Noah "Neo" Ashfield
Mossdeep City, Hoenn
Affected RPers: N/A

The Progressive Science Expo was a place for nerds, geeks, and freaks to all convene and drool over the latest geeky crap lab rats like this chump Malcolm Hayes was showing off. Once we landed in Mossdeep City, it was easy to notice this joint was devoted to science. Most of the civilians here were researchers, technicians, mathematicians, and engineers. All the guys that could literally puke math by the gallon.

Sure, I knew most of the weaponry and technology we had was thanks to crap like this, but it was the technical garbage that made me angry enough to punch babies. This was definitely not the place I wanted to live in. I would blast heavy metal all day just to piss people up a tree.

The sun was out and the day ordinarily seemed typical. The ocean breeze made me feel like doing other things, like drinking up the beers and booze in the boat. My three-man crew got our equipment together and headed toward the expo, leaving the beer behind. Meanwhile, the camera and boom mike weren't real, they were simply containers holding our real equipment.

The crowd wasn't nearly as big as I thought it was going to be. Sure, a few people from Science Tomorrow Magazine were there, along with Computer Guru. All magazines I wouldn't be caught dead reading. And there was one other news channel team there. We blended in pretty well. Crowds were light so we wouldn't be facing too much screaming and stupidity.

I took note of the helicopter that Hayes used to arrive. Ken managed to get a tracking bug on it pretty quickly, but my plan was to get what we wanted before Hayes even left the island. Still, I could tell this schmuck was rich. Rich people always love to fly away.

In the meantime, the place was lightly guarded. The guards here were armed with handguns and nothing more. It seemed like things around here couldn't possibly be more boring for these guys. And from the look of it, it seemed like these guys hadn't seen anything in years. I imagined they were probably out of practice at that.

The expo was pretty big. Open, airy, lots of stupid triangular windows in a dome formation, white pillars, marble floors, potted palm trees, and other expensive crap. It was hard to resist the urge to just break something. Couldn't be by accident either.

Hayes was just one event of the expo. There were six others that went into other various crap that I wouldn't care about. One was ancient archaeology. Sure didn't give a crap about that. Those tribals were dead and I didn't care about their pots or ugly figurines. Another was for future communication. So what? I figured I'd just buy whatever was at the store in due time. But there were always some people that ate this stuff up. Nerds.

Mission step one was to act like we weren't actually all that interested in Hayes's stuff. I actually made it look like we were interviewing the joker by the space exhibit. He went on and on about describing a planet out there that didn't have a dang hint of life on it anyway. Who the hell cares about it then? It sounded like he was trying to sell it. Idiot. I might as well be buying a star.

Next exhibit, the botanist girl. All I really cared about was that she looked hot. While she was going on about some kind of sunflower or whatever thing, I was trying to picture her naked. In only minutes, her lecture was over and only when she leave did I snap out of it.

Then, we moved onto Hayes. And this was where the fun would begin.


Janine "Angel" Price
AMS Deathwing, Mirage Island, Hoenn
Affected RPers: N/A

PokéTarts had reached that stage between "hot seller" and "there's gotta be something wrong with this stuff." Trainers were becoming concerned that their Pokémon were quickly becoming PokéTarts junkies and now downing entire handfuls at a time. As many trainers had discovered, Pokémon were turning into whiny, greedy beggars if they didn't get their fix.

But most of the general public still refused to see it as a problem, which was funny. People just figured hey, it's a popular item, Pokémon love it, ain't broke, don't fix it! And hey, I was cool with that! In the meantime, production of this stuff was rolling along and each bag of the stuff was a pretty much guaranteed seller.

In the meantime, we finished and finalized the successful results of Project MEND! Total, sheer victory on this one! Team Aqua quickly realized what MEND does when we pulled the bow and wrapping paper off of this baby.

Regeneration. It was that simple! If you got shot, stabbed, burnt, pierced, impaled, or whatever form of wounding the other side came up with, all you had to do was give it a handful of seconds or so, and the injury would start healing totally on its own! Now big injuries, like getting your hand chopped off and such would take a few days to grow back, but you would totally grow another working hand! It was freaky and weird, but kinda cool in a way! But, unfortunately, it didn't exactly make people immortal. Total destruction of the head or heart would still be deadly. You could still get killed by drowning, falling into lava, or getting crushed to death by a whatever. But minor and even some serious injuries... no problem! Bandage sales go down 100%!

MEND was kept under tight wraps. Team Aqua only. We weren't even thinking of selling this thing. It meant whoever thought of fighting us was in for a big surprise! Among all the other things, of course. Now, how to get MEND? It was a special kind of injection that was only being given in the labs. We really didn't want anyone to steal this.

Meanwhile, I was working on the Metamorphosis project. Since I wasn't making too much progress with getting a lucky Team Aqua volunteer to try on a new Pokémon tail, I decided to go for it myself. Had a tough time picking, though! But in the end, I decided to go with a Furret's. Every Furret had a nice, cute tail to work with, so I figured I'd try that out.

Tiantus had plenty of Pokémon DNA samples and Furret wasn't exactly the most legendary Pokémon out there. So, I decided to work the Furret DNA with the mutagen I created and worked through the configurations to give myself a nice Furret tail. Now, I needed to compensate the mutagen with a threshold value to make sure my body could actually move it around and feel natural as opposed to being a limp coil of useless fluff that I would drag everywhere. That'd suck.

Once it was ready, I figured hey, time to give it a spin. So, I took the syringe, jabbed myself, and inserted the mutagen. Easy money.

First check was it was working quickly. Great! If it was too slow, no one would have bothered with it. So at least the mutagen's effective speed was great! So, within just a few seconds, a nice, fluffy Furret tail tore its way out above my butt, through my jeans and lab coat, and extended for a few more feet. So far, I couldn't feel it, but it was still working so I give it a little time. It was really quite a big tail!

Then, I tried to move it, and hey, that was working too! Wow, it was crazy, having a tail was like having an extra arm that could bend in any direction you wanted it to! Everything seemed to be working great! No crazy cancer or brain damage either! And those potential volunteers didn't trust me!

And then it happened.

I felt pretty good about the mutagen's success, and then as luck would have it, I suddenly realized the mutagen wasn't stopping at the tail. Nope. I suddenly realized I was growing brown and beige Furret fur all over my body, and then I felt like my bones were starting to shift and transform as well.

"No, no, no, you can stop now!" I pleaded, as if the mutagen could actually hear me. "Yikes, why isn't it stopping!?"

But it didn't. It kept on going and going because hey, the mutagen was dumb and though well, to make the threshold work, the cells near the tail need to be transformed. And the ones next to that as well. There wasn't really any special kind of stop indication that said "this is Janine's DNA that you're not supposed to mess with!" Nope, it just decided to mess with everything!

I was coated from head to toe with Furret fur, my freaking arms and legs were sucked into my body, leaving me with only hands and feet, and my ears grew long and pointy. Meanwhile, my entire skeletal frame was changed around with a lot of crunch, snap, and pop sounds that could have make me puke.

I felt like I had been turned from a human into a furry Slinky with hands and feet. Oh sure, it was extra cute, but I didn't want it to turn out this way!

End result: 100% Furret, tail and all. 0% human. Way to go, Janine! My clothes were now just in a pile while I slinkyied my way out of them. Crap, I mean, wow, being a Furret was really cool, cute, and fun, but it was not what I wanted. Plus really, turning people into Pokémon, Bill figured out how to do that years ago. This was like me suddenly inventing the HAM radio... again.

Oh well, time to get back to work and figure out what I did wrong!