Pokémon Obsidian | An Orre Fanfiction

Chapter 86: New Mystery

Emma took the subway from the Wilderness Mine to Obsidian City. A robotic voice spoke when she swiped Jamie's key card.

'Wel-come, Grand Mas-ter G-o-D.'

So he didn't ever call himself 'Grand Master Jamie.' And 'GoD' wasn't even a teenage boy being an idiot. It was a middle finger to the history that meant he needed a code name.

She disembarked at the lab. The portraits of Cipher's scientists were left slightly crooked after Piruzi's explosive departure. When Emma examined them up close, she saw Ardos wasn't the only victim of fangs and a moustache. Ein had both. Lovrina had fangs and evil eyebrows.

Piruzi took everything she could carry. Her muddy footprints were everywhere. Emma's colleagues had already photographed them, but if her mother was anything like her idol Ardos, they probably blew up any shoes that left footprints.

Pierre was on the floor of the lab with his laptop. His Chesnaught carried a crate of hard drives. He nodded when he glanced back.

'Almost done. Those women tried to wipe the servers, but they didn't do a very good job of it.'

'Has the data been sent for analysis?'

'Yeah. Sending it as I go. I feel sorry for whoever has to watch the footage of "Rose Moore's Pool Party." A glimpse of it was enough for me.'

'So do I. Is the data stored here anything I need to see?'

'It's all scientific stuff. Mostly on Shadow Pokémon and time travel. I haven't had the chance to look at them in detail, but the records of Jamie's time travel were something only he could access, so they're pretty revealing.'

'Could you copy them to my hard drive?'

'Sure. You headed to his place now?'

'Yeah.'

'We haven't done a proper search yet, but I've cracked open all the devices. Haven't got around to sending that data to HQ or looking at it myself.'

Emma left a portable hard drive with Pierre. The subway remained fully operational. All the trains were automatic. She only needed to swipe Jamie's key card to board. Even if the train wasn't scheduled to leave, Admins and the Grand Master could override the schedule. Flying would have been faster, but Emma wanted to explore the city as its inhabitants did.

Stepping off the train to look through the station's glass roof to a tower block, she might have thought she was at home in Lumiose City; but every one of its windows was dark. Most of the garden tables and chairs on balconies were gone. Inhabitants took them when they were moved from the block, which was considered a crime scene, to another. The elevator smoothly carried Emma to the 40th floor. Jamie's keys were in her pocket. He must have taken off from the balcony when he left, because a colleague's Pokémon had already used Cut to slice through a bolt barring the door.

Police tape hung limp across the hallway. Emma pulled on a baggy, sterile white suit to step over it. Pierre left notes to mark anything he touched. Another forensics officer noted flecks of blood everywhere. That didn't surprise Emma. Jamie told her that he hurt himself, increasingly aggressively, to force his mind from his feelings. Her eyes went immediately to an envelope on the coffee table. It was addressed to Raidne. She took a knife from the kitchen to open it.

There was a memory stick inside. Emma uncertainly plugged it in to her mini laptop. She almost sat on the floor, but she didn't have time to examine everything on the stick... if it was full. It was not. There was only one video. Emma stood awkwardly over the little screen as she stabbed at the file to play it, a little clumsily in her sterile gloves. The view was the exact same view she saw if she looked up from the screen: the blank living room and the closed, limp curtains, which could never be ruffled by a pleasant breeze.