• Due to the recent changes with Twitter's API, it is no longer possible for Bulbagarden forum users to login via their Twitter account. If you signed up to Bulbagarden via Twitter and do not have another way to login, please contact us here with your Twitter username so that we can get you sorted.

EVERYONE: - Ongoing Time All At Once

Time All At Once
Created at
Index progress
Complete

Penny's quiet life in Pasio is disrupted by Hoopa's discovery of some strange robots. She and the Gadgeteers are called upon to fix them, but her prior encounter with the Paradise Protection Protocol dredges up bad memories.

Contains depiction of a panic attack, discussion of a past death, a lot of musing about morality and fate
Last edited:
A Project Unlike Any Other, AKA Consequences of Nemona's Actions New

Blackjack Gabbiani

Back due to popular demand!
Joined
Jan 1, 2003
Messages
16,573
Reaction score
382
Chapter 1--A Project Unlike Any Other, aka Consequences of Nemona's Actions



"Ah, Champion Nemona!" Lear was in a good mood, indicated by his formality. "What brings you to see me today? I heard you had a proposition for me."

Nemona bowed slightly. She wasn't sure if Lear was really a prince, but best to err on the side of caution. After all, she was there to ask a very big favor. "Your highness! Hello!"

"I'm not going to battle you." But he was smiling when he said it.

She laughed. "Oh no, that's not why I'm here." She bowed again, not as low as before. Maybe she should curtsey instead. She wasn't sure. "I've heard that Hoopa can bring people here from other times, right? Mister Rose for example. My friend Penny was telling me that he was brought here from before he did the thing that got him arrested."

Lear nodded. "Yes, that's apparently true. We're keeping an eye on him, as with everyone we view as potentially suspicious, but with Eternatus safely in Leon's hands, I doubt he'll be a threat."

"Oh! Ah, that's good to know." She shook her head. "And you--or rather Hoopa--can bring people from other timelines entirely? Because Penny is also pretty sure that Kalosian tech guy is supposed to be dead. I don't know; she pays more attention to that stuff than I do."

Lear's eyes narrowed. "Are you going to ask me to bring some sort of...dead villain to Pasio?"

For a moment, Nemona thought how that would work. It wasn't as if she didn't know of a dead villain. But while that was close, it wasn't exactly who she was after. "I hope not! This one was nice. If you keep her away from that weird machine, anyway, but it doesn't work any more." She wasn't technically supposed to be talking about anything that had happened in Zero Lab, but that was vague enough, right? And it wasn't as though she was telling just anyone.

"A...weird machine...?"

"She's the strongest opponent I've ever seen!" Nemona enthused, "but I didn't get to battle her!"

"Ah, a missed opportunity?" Lear seemed to have relaxed a bit. "You can't extend the invitation yourself?"

"Well no, see...she sort of..." Nemona sighed and wrang her hands awkwardly. "had to send herself to the distant past in order to stop an evil computer program from carrying out a mad scientist's plan."

Lear pondered this for a moment before his face twisted in disgust. "Excuse me, WHAT."

Nemona didn't seem to notice. "So she's probably very lonely. If she's running at all. If she went back too far, the crystals that keep her powered might not exist yet."

"That keep her powered." His tone had switched to dry and terse, and he took a hostile step towards Nemona. "Just what sort of person are you asking me to bring?"

That, she noticed, and grinned broadly in a futile attempt to lighten the mood. "Um yeah, she's sort of a...robot." The last word was rushed, as if trying to propel it to sound a lot more rational than it did.

"Get out of my office."









"I suppose you're wondering why I've called you here today."

Lear wasn't present, speaking to the gathering of Gadgeteers over the Poryphone. He wouldn't dare set foot in their isolated lab. Who knew what sort of mad science was happening there? He had tried, but Raihan had nabbed him in a selfie, and that was the first and last straw. Even with the influencer busy elsewhere, Lear wasn't going to take any chances.

"With an introduction like that," Volkner drawled, "it makes you sound like you want us to develop some sort of superweapon."

Everyone was grateful, though they wouldn't say it out loud, that Lysandre hadn't shown up.

Lear coughed a bit. "What sort of man do you take me for?"

"You don't want us to answer that." Cyrus had mumbled it far too low for Lear to hear, but next to him, Sophocles sighed and shook his head.

"Anyway! Your task today, my consortium of energy experts, engineers, and hackers supreme--"

Not looking up from his tablet, Thorton exclaimed "A consortium!" It was impossible to tell if he was impressed or mocking.

"Am I going to keep getting interrupted or are you going to hear my words?" The group heard a thumping, no doubt Lear tapping his foot in impatience.

"...Sorry," Penny murmured, though she hadn't said anything up to that point, including to greet the other members.

"AN. Y. WAY." It was emphasized with considerable force. "Are you all interested in a project unlike any other? Something that could revolutionize multiple scientific fields and make Pasio the hub of world technology?"

Sophocles stood up from the bench and raised his arm before Cyrus could answer. "We are!"

Clemont, who had been drinking the remainder of a juice box, handed it off to the robotic arm on his back before raising his own arm. "The future is now!"

Penny raised her index finger before quickly lowering it back to the table. "Sure."

Volkner sat back and pondered. "There's no way this is going to be nearly as interesting as you're making it sound but I've got nothing better to do."

Thorton waved his tablet slightly. "You'll need my vast expertise."

From the screen, Lear smirked. "It sounds unanimous. At least among present company, but you lot are the ones I wanted anyway." They couldn't tell, but behind his opaque sunglasses, his gaze wandered slightly to Cyrus for just a moment. "Mostly. The future of robotics and energy awaits in this room!"

"Naturally." Thorton input something on the everpresent device. "Anything I'm involved in is sure to be a success."

"Oh my god," Volkner groaned, "put your ego away before someone makes you."

Penny drummed her fingers on the table but said nothing. Cyrus stared intently at the Poryphone as if trying to drill a hole in it with his eyes.

"Yes, the future..." Lear didn't sound nearly as sure as he had a moment ago. "Anyway! An associate will be bringing your projects in in a moment." He flared his hand to the side and was no doubt cocking his hips in that particular stance he often took during addresses. "I had a request a few days ago, you see. A request from a certain high ranked trainer. Very enthusiastic one, wanted to find a battle robot."

Penny's drumming stopped. No one noticed.

"One who'd traveled to the past, apparently! It all sounded like nonsense to me, but I figured why not? So on a whim, I asked Hoopa to try to find some sort of...time traveling robot..."

Penny started breathing funny. No one noticed.

"And somehow, it managed to find two of them! One of these days I'm going to have to assemble all you scientists to figure out how the multiverse works, but for now, we have two de-powered time travel robots--"

Penny was sitting stark straight, wide eyes straight ahead. No one noticed.

"--who apparently depend on crystals only found in Paldea to run. So we're going to need you to get them back...is it 'on line' for robots? Rachel, is that the term?" His retainer murmured something from the side. "Ah yeah, I should ask them. Get them running again! That's your order! So proclaims Prince Lear!" And the Poryphone went dark, dropping back to the table.

Just as it did, the back door opened, and one of Lear's servants started pushing a simple gurney into the room. "Don't freak out," the servant warned. "It looks like a dead human, but I assure you this is a robot."

