"Mm, you two work together much better than I had anticipated." She purred with her normal half-open eyes, demeaning look adorning her face. "I had half expected you to not even figure out the cure for F.E.A.R., and I certainly didn't foresee you managing to defeat the Black Heart! I must say, I am quite impressed."

I looked around with a look of absolute confusion. "Uh... Wha- How... Someone explain what's going on to me."

Vivian smirked smugly. "The entire experience you just went through was a PRT training simulation. None of it was real, I was in control the entire time. I was testing how compatible of partners you two were. And it certainly seems as though I was correct to put you together."

"I agree entirely, Miss Vivian." Sammy crossed his arms and nodded his head. He then proceeded to turn and face me and extended his hand to me. "So, how about it? Partner?"

The entire thing was simply a simulation? A make-believe test? But the pain inside it... That was real. The slash marks still lingering on my body proved that. And Ms. Vivian had said she expected us to do much worse... She was expecting us to get mauled more severely...

"Y-yeah... Partners...." I shook the Sigilyph's hand cautiously. As much as I was beginning to feel like the whole idea of being in the PRT was a bad thing, Sammy was a friend sure enough.

Vivian flipped her hair back. "Excellent. You can start working together effective immediately."