Chapter 2: Warmongers

November 13

Brock and Dawn walked alongside Ash through the streets of Hearthome, their hands brushing their upper arms methodically. The slight chattering of Dawn's teeth resonated in Ash's head like a gong, the light emanating from the egg nearly disorienting him. The sweat that dribbled down his chin boiled as hot as a summer day. Ash wiped a forehead of sweat into his hand.

"Isn't it a little cold for this time of year?" Dawn asked.

Brock shrugged. "Doesn't bother me much."

"What're you guys talking about?" Ash said, raising his eyebrows in genuine concern. "It's hot as hell out here!"

Everyone but Ash stopped walking and stared at him, mild shock registering on their faces. Pikachu's expression thought that Ash had been joking.

"Ash, it's barely thirty degrees outside, and we're all wearing short sleeved shirts!" Brock said. "You mean to tell me that you're not cold at all?"

"Ya kidding me?" Ash threw the egg up in the air playfully, laughing as he caught it mere inches from the ground. "These clothes are enough to make me stuffy!"

Dawn sighed before her eyes went wide. "Ash, watch out!" she cried, tugging him to her side. He laughed when he saw that he nearly ran into a lamppost.

"Who da hell put tha' thing dere?" Ash slurred. The lamppost suddenly blurred, becoming a slender, albeit undefined gray blob. His footsteps were no longer uniform, but drunken.

Pikachu looked at him uneasily. "Pika, ka chu?"

"I'm fine, dammit!" Ash shouted. Bystanders looked up from their morning coffee to see him waving his arms around madly, the egg barely staying in his grasp.

"Ash, gimme that egg before you drop it!" Dawn demanded.

He said nothing, prompting Dawn Brock to yank it from his loose hands. He opened his mouth to shout at him, but his wooziness brought him to the ground, unconscious.

"Miss Skylar?"

The executive looked up from Mahon's desk to see one of the grunts standing over her. "Yes?"

"You're needed over at Surveillance Operatives," said the grunt. There was no emotion about his face, only formality. "I'm not sure what for, though. No one's told me anything, yet."

Skylar sighed and turned to Mahon. "I'll be back in a sec."

Mahon grinned and nodded. "Good luck with Jasper, if he's there."

"I'll try."

The grunt escorted her to the elevator silently. He walked in first when the lift door opened, but Skylar gestured for him to get out.

"I can get there on my own, thanks," she mumbled. "I run that division, after all."

He merely nodded and walked out, leaving Skylar on her own to press the button to Floor Six, where the Surveillance Operative Division was housed.

Another lowly private met her the moment she stepped off of the elevator. "Ma'am, we found something that we need you to see," he said. Without another word, the grunt led her to a large wall of television monitors. She had to adjust her eyes against the bright monitors in the dimly lit room, squinting her eyes to get a good look at the image.

"This is footage we picked up from Hearthome City," the grunt started. "The stone that we were told to look for has apparently been picked up by a group of teenage pokémon trainers. We haven't identified exactly what this thing is, but it looks to be supernatural, since it obviously did something to the boy, here."

Skylar zoned out before the grunt completed his first sentence. Every ounce of her attention span narrowed onto the footage from Hearthome, her eyes solely fixated on the stone that the smaller boy carried. She almost gasped when he fell to the ground, only for him to be carried away by the girl that followed him.

After almost a minute, she broke her hypnotic stare from the egg, turning back to the grunt. "Fetch me Jasper from the Executive Office," she said slowly.

The grunt only stared at her, perplexed at her sudden calmness. His mouth hung slightly agape, drool starting to drip onto his dull grey jumpsuit.

"Now!" Skylar barked. The grunt scrambled off in fright, and everyone else in the room jerked their heads toward the nearest piece of paper, none of them keen on getting a load from her.

Jasper burst into the room five minutes later, his platinum hair sprinkled in beads of sweat. "What the hell is going on?" he exclaimed. "Can't a day go by without anyone clamoring for me like it's the end of the goddamn world?"

Skylar's expression turned from distress to worry. "S-S-Sir, w-what we f-found-"

"I don't give two shits about what you found!" shouted Jasper, primed and ready to explode, "I'm pretty damn sure it could've waited till-"

"Sir, we found your stone!" screamed Skylar, her face a blushed red, her eyes nearly afloat in tears.

All emotion and color in Jasper's face vanished in an instant. He took a deep, calming breath and said, calmly, "Good. Where?"

Skylar had to take a few deep breaths herself before answering. "Hearthome. A group of trainers picked it up." She pointed to the looping video footage, blown up now on all of the monitors in the room.

Jasper became transfixed on the stone as Skylar had. The shock on his face when the boy fainted was even more potent than Skylar's had been. After what seemed like hours, he cocked his head back to Skylar, a razor thin grin replacing his trademark scowl.

"That's it," he whispered. "That's all that we need." He ran for the door.

"What the hell are you talking about, Jasper?" Skylar called to him. "All that we need for what?"

He turned to face her again, standing under the doorway, a wide smile in place of his papery grin. "To launch the occupation, of course! I'm sending out the troops straightaway. Keep Sinnoh's electrical systems on standby. We may need to shut them down any minute."

Fatigue and weariness set in after Ash came to. The soft texture of the sofa he lay on didn't help much. Dawn, Brock, Pikachu, and a woman in white and pink clothing surrounded him. "Pokemon Center," he realized. Panic rose to the surface when he realized that none of them had the egg.

"Where is it?!" he exclaimed. "What happened to the-"

"Ash, don't worry!" Dawn said. "The nurses are running some tests on it, to try and identify it."