The figure on the gurney was covered with a sheet, but the top of its head was poking out, and Penny would know that piled sandy brown hair dotted with orange accessories anywhere. "Um. I have to make a phone call before we start. I'll be outside..."

"I can't wait!" Clemont exclaimed, squirming with excitement. "It'll be your first project with us and it's gonna be robots!"

That was the only address she got before she darted out the front and slammed the door behind her. A moment later she snapped into her phone "Nemona, what did you DO?"
 
Last edited:
Insecurity System New
Chapter 2--Insecurity System


Two robots, in the form of a man and a woman. The woman bore a striking resemblance to the late Professor Sada, Volkner stated, but was clearly something mechanical.

"They look so lifelike," Sophocles said, caution in his voice.

Volkner shrugged and pointed to a gathering of a shiny mass that had built up on the clothing of both robots. "This stuff here. This is what we've got to focus on. The informant from the file said that this is what powered them originally, but since they're not in Paldea any more, it isn't enough on its own."

Thorton rifled through the provided papers again. "Pasio has an unparalleled ability to make any sort of regional power work. And if a mere schoolteacher could get terastalization to work on an artificial island in Unova, no place with me in it could possibly keep its secrets for very long!"

Cyrus glared. This in no way was a change from his previous expression. "It isn't merely tera energy they require. The informant who spoke to it when it was active reported that--"

"She." Penny had slid back in, having been gone for several hours. "When she was active."

"Was it you then? I know you go to school in Paldea. Were you the one who talked to the robot?" Clemont's voice bore a fair eager streak to it.

"N-no, I just...I didn't talk to her. But I know who did."

"Fine." Cyrus's tone was terse, as always. "The informant reported that the robot claimed to be unable to leave 'here', but didn't specify if this meant the specific laboratory they were in, the underground cave where the crystals grew, or the space known as Area Zero. Additionally," he continued as he gestured slightly towards the unknown male figure, "we do not know if the same restrictions apply to her unaccounted for counterpart. There is a considerable amount left unanswered, and we must access their programming to uncover their secrets."

Penny shrank back. Hacking the league was one thing. It had even been easy. But a robot double made by a paranoid mad scientist, who had already got taken over twice by a security program that wanted them dead?

A faint mechanical whirr, and there was a small soda can before her, gripped in Clemont's Aipom Arm. "You look a little sick. Figured some ginger ale would be good for that. I'm sure you can do it, Penny!" He smiled broadly. "The future is now, thanks to science! Say it with me!"

She accepted the gift but shook her head. "There's no one else that can help? One of our missing members maybe?"

Volkner laughed, short and bitterly. "Listen. I don't know if you've met him yet, but Raihan's no scientist. He's not stupid, like his public persona might lead you to believe, but he's a history buff, not an engineer. And the other one is the guy you expressed shock was still alive because the last time he made the news, he was trying to blow up Kalos and ended up getting exploded himself."

"Getting blown up."

"WhateVER, Thorton!" Volkner leaned forward in his chair, a familiar posture to most of his gym challengers. "Actually, a programmer is something we needed, and it looked like you came at just the right time."

Her gaze darted back and forth, but always at the floor. "Uh...I've met a man named Colress before. Would he--"

"NO!"

She startled, nearly dropping the soda can. Every last person there had replied in the exact same way, including Cyrus, making it the most emotion she had ever seen from him.

Clemont chuckled and patted her on the shoulder. "We'll explain later but long story short, no. Would he? Yes. Do we want him to? Absolutely not."

"Uh...ok..."







Nemona had told her about the exchange she'd had with Lear. About how she was originally asked to leave but was contacted shortly thereafter for more information, and filed a full report with everything she and their other champion friend knew about the entity known as AI Sada. As far as any of them knew, however, there was only the one robot. The man was a mystery.

Not that AI Sada herself wasn't one as well, but at least they knew what to call her.

Everything about this felt wrong. Penny had been sure that the professor's AI was having fun in the past. Sure, she had been slightly malfunctioning when she went through the machine, but the first time Penny had seen her, she had been emitting smoke, so she must have had some sort of internal healing factor.

Unless that was something else that depended on the crystals.

And how far back had she gone? The notes their group had discovered around Zero Lab later on indicated that the crystals only began forming a few million years ago. If the robot had traveled back further than that, would she have lost power completely?

She had seemed to happy to go. Regretful to leave Arven, but happy to have her own adventures. That was what had made Penny so sure that she was able to succeed. What sort of ending would it be otherwise?

Even if she fell dormant and could power back on once the crystals grew big enough, she must have been scared. She must have felt like she was dying. All those dreams of freedom, for nothing.

Or as much as a robot could dream, anyway. Penny wasn't sure about that.

Robot characters weren't usually her favorites. Penny was more interested in their technology or how they could serve the story of whatever anime she was watching. And even if they were alive, they were just machines and could be rebuilt. They may not have the same memories, but a human who gets amnesia is still the same person, so she always thought of it the same way.

But this wasn't one of her shows. This wasn't something created by some visionary writer, or even cobbled together to sell toys. This was something far too real, far too unsettling, far too sad, far too dangerous.

If any trace of the Paradise Protection Protocol remained...

...she didn't want to think of those crystalline eyes ever again. She didn't want to think about what would have happened if Sada's own Koraidon hadn't fallen into the hands of a random passerby, the same random passerby who intervened when Penny herself needed help...

She wasn't going to tell Arven that it still gave her nightmares. He had enough problems. And he wasn't there anyway.

Nemona, on the other hand. If her desire for a strong opponent resulted in the revival of "Paradise", well, that was something else that Penny didn't want to think about.









"You ok there?"

Penny wiped at her eyes and slid her glasses back down. "Yeah, I guess I am."

Clemont picked up the empty ginger ale can in front of her. It was the third one. "You don't seem to be. What's going on? It's ok, just Thorton is still here and he doesn't care."

Sure enough, the Factory Head was slouched over a table, examining his everpresent tablet, not even looking up at the mention of his name.

She shook her head. "I know her son. Or, the son of the person who created the robot. He's a friend of mine, even if he gets on my nerves sometimes."

"Sounds like me and my little sister." He handed the can off to his Aipom Arm, which tossed it into the recycle bin in the corner of the room. "Yes! I could never make that shot myself. Machines let us do a lot more than we could ever do ourselves. I imagine that must be why she created something like this."

Penny tried to look at the screen again, but flinched. The raw data on display was nearly incomprehensible, and Penny wasn't sure if that was a sign of Sada's genius or her madness. Probably both. "It's been a long time since I've been this overwhelmed by a computer. She's so advanced that I can't figure it out. And even if I could..."

Clemont pulled up a chair. "It feels personal?"

"Yeah." She hugged her knees up to her chest, pulling tight in a ball. "It feels like I'm poking around where I shouldn't be. That I'll find something too dangerous."

"The document said that she..." He trailed off and looked through a nearby sheaf of papers for a second before continuing "got overridden by the lab's security system. Is that what you're afraid of?"

Penny tugged on the cords to her hoodie, closing herself off from the outside. "Yeah. She kinda tried to kill us. Including her creator's own son."

"Well, if it helps, the document says that the machine in the lab was deactivated."

She shook her head. "It was, but that was only possible because she left. Because she went back in time, it severed her connection to it. Now that she's back, I don't know what will happen. And the worst part..." She didn't finish, tugging the cords tighter, balling up smaller.