He stroked Pikachu behind the ears, the recollection of what had happened earlier coming back to him. "Wh-what happened?" he wondered aloud. "I felt dizzy, drunk almost, and-"

"You fainted from exhaustion. All we can figure is that something from the egg triggered it," the nurse chimed. She twinged in a slight, forced grin.

"The egg?" Ash asked. "What sort of egg could do that, though?"

"That's what they're trying to figure out," said Brock. "Eggs don't normally give off any energy like that, so that's why we want to have it identified right away. It might be genetically mutated, but we don't know for sure."

From the corner of his eye, Ash noticed a girl, one with long brown hair and a youthful, cunning complexion – staring at him with intense concentration. He mentally waved her away and asked, "What have you found so far, nurse?"

"Not much," she said grimly. "Just that this isn't your normal Pokemon egg." She glanced briefly out the window. "It's getting dark out. You may as well stay the night. I'll get you some dinner."

"Great," thought Ash as the nurse walked away. "Not only is this egg some supernatural oddity, but we don't even know what kind of oddity it is!"

"You were out for a long time," Brock said. "Almost eight hours."

Ash turned to the window and saw that darkness had enveloped the streets, interrupted only by the scattered street lights. Nighttime.

"Pika pi chu?"

Ash shrugged. "Pikachu's right. What are we gonna do about this egg? Are we gonna let these guys keep it, or…" he trailed off.

"Or what?" Dawn asked, raising her eyebrows in worry when Ash started staring into space. She and Brock craned their necks and noticed a girl, the same one that Ash saw, staring back at them from the rear of the clinic. The girl caught their looks and widened her eyes before bolting out of her seat, disappearing from the Pokemon Center and into the night.

"What was that all about?" Ash said.

"Dunno," Brock mumbled. "You think she knows anything about the egg?"

"Doubt it," Dawn said.

"Chu."

Ash frowned. "Anyways, we'll have to wait and see what the tests come up with. It's more than likely that they'll let us keep it once they're done. Still, it really is strange, for it to radiate so much energy.

Brock and Dawn fell silent, but Ash didn't fill the gap. Even after dinner, spaghetti with meatballs, was served, no words were exchanged. Between the silence, however, the four of them preoccupied themselves with the thought that this egg, whatever it was, it would end up being a hell of a lot of trouble.

Laina ran until she almost fell over from exhaustion. Picking herself up, she looked over her shoulder to make sure no one followed her out of the Pokemon Center. She cursed between her heavy sighs of exhaustion. "After sitting there for six hours in that damn clinic, and I don't even get the egg out of it?"

Every nerve in her body wanted to collapse to the ground, but the stiff, chilly November air kept her moving. She avoided the street lights, walking to the city limits in complete darkness. It wasn't until she reached a large sign that read "HEARTHOME CITY WELCOMES YOU!" that she stopped. It took all of her energy to keep from collapsing, to keep from doing other than leaning against the sign, gasping for breath.

She splurged herself with five whole minutes of relaxation before digging for her phone in her pocket, punching in the numbers to Jasper's direct line. Her foot started tapping the cold, frozen ground after the third ring.

"This is the Executive Office of-" a grunt started after the seventh ring.

"I want Jasper on the line, now!" Laina hissed, wiping away any sense of formality. The private dropped the phone and ran for Jasper, leaving Laina once more in the silent, dark night.

"Laina's on the phone," she heard the grunt say to Jasper. "It sounds like it's urgent."

A loud grumble broke from the other end. "What is it, Laina?" barked Jasper.

"Jasper…sir…huff…I found them. The trainers that had the egg, I mean. I didn't get to see what they did with the egg, though."

The time it took for the anger to surface surprised even Jasper. "Why the hell didn't you get to find out?"

"They blew my cover before I had the chance, sir."

It took Jasper a few moments to respond. "Who else in in Sinnoh with you?" he asked. "Is anyone from your Interrogation Team there? What about the mercenaries?"

"My Interrogation Team? Why would he need any of them?"

"I only brought one of my assistants," she said. "He's waiting for me back at the apartment with our truck. I left everyone else that's under my command back at the Western Capital."

Jasper took another silent moment to himself. "Alright, listen," he said. "The invasion is going to take place tomorrow. We have everything we need, and all of the plans are in place. Where are you situated at right now?"

"I rented an apartment for a few days in the city," she said. "Right now I'm just outside of Hearthome. Like I said, I had to get away from-"

"Turn around and go back to that Pokemon Center," said Jasper. "I'll have Skylar cut Sinnoh's electrical grids once you get there. When the lights go out, I want you to sneak in there and get one of those Trainers with the egg to fess up. Kidnap them, if you have to, anything to figure out where that damned egg is."

"Great, another kidnap mission," thought Laina. The thought of another messy interrogation almost made her sick.

"The power won't come back on until after we've fully occupied the region, so be careful. Jubilife will be our main target, since it'll serve as the Northern Capital, but Hearthome's gonna be hard hit as well. Are you getting all of this?"

Laina tried, and failed, to process every bit of information at once. "I think so, sir. I'll have that truck waiting outside of the center with me. I'm only gonna need one, right?"

"It'd be cumbersome to kidnap all of them. Just go for one of the trainers, and you should be good to go."

Laina turned around and broke into a full-speed sprint for the city. "I'm on my way, sir. I'll call you once I get there."

She ended the call and dialed her assistant, running awkwardly with the phone up to her ear.

"Yuh?" he answered.

Laina entered the city and dashed into a side alley. "Bring the truck and pull it up in front of the Pokemon Center," she sighed. "There's business we have to take care of."