"Penny, if you need to take a break..."

A deep sigh from somewhere in her hoodie. "...I'd never met the woman. Sada herself. But Ar--" She sighed again. "My friend said later that when the machine was talking, even as brutal as it was, it felt like his mum was talking. Like that was all that was left of her..."

Clemont pondered this, finally shuttering slightly at the thought of it. "That's awful. I can't even imagine that."

She loosened the hoodie just a bit. "What are your parents like?"

"Uh? Oh, they're all right. They're really encouraging, but they want me to go outside more often. They're excited that I'm meeting a lot of people here! What about yours?"

"..." Even though asking him meant that he would ask in return, she was still hesitant to answer. "...I think I appreciate them a lot more after going through all that. My dad is all clingy and loud. But after all of this stuff with Arven's mum, I thought about it..." She shook her head, sniffling a little. "He just loves us. And...when he was a kid, his dad died real suddenly. I think he wants to value his time with us because he knows things could change in an instant."

Clemont nodded, holding back a sniffle of his own. "I can't even imagine that either."

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the sound of Thorton typing on his tablet. They had both forgotten he was there.

"...So uh...do you need any help?

Penny undid her hoodie entirely, pushing the hood behind her as usual. "Yeah. Her programming is absolutely bonkers. It's like learning an entirely new language."

"I'll take a look!"

If it hadn't been for the brief reminder a moment before that Thorton was still in the room, the teenagers would have jumped. The startling suddenness of his statement was jarring. "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely! There's no programming language that can possibly stump me! Move over."

Penny scooted her chair out of the way, and Thorton dragged in another from the main table. "You see, it's nothing I've ever seen before."

"Me either," Clemont agreed. "Though it's also partially in Paldean. If I wasn't sworn to secrecy with that contract we all had to sign, I'd be asking one of my online tech group. Cassie would be perfect for this project."

Standing up was painful, a sign Penny had been sitting for far too long. "Cassie?"

"Yeah, I'm in a group that talks about tech. Bunch of kids from all over the world. There's this programmer with the screen name Cassiopeia--"

Penny's eyes went wide. She covered it with pushing her glasses back up.

"--and they mentioned speaking Paldean, so it would be pretty good to have them on board."

"That's uh...that's a heck of a username..." she murmured.

"Our guess is they're probably an astronomer. My user name is Clembot 5000!" He seemed so proud of it.

Clembot 5000, the robotics expert of the group, who had made an autonomous robot to do his daily tasks but had accidently activated it with the wrong keywords. She had known Clemont was the one behind that name, but didn't think that it would ever come up in any sort of offline life. "I think a lot of people could figure out who you are from that. Especially since you're a public figure."

He shrugged. "Yep, it doesn't really come up much. They're like oh that's Clemont. Which is nice, you know? Sometimes being famous is nice, but you want to be seen as just one of the gang sometimes."

"Yeah..." Her dad had echoed that a few times, and she didn't want to think about him right then. She looked aimlessly around before letting herself really take in the figure of the robot, laying mostly covered on the gurney she'd been brought in on. They were both in the next room for closer physical observation, but the window set into the wall was guarded only by a curtain, leaving very little to prevent the feeling that they were watching her. "...You know, I wonder how that affected Sada. The real one. She was super famous but she hid away. People even knew Arven was her son, even though he wasn't in the public eye."

"Even I'd heard of him," Thorton interjected without turning away from the screen, "and I don't care to know anything about the personal lives of these scientists. Or I knew she had a son, anyway."

Penny put her hood back up on instinct. "That's sad."

"Sad?"

"That he'd be so known without trying, but nobody cared to check in on him."

This time, the silence was absolute, without even the ticking of a keyboard to break it.
 
Last edited:
The Past Is Always Tense New
Chapter 3--The Past Is Always Tense






--Penny, are you angry with me?

--no
--I just wish you would have considered the consequences

--Consequences?

--she tried to kill us, nemona!
--if that program takes over her again, what's going to happen?

--It wasn't really her, wa--Ah, sorry, was already typing.

--and besides, she was probably having fun in the past. then suddenly a portal shows up and she loses power. she probably thought she was going to die

--When she wakes up, when you guys fix her, she'll know she's fine!

--nemona try to understand. shes going to be terrified and i don't want to deal with a terrified robot with a history of being taken over by, if what arven described is any indication, the wrathful spirit of a creator who was out to destroy paldea because she thought an old book told her to

--I think it was a little more complicated than that, but you'll have to talk to Clavell about that.

--close enough for a text message. id explain more if i was talking to someonh who wasnt there
--*someone
--you know that

--I would think she'd be happy to have people to talk to. It must be really lonely in the past.

--did you really think about that in advance or did you just want to battle her

--I did! But I admit battle is my priority. I think she could have fun though!

--nemona you have to understand something. im sitting here in my room all alone, middle of the night, hoping to wear myself out so i can fall asleep and not have nightmares about a crystal robot tryin gto kill us with the same monster that killed her creator, who shes possessed by, so id really rather be thinking about literally anything else

--I'm sorry.
--I'll let you get some sleep.

--i'll probably be up for a while. gonna text the gang and see whos up.

--That's the spirit! Sleep well.

--...good night nemona.







Out of all the brilliant tech and incredible science she had seen in Zero Lab, the one thing Penny wished that morning that she would have nabbed when she had the chance was a barely-opened bag of the darkest, most heavily caffeinated coffee she had ever seen. It probably tasted like sludge, and the idea that its buyer probably only got a few cups out of it before her untimely demise would have been a little unsettling, but the cafes on Pasio didn't sell the strong stuff to fourteen year olds.

And frankly put she needed something overwhelmingly strong after only getting about an hour of sleep. There didn't seem to be any more sodas left, and there was only so much zing to a box of pinap juice.

Fortunately for her sense of being watched, the window into the smaller room that contained the robots was being blocked off with a large box. But out of sight didn't mean out of mind when everything she was there for revolved around them.

"You just missed Thorton." The voice was coming from Volkner, who was hunched up on a chair in the corner, typing something on his phone. "Seems he was working all night on this code. I give him shit for his ego, but he really does know how to back it up." After a moment more, he pocketed his phone. "Sorry about that. Had to tell Flint I can't meet up today."

"'s fine. Do you know what he got done?"

"Not really. Apparently he figured out some sort of cipher she was using, but I haven't checked myself. I've been working on the energy source." Volkner held up a vial with a chip of crystal in it. "The crystals still on them are identical, so wherever our mystery man came from, he runs on the same power source she does. Makes things easier for us at least."

Sophocles, who had been at the table reviewing the project document while waiting for Cyrus to show up, smiled broadly. "We sure live in exciting times!"

Volkner chuckled. "I remember when I was a kid and Porygon was a big deal. Sapient computer code that's alive." For once he leaned back, stretching broadly. "God, when you're that young, you don't really understand why something like that is a big deal. I even got to meet one at a science event in elementary school and I thought it was a sassy little bastard. Swear if it had teeth it would have bit my hand."

"Mister Cyrus said you were poking it," Sophocles interjected, smile lowering into a smirk.

"Yeah well 'Mister Cyrus' is a narc." But Volkner went to sit next to him anyway, picking up some of the earlier pages.

Penny hadn't known that Volkner and Cyrus knew each other outside of Pasio, and mentally tucked it away. "So uh...Sophocles, do you have any thoughts from looking over the files?"

"Oh yeah! We were talking about that because the informant says that she's fully sapient and self-directed! That's not even close to being possible under our modern understanding of robotics and artificial intelligence!"

He sounded so enthusiastic. So eager to study these robots, to see them reactivated. For some reason, his high energy and happiness unsettled Penny. Well no, she knew exactly why it was so unsettling. He hadn't been there. He hadn't heard the robot cry out in fear--in genuine terror--as crystals built up around her, as the machine roared to life again, overtaking her programming and forcing her consciousness into submission.

/Y₀u ⅿust run!/

Just the memory made Penny snap back to attention with a gasp, and she quickly realized that the two were staring at her.

"Penny?" Sophocles was visibly concerned. "Are you ok?"

"I just didn't...didn't get enough sleep. It's ok..."

Volkner got up and offered his chair, though there were plenty to go around. "None of us get enough sleep. It's sort of a hallmark among us nerds."

She started to sit, not where he offered but in the chair closest to her, but stopped and sighed deeply. "...I'm sorry. It's more than that."

"Get enough to eat this morning? I've got some potato chips." Sophocles was already starting to open the pouch on his belt. "If you want."

"No...I'd rather just get this work done." She was tempted to seal up her hood again, block out her face from the outside world, but instead just flopped in the chair at last and put her head on the table. "Is something going on in there?" she asked with a wave of her arm at the curtained room.

"I don't think anyone is in there, so probably not."

"Mm ok..." She sighed again. "Clemont knows robots pretty well so he's probably going to want to get in there and examine how they were made."

"Oh yeah?"

Sophocles set a bag of chips on the table anyway even though she hadn't asked for it. "Yeah, Clemont told me a few stories about a robot he built. It looks really cool! But it's a lot more mechanical looking than these two."

Penny pondered how much she should share. If he had told Sophocles some things, that was a plus, but what he told the people in Pasio versus what he had said in their group was an unknown. "I can imagine it would be. There's not much that can match the robots we have."

Volkner stretched again, causing an audible crack as he did. "Oh man, ow. But yeah, I'm glad I get to work on something like this. Artificial intelligence is a really interesting field, but most people nowadays use the term to refer to stuff like data scrapers, and that's not even close to what a genuine intelligence would be." He paused to yawn, during which time he also scratched at his stomach. Penny wondered if he had just gotten out of bed. "Of course then you run into the issue 'is it a contradiction to call it a genuine intelligence if it's artificial' but eh."

"Are you interested in robots too?" Sophocles asked.

"Not like that. But automation that can make low level decisions on its own would be amazing. Like a power grid that can repair itself before humans can even detect anything is wrong. We've got Rotoms and stuff for that now, but they get distracted so easily."

"Boy, do they! Mine is...somewhere..." Sophocles only looked around for a moment. "They're so capricious." His pronunciation indicated that he wasn't familiar with saying it aloud. "They're silly little things."

"Everyone in Galar has Rotoms in their phones. In Paldea too."

"Yeah but when they're in the phone, they're pacified with the internet and everything." Volkner sighed. "It's weird. Rotoms are everywhere now but people act like I'm nuts when I try to talk about the guy who did the first studies on them."

Penny thought for a moment. "It was in the first pokedex...do you mean Laventon? He was a big deal in Galar."

"No, no, the guy! He's more recent, like fifteen years ago or something." The hand gestures he was making was the most animation Penny had seen from the gym leader. "I think Rowan knew him. If I knew his name I could look him up."

"You could ask Cyrus," Sophocles offered. "He knows a lot about Rotom. Like, a LOT a lot! I bet he can find this guy."

"Tried it. He's got no idea. But that's ok I guess." Another sigh. They were starting to seem second nature to the man. "Anyway, I was wondering yesterday if a Rotom could get these two up and running, but it wouldn't work. They're very different sorts of power sources. But it would be really interesting to see what would happen, which one would be the consciousness."

Penny suddenly felt sick. Sicker than she had a moment before. "I..." To be overridden by something like a Rotom would be a far cry from the all-consuming terror of the Paradise Protection Protocol, but it would still result in being overridden.

"Are you ok?"

"You asked me that already." But her voice was distant, much softer than its already soft tone.

"Penny." That was Volkner, voice flat. "What did I say?"

She shook her head. "Just...don't wanna think about them losing their consciousness. That's already happened to them a few times. 'm sorry..." Penny started to pull up her hood, to hide away from the world again.

The man frowned. "Hey, look, I get it. Empathy can suck sometimes." He leaned over and put a hand on her sleeve. "But you've gotta be open with us. Tell us what's bothering you. Tell us what you can handle. If you keep your emotions bottled up, you end up like Cyrus."

Sophocles initially objected with a sharp sound, but rolled his eyes, the statement rude but still quite accurate.

She flinched but didn't pull her hand back. "It would just be really awful to go through that."

"I getcha." He patted her arm before pulling back. "Is that why you're tired?"

"N--not really..." It wasn't really a lie. She hadn't slept much because of her fear, after all, not her empathy.

"It's different if you know someone," Sophocles added, sliding the potato chip bag back into his satchel. "And if you know a living machine, it's the same thing."

Penny stood back up, muttering "I suppose. I don't know what I'm going to tell A--her son."

"Yeah, that sounds like a pain and a half. I don't think I could keep any personal secrets from Flint." Volkner was texting someone again. "Not anything like that. Like if something happened to his brother or whatever. And I hope I never have to."

She sat back at the same computer from the night before and looked over what Thorton had written. Sure enough, a great deal of the encryption had been handled, and it seemed as though he had left off due to tiredness rather than difficulty. A sticky note on the side of the screen featured a rough sketch of a woman with wild hair, the triangular accessories and rough cut clothing indicating it was meant to be Sada, though the face was a generic bug-eyed cartoon, with swirls around her head as a shorthand for insanity.

Penny ripped it off with such speed that the monitor itself nearly tipped over, and took a few deep breaths. Neither of these worked, and she had to resume feeling as sick as ever.

The code was a lot easier to read, she had to admit. Even the Paldean text had been partially translated, and it was simple enough for her to handle the rest. She wasn't entirely sure how Thorton had done it, but she had to assume that his distance from the subject meant he didn't have the mental blocks she did.

Which, if that was the case, would mean that she could do this. Or that's what she was going to convince herself of anyway.

She didn't have any experience in robotics, but it's not like she had been born a hacker anyway. She had to learn everything at one point, and that was going to continue. Part of the purpose of the Gadgeteers was to provide an alliance to keep building on the knowledge held by the already skilled members.

They all had various specialties, and you had to be the best of the best to join. Which, she thought with a faint smile, made the inclusion of social media maven Raihan even stranger. Lear had to have his reasons, though, even if it was exclusively in the realm of promoting the scientific side of Pasio.

To be invited to such a group was a great honor and spoke of her expertise as a hacker. How Lear knew of her history was anybody's guess but Penny suspected that La Primera had something to do with it. Which, if that was the case, made this task fall under the category of community service.

Did La Primera know about the AI? Obviously she had been told that the real Sada was deceased, but she always seemed to know more than anyone had ever told her. Someday, perhaps, Penny could employ her fellow geniuses to investigate Geeta's seemingly endless well of mysteries.

Letting herself get distracted was easing her mind. The smile from earlier hadn't disappeared, and she felt a little more relaxed in her chair. The code being laid bare in front of her was a great boon, letting her scroll through it easier.

Though easy was still relative. The code was hundreds of millions of lines long, and all Thorton had done was crack the parts that were making it impossible to understand. Breaking through Sada's programmed paranoia was one thing. They still had the vastness of the AI's mind to get through.

Volkner had disappeared into the side room that held the AIs, and Penny was glad that he had left the curtains closed. Sophocles had followed him, and she could hear him exclaim his excitement to help them.

He was so eager to help. It felt almost refreshing, like childhood innocence. A wide-eyed kid following his curiosity, and Penny couldn't help but admire that. Young scientists made for the breakthroughs of tomorrow, after all.

But the professor had been like that once, hadn't she? An eager youth, wanting to uncover the secrets of the world. And that was exactly what had led her to madness and an early grave.

Penny shook her head, shaking off the icy thoughts. There were any number of things that could have contributed to Sada's deterioration, from scientific phenom to paranoid recluse. Maybe she had a preexisting condition that had gone unidentified, or brain damage, or maybe it was just one of those things that happened sometimes.

Again she was grateful that Lysandre never seemed to show up for these meetings. The bold tech mogul with the regal bearing, beloved by so many, suddenly turning national terrorist and trying to blow up a superweapon for reasons that likely made sense to him, but no one else. But it wasn't "suddenly", was it? Something like his organization had taken years to establish, and whatever had inspired it had been going on for who knew how long beforehand.

Penny's own uncle had believed himself to be a hero. That everything he did would be vindicated by history. At least he was just behind bars, not...

She slapped her cheeks in the same manner Arven often did to refocus himself and tried not to think about how a different timeline's version of her uncle, who apparently never reached that point, or hadn't yet, was roaming around Pasio at that very moment. She had avoided him up to that point, but it was inevitable that they would meet sometime. Maybe her father would show up as well, which was an uncomfortable thought, but at least it got her mind off the matters at hand.
 
The Consequences Of Living In A Multiverse New
Chapter Four: The Consequences Of Living In A Multiverse



Having delved fully into finagling the last locks on the programming, Penny was feeling more confident by the time Clemont walked in. He turned on the computer next to her and smiled. "You look like you've loosened up. Let me check what's up."

"I've been able to delve a little deeper," she said. "Thanks to Thorton, that is. It would have taken me a long time to do this on my own."

Clemont looked over the updated code and gave an appreciative whistle. "That's incredible! We should do something nice for him. You think he likes cake? I've been batting around an idea for a Super Caker-Baker recently."

Penny couldn't help but smile, ever so slightly, but it fell away. "I've been a bit nervous though. Being able to see everything more clearly, I'm understanding a lot more, but that still leaves the security system."

"The one that..." He dropped his voice to a whisper "attacked you?"

"Yeah." It was icy, rushed.

He sighed deeply and leaned back in his chair. "The summation we got, it says that the machine was shut down. And she didn't know that the really murdery program existed, right?"

Penny shook her head. "She didn't seem to. It seemed to really scare her."

/Wɑs kəəping the time maɔhıne runnıng truly all thə profəssor cɑred about?!/

She bit back a shiver at the echoed memory. "She had her creator's memories, but she didn't know about that."

Clemont thought about that for a moment. "It must have been added later then."

"...A fully sapient and self-directed robot would be alive, wouldn't it?" Her voice was hollower than she would have liked, and just a little louder too.

"Hm. It's more complicated than that, but a living robot would have to demonstrate those traits, I think. Unless it was, like, bacteria or something because even living bacteria isn't sapient. Wait, or is it?" He started to reach for his Poryphone but stopped. "Yeah, we're not talking about bacteria. I can wait to look that up."

Penny turned towards him for the first time since he sat down. "Volkner was talking about Porygon earlier. How they're alive. Which tells me he thinks the AI is too."

"It's entirely possible!" Clemont exclaimed. "This is way more advanced than anything we've ever seen! Even when I built a robot before, he just kinda makes decisions based on what I would do because that's what I told him to do. He only gives the appearance of being self directed, but really he's just a really advanced computer program, like one of those robot vacuums that calculates where all the obstacles are in a room. But times a few hundred."

She nodded. "Yeah. People tend to assign organic characteristics like self direction and free will to robots that look like living things."

Clemont seemed like he was about to say something, but laughed. "Yeah, I guess now that I think about it, those vacuums look a lot like Wimpod, don't they?"

That hadn't been what she was talking about, but it was still true. "Anything that takes direction and gives the illusion of obeying. It's a weird sort of empathy."

"In a way it's nice, though." He smiled. "If people can show empathy so much for something that isn't alive, just because it seems to be, they can do it for each other. Even if they often don't, they can, and if we work on that, we can make a better world for everyone."

Penny glanced over at the closed room. "I hope she agrees. And I hope she's accepted here."

"Yeah. And I...hope she doesn't mind us studying her." Clemont looked over to the other room as well. "Machine testing is pretty invasive if you're a living thing. And even though she's the double of a scientist and talked about her own curiosity, according to the document, it's different when you're the test subject. And we still haven't figured out who the man is at all. He may have a completely different story, even with having the same crystals on him."

She turned back to the computer. "Hopefully, we can apply these same fixes to his files and get to the bottom of things. I was hoping to do that some time soon."

"Need a double of your own?" He swiveled back to his own screen. "You looked happy when I came in."

Penny nodded, and as she shared the massive file so he could examine it on the other computer, she did in fact feel a little better again.








"What's your big news?" Sophocles was excited, swaying back and forth on his heels as Cyrus entered. The man had sent word that he'd made a breakthrough, but had been strangely mum about what it could be.

Cyrus dropped a thin file on the table by the door. "I found our mystery man."

That caught the attention of everyone, including Volkner who was taking a break and texting again.

Sophocles paused, looking up at Cyrus for a moment before adding "Are...you gonna tell us about him?"

Cyrus stared at the boy for a moment with an expression Penny had recently learned wasn't actually hostile, it was just how he looked at everyone. "...Fine." He brushed the file open with a passive wave and held up a photograph of a small team of researchers. Sada was front and center, looking a bit younger than Penny had ever seen her. This was likely before the Tera Orb research had made her the star of the scientific community and plastered her face on every tech and trainer magazine

Penny took a closer look. Director Clavell was also present, long before he was ever the school headmaster, and seeing him in a younger year made her realize that he somehow looked older than usual in his Clive costume. But out of the rest of the team, the one that stood out the most was a clean-cut man of about Sada's age, his serious expression directly facing the camera. "That's...our robot?"

"Professor Turo, another of the elite scientists chosen to work in the Zero Lab." Cyrus handed the photo off to Penny and continued with the next page, sliding it out of the folder so the others could read it. "He and Sada were classmates at Naranja Academy--" His pronunciation of the school's name betrayed his unfamiliarity with the Paldean language "--with his particular field of study being the future of technology."

Clemont whistled. "A worthy field!"

"He left the Area Zero studies early on, and at present is known for his work in--"

Penny had to interject. "At present?"

That expression didn't imply hostility, she reminded herself at Cyrus's glare. "Yes, if I will be permitted to finish."

"So he's still alive..." Somehow that felt both good and terrible within her. She had a vague memory of Arven mentioning that his father had a similar name, and she didn't want to ask him to dredge up verification.

"That makes it easier!" Sophocles cheered. "We can call him up and ask him about his robot!"

Cyrus closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath before replying. "It is unlikely that he would know anything about it. The evidence suggests that this machine came from a parallel timeline. Considering what we know about their construction and power source, it would have to have been made within the Zero Lab, a place he would not have had access to since leaving the research team."

Volkner slid the photo over to himself, and lined it up with a crease in the table's surface before examining it. "Do we know when that was?"

"Data on the research team is spotty, and most participants are still under a non-disclosure agreement. However, from the dates on his own research papers, it would have been approximately seventeen years ago."

Penny's mouth tightened a little bit at the edges. Arven's age. /That man walked out not long after the boy was born,/ she remembered from Sada's erratically written journals, and had to remind herself that she wasn't even certain that the man they were discussing was "that man" at all.

"So, what are we going to do?" Thorton had just gotten there a few minutes before Cyrus. "Though honestly if I had created a beacon of scientific advancement in a parallel universe, I'd still like to know about it in this one. Just putting that out there."

Volkner handed the photo over to Thorton. "Yeah, I would too, but I'd also want to interact with it. And we can't tell him what we found, and considering this probably means he got killed in that parallel world, that'd be really uncomfortable. Like, what do you do with that information?"

Penny shook her head. "I wouldn't like that. Even if I saved the world in another timeline, I wouldn't want to know about it if it meant that I died like that."

Cyrus looked up from the papers. "It makes no difference to me. Neither accomplishments nor fate of any other me has any impact on this universe. Ergo, it does not affect me as I stand before you today."

"Not to hear Miss Cynthia say it," Sophocles said with a smile, but the smile quickly dropped when Cyrus shifted his gaze to the boy.

"Regardless. I believe it wise to keep the existence of this robot from the Turo of this universe. Even if he is capable of constructing such a thing, he has not done so, and to reveal that information to him would not only be disruptive, it would violate the non-disclosure agreement we took on." Cyrus's leadership skills were evident, though Penny had to remind herself where he had honed them.

Clemont nodded. "That sounds reasonable. It would likely be possible to petition Lear for an exception but with the rest of that to consider, it wouldn't really be worth it."

"Yeah, I'm fine with that." Volkner stood up from the table and stretched heavily before headed for the windowed room. "I'm gonna run another test on the crystals, see if I can match the energy to another source. I had some ideas about artificial impulses that I could try to implant. Sophocles, 'Mister Cyrus', you wanna join me?"

That broad smile returned to the boy's face and he pushed off from the table with glee. "Come on, let's go!"

Cyrus, who had already taken a few steps in the direction of the other room, almost seemed to wither at the enthusiasm, but followed regardless.

Thorton took that opportunity to return to the row of computers and resume examination of the code. Clemont moved to sit two stations down, and gestured for Penny to join them on the seat between. When she did, Thorton started talking as the other two sitting there was part of his plan all along. "So what I was looking into first was getting rid of that security system, but it seems it's location based. Since she couldn't leave the immediate area around the machine she was guarding, she would be compelled to go to it if anyone tried messing with things."

"My friend who dealt with her was led there. Um, by her," she stammered.

"Yes, yes, to specifically shut down the machine." Thorton patted the copy of the mission summary that still lay between the computer units from the night before. "But if she hadn't been there and your anonymous friend somehow got in, her programming would have forced her to go to the machine anyway. She wouldn't have a choice in the matter."

"That's scary," Penny murmured.

"That's depressing," Clemont said at the same time.

Thorton didn't seem to have an emotional reaction, and kept talking. "But with the machine shuttered, and it being apparently impossible to restart for anyone who isn't Sada herself, that compulsion won't manifest. We can try to get rid of the code, but I don't see a need to."

"We should do so anyway. I think it would be a weight off her mind to not have that hanging over her."

Penny was glad that Clemont said so. It meant she didn't have to.

"Yeah, ok, sure." Thorton began the search for the relevant code. The sheer volume of code to sort through was going to take a few minutes, even on a top of the line computer, so he pulled out his tablet again.

Clemont leaned back in the chair. He wasn't wearing his Aipom Arms backpack, which had been carefully placed on a nearby table. "So, Penny, do you know if your friend is going to come to Pasio? Being able to interview them about what happened could give us more insight into the robot's behavior."

The official document had been so mum on her friend's identity that almost nothing was known, and she was going to keep it that way. "I haven't any idea."

The gym leader nodded. "Gotcha." A moment later he added "I'm about 99% certain that we can do this. And the other percent is that we won't be able to figure out a power source, in which case we can send them back to where they came from, and they'll just wake up when exposed to the crystals again. So either way, they'll be ok."

"I'd rather not think about any failure states right now. My worst case scenario is a lot different than yours."

He paused for a moment before his eyes fell shut. "...Yeah. I'm sorry." Looking back at her again, he sighed. "But like Thorton said, she can't activate the security programs. So that should be a load off, right?"

Penny wanted to point out that the AI hadn't activated the security system, it was almost the other way around, but Clemont knew that and had addressed it before, so it was worth it not to nitpick his wording.

The lights flickered in the next room, visible through the curtains, before shutting off entirely for a moment. The workroom was on a separate power source from the main room, something Volkner had insisted on, so the computers were unaffected, but it was enough to draw the attention of the three seated there.

From the back, Sophocles could be heard exclaiming "When it works, you totally gotta shout 'they're aliiiiiiiive!' like in the movies!", followed by Cyrus muttering something inaudible.

All right, Penny reasoned, that was a sign that whatever they were doing didn't yet work, but that they were likely on the right track.

"Wonder what it is they hit on," Thorton mused. "Their power source is so unique, but it's almost impossible to replicate even here." He typed for a second, exactly a second, before continuing. "I thought everything was possible on Pasio, especially with my technological expertise contributing to it, but the huge scope of the world's natural occurrences isn't something I really have personal history with."

Clemont's eyes widened and his mouth puckered, and he nodded slowly. "Uh, yeah. Yeah, I can see that."

Penny, sitting between them as she was, bit back a chuckle and hoped that her position prevented Thorton from seeing the sarcastic expression, but Thorton kept working. "You're lucky to be so young. The future will produce such astounding things."

"You're not even twenty," Clemont chuckled.

"Correct! But you're still younger than I am."

Penny looked over at Thorton to take in his features. She had thought he was older than that. Twenty three, maybe. Between that and finding out that Volkner, who looked like he was in his late twenties, and Cyrus, who looked like he had died six months ago and no one had told him yet, had gone to school together, she wondered if there wasn't something in this line of work that led to premature aging. High stress was no stranger to her, and there was a part of her life where she wouldn't have been surprised if she had developed grey hair poking through the dye, but she still looked in the estimable age of fourteen like she ought to.

It made her wonder what Sada had looked like at the end. The mental strain, most of it self-imposed, that she had been under must have been incredible, and even if she had built the robot to be an exact double at the time, there was no saying what toll her lifestyle had taken on the original.

Even in photos before she had isolated herself from the outside world, Sada was starting to develop the faintest of wrinkles around her eyes. Small ones, "laugh lines" they would be called. She was always smiling in those photographs, because they were for magazines and news articles. With funding being as vital as it was, she had to remain positive in the public eye, sell her research as something exciting and necessary. She doubtless believed it was anyway, but she would have learned a long time ago that she had to convince everyone else.

Penny saw a bit of that in Clavell, but maybe that was the educator in him, having to convince students to take an interest in the information before them.

Sada had been around forty. Things like grey hair wouldn't be a surprise, especially with such a stressful life. Had she lost weight? Gained? The lab had still been peppered with instant noodle containers strewn about, but Penny imagined that she had likely needed to be reminded to eat. Perhaps that was her own experiences, though. Penny could subside on horribly salty or sugary snacks and energy drinks due to a combination of teenage metabolism and a habit of only nibbling at things, and she had no idea what it was like for others.

She'd imagined the AI trying to force her creator to eat something healthy, like some sort of old cartoon where a robot maid had nagged the family over their habits. Imagining the AI in an old fashioned maid hat with the ribbons was at least a funny enough image that drew her out of the funk yielded by her previous thoughts, and that was enough to draw her attention back to the screen before her.

The text was something understandable now, not only through Thorton's adaptations but because the code in that part was about memory retention, something that was the same as in a regular computer. Well, much more expansive and beyond anything Penny had ever seen even in the biggest and most effective supercomputers, and the computers in the Gadgeteer base could only process it as a file and would probably explode if they tried to run it, but it was built from the same bones as anything else.

Eventually, Clemont got up, not explaining where he was going, and left Penny with Thorton. At first they didn't speak, both focusing on the code before them, analyzing it for anything they could use. But after a few minutes, Penny turned towards him. "Um...there's something I want to talk to you about."

"Go ahead."

"First, thank you for your hard work. Trying to figure out how she was made is hard enough, and getting deeper into her code was something I thought was going to take years. Thanks to you, we got past that wall in just a few days."

Thorton stopped and looked back at her. "Naturally! If we have the ability to unlock this knowledge, it's only right that we should do so!"

"But..." She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. "You left that note. And it was really hurtful."

"I left a...oh, the doodle?"

"Yeah. She--the professor--had a lot of problems. And she hurt a lot of people in her life, including a friend of mine. But she died to save a pokémon she loved." Her voice was wavering. "So if you could...not make fun of that."

Thorton thought about this for a second before nodding slowly. "I get that. I was working on no sleep for about two days and just used all my mental capacity on this weird code. But yeah, I'll be smarter about that in the future."

Her head drooped but she smiled, and hoped he could see it. "Thank you. Finding out what she was really like was pretty bad, but she wasn't completely evil, not if she put her life on the line to save someone. We've...me and my friends...have wondered if she could have changed."

"Yeah, I understand. That must be frustrating."

"My friend, the one who talked to the AI, said that even she couldn't figure it out, even with Sada's memories. So even if this works and we get her running again..." Penny shook her head. "We can never know, can we? Unless something happens here and the real Sada gets nabbed from before she died."

Thorton laughed, nervously and uncertainly. "Talking to people here is something that sometimes escapes even me. I want to analyze where and when everyone is from. That Lysandre...we're all glad he's not here with us right now, but most people from Kalos said he--"

"--should be dead." It was finished by Clemont, returning to his seat. "Actually, I wanted to bring that up, Penny. If it's ok with you."

There were many things that could mean. "Bring what up?"

"Your...apprehension on working on the AI, since she tried to kill you. Or was overridden by a program that tried." He waved at the screen. "I'll get there eventually. But whenever I have to work with Lysandre, all I can think is 'this man tried to murder me and everyone else in Kalos'. But Lear treats him like nothing happened." His usually confident voice was wavering a little. "I'm really glad he's not here. Even if he's from another timeline, he still did the exact same thing there, so he's functionally the same person. The only difference is that he survived somehow. And..." He trailed off, letting his head droop and his hand tighten around the computer mouse. "...it's just really frustrating."

One of the rumors Penny had heard soon after arriving was that Lysandre had recently killed two people, but it was unconfirmed. No sync pairs were missing, but it was reportedly two Rocket grunts, who used their own documentation. And she wasn't about to hack into their records just to find out what she already knew about a bad guy being a bad guy.

She was glad that nobody had ever tried to force her into a group with anyone like that. The rules of Pasio were strange and seemed to favor certain trainers above others, and while the place could seem like heaven to some trainers even not in the favored few, it was strange and arbitrary and at the mercy of a single overlord who could alter the rules at any time.

Paradise never did work out, after all.

Thorton cleared his throat, seeming to want to bring the mood up ever so slightly. "I'm fortunate in that regard. What little work Cyrus does around here is brilliant, and allows the rest of us to keep an eye on his actions. It's doubtful that, despite his boasts, he'll ever try to pull such a destructive stunt again."

"Yeah, and he's got a friend now, as much as he denies it," Clemont said with a bit of a smile.

Penny wasn't exactly sure what Cyrus had done, but if he was being mentioned in the same breath as Lysandre, then it had to be something terrifying. She knew he was a criminal, a cult leader, and possibly a terrorist, but the specifics weren't nearly so close to home as the events of a neighboring region.

Someone her uncle had even done business with. Someone her father had met personally, though Penny was too young to remember that.

Thorton, after a moment, continued clacking on the keyboard. "This part here, these partitions, this is what you were after, right Clemont?"

"Oooh! Thank you!" After a moment of his own, Clemont smiled. "Hey Thorton, what's your favorite type of cake?"
 
Empirical Measurements of the Everyday World New
Chapter Five: Empirical Measurements of the Everyday World​




To make up for how busy he was with training, Raihan had sent lunch for everyone. He hadn't told them in advance, and if he had anyone in mind for the orders was known only to him. Why he had ordered a variety of Castelia style deli sandwiches was equally confusing. Nobody in the group, including Raihan himself, was especially fond of them, but they were tasty and came with enough side dishes that even super picky Cyrus was able to claim a cup of cole slaw for himself.

Penny wasn't sure if the man was on any sort of special diet. He seemed to follow some sort of life plan that was probably related to his being a cult leader, but she tried not to think about that aspect of things. She was tucking into her own sandwich, made with sliced loaf bread and many more cold cuts than Arven ever used, but it was nice. Even without her friend's knowledge of food, she could tell it was made using fairly high quality ingredients.

While the others chattered among each other, she slipped a glance under the table at her phone. No messages. Well, she had messages, but they were emails or other unrelated things. The important thing is that Nemona hadn't gotten back to her.

"I'm gonna sound like the boring bastard here but don't forget to eat some vegetables," Volkner reminded them. "Baked beans don't count."

"Yes dad," Thorton ribbed with a roll of his eyes. He was already midway into dishing himself some broccoli salad anyway. "I believe everyone here is familiar with proper nutrition."

"Speaking of dads." It was said through a mouthful of food, so Penny could tell even with the voice distorted that it was Sophocles. He thankfully took the time to chew and swallow before finishing. "Just so we're clear, we're not going to contact the other guy, right? The guy we think the other robot looks like?"

"I don't think that would be a good idea." Penny set her sandwich down to speak. "He doesn't know anything about it, like Cyrus said." She noticed that the man nodded slightly when mentioned. "Even if another version of him did this, it isn't the same man."

"I for one am utterly astounded that Lear hasn't had us research all of these alternate timelines that seem to intersect here on Pasio!" Thorton gestured with a bottled drink in hand. "We're the best and brightest across multiple worlds and we should know more about that. Not that sapient robots aren't fascinating, but surely there's a priority to things."

Volkner took a sniff. "Dude, is that juice fermented?"

Thorton again rolled his eyes. "You know it's important."

Clemont turned to Sophocles. "What have you guys been working on in there? It sounded like you had a breakthrough at some point."

The boy beamed. "It was amazing! They moved! They're not even close to being turned on yet, but it means we've found a power source that their bodies can conduct."

"It was akin to the original electrical tests performed on dead animals, where applying current would make their limbs twitch."

Everyone stopped and stared at Cyrus. It was true, everyone there was familiar with the experiments in question, but there was a special morbidity about bringing it up over lunch.

A faint "Seriously? In front of my salad?" could be heard from Sophocles, but the boy was still smiling. This got Clemont snickering, and soon the rest of the table, except for Cyrus, was laughing.

Cyrus scowled and got up to dispose of the cup from his lunch, though Penny noted he recycled the plastic fork. It would be a mistake to believe that someone who recycled could be a real villain, but she was finding that not knowing everything about the man's deeds was working to her advantage.

She didn't know much about anyone there and that was fine. Clemont, Clembot 3000, was the closest and even online they mostly talked about tech. It was only in person that he wanted to talk about things like feelings and how a project affected someone, but that was just because he could see that she was struggling, and he didn't ask further.

That was fine. If the only thing they took away about her was that she had seen this robot be overcome by that program, and was scared of what could happen once the robot was revived, that was going to be all right. Every little bit helped, and right now having a situation she could be eased into was the best thing for her.

She finished her sandwich and cleaned up, and sat back at the computer without a word. A few minutes later, Clemont sat beside her, and Thorton, and they continued their work, talking about nothing in particular. This slow familiarity, no one prying too hard, letting her expand at her own pace, was a deep comfort to her.








The lights in the side room flickered again, for longer than the day before. "She's a-" Sophocles cheered before promptly cutting off. "Aw darn. Thought we had it."

This time the door was open, allowing greater cross-pollination of conversation between the rooms. Thorton had managed to finagle the program into something more solid, something that could be easily built off of for the others. "You'll get it soon," he called into the other room. "Just don't make any more dead frog references while we're eating and we should be ok."

Volkner laughed. "You're a bold man, Thorton. Cyrus does what he wants, no matter what the rest of us think."

"The man who has shut off power to Sunyshore City for his own vanity project thinks he can speak of such things..." Cyrus intoned.

Penny glanced with wide eyes back at Clemont. "Is that true?"

"If I ever go to Sinnoh," Clemont whispered as he leaned in as if keeping a conspiracy, "the first thing I'm going to do is test the water in Sunyshore, because I'm pretty sure that the people there are stranger than statistically average."

"I don't think such a thing can truly be quantified," Thorton murmured, staying where he was but adopting the same lower tone. "Besides, one would have to take Almia into account as well. Perhaps as a control group." He paused. "The social sciences aren't my forte."

Though the notion of trying to iron out how exactly to empirically measure strangeness was a funny one, they did have work to do, so the resulting laughter was subdued and ended quickly, replaced with clicking keyboards and tech discussion.

After a while, Clemont turned back to the others. "How long do you think it will take before we can put these updates back in the robots? I know we're doing her first since she's the one we know of, and then he'll be faster, but when will that be?"

Thorton didn't stop, but he did slow down. "Hopefully when we get her running, she can help us iron out the last stages. But it's impossible to say. I'd estimate it at anywhere between a week and a month."

Penny double checked a line for cohesion. "We can only do so much ourselves, too. Making this code readable only goes so far. They need a power source, and then we can adapt what we're doing to reflect it. But until then we can just make sure they've been properly scrubbed of those horrible security programs."

"That's pretty much gone. We've been making sure that those are as redundant and inaccessible as can be, and that's just what we can't get rid of entirely."

The dry tone that Thorton had said it in was a bit offputting to Penny, and she had to remind herself that none of this was personal for him. "We do need to try. We can't risk anything like that ever happening again."

Clemont rested a hand over hers. "Remember, it can't happen here. That machine doesn't exist in this place."

"...I know." Logically she did know.








The program they had developed to sort through the coding could run on its own for a while. They needed to be diligent about checking everything it found, but for the time being they could relax, and Penny went for a walk.

It was atypical of her to want to be outside. Even getting outside more with her friends was still more to spend time with them than anything else. Her thoughts wandered to what her father was doing on his exploration tours.

Rather than call him, she checked his website. There was his big smiling face, both in photograph and cartoon logo form, spread across it in various places. She could program a better site for him, something more professional, but he had insisted on doing it himself, so it was very basic in presentation.

Of course, if it was up to him, he would have run everything off a 56k modem as well, but that was more petty infighting between him and his brother.

She could hear it now. "He runs 90% of Galar he doesn't need my money." It wasn't as though her father cared about business monopolies, of course. Only those run by his big brother.

It was really just a matter of time before she ran into her uncle, but that would happen when it happened. If he was really from before he started his big scheme, she wondered how much he would know of what happened to her. Would he even know she had been sent back to Galar in the first place? Or maybe he was from before she went to Naranja at all. She wasn't looking forward to finding out.

Instead of thinking further, she sat under a tree and brought up a series she had been watching, sliding her earbuds in to block out the rest of the world.

But the rest of the world found her in short order. "Penny! What are you watching?"

She looked up to see Clemont smiling down at her, seemingly oblivious to having interrupted her break. "Oh. It's just an anime. It's nothing you'd like."

He cocked his head. "Oh, I'm just curious. Do you mind if I sit here? I've got to write an email to my sister."

If he didn't bother her, it would be all right. "Sure. I'd just like to watch this. Clear my head for a while."

"I understand." He sat beside her and brought out his own phone, and she was glad that he was doing so without talking to her further. Still, the company was nicer than she would have thought.
 
A Reality To Be Solved New
Chapter Six: A Reality To Be Solved​


"Sorry I'm late." Penny slid into the base the next day. "Bettie wanted me on a team. I had to fight Drake like fifteen times."

Volkner was looking over some papers at the table, with no one else visible. "Yeah, I hear that. She teamed me up with your friend Nemona the other day. It's weird to think of the two of you hanging out." He took a drink out of a large mug with Lear's face on it, some attempt to produce Pasio merchandise. It had sold almost nothing, and Lear had resorted to giving it out for free as a 'teaser'.

She sat next to him and looked at the papers before him but they were about energy sources. "It's a long story. Any advancements?"

Another drink. Whatever was in the mug didn't smell like coffee. Or tea. Or anything she recognized. "Chipping away. Bit by bit." He paused. "Chipping...yeah. I've had to take parts of the crystals on them for testing but it feels like if I take too many then it may harm them in some way. She ran without them, according to the document, but that was when she was inside a giant crystal that grew around the lab. And I'm going to assume it's the same for him, but who knows."

Penny nodded before realizing that he wasn't looking at her and she would have to say it out loud. "Yeah. When I came in, she was already injured. She was emitting smoke from her joints, but it cleared up within a few seconds, and I don't know if that's a self-repair function or that's something exposure to the crystals does."

"Yeah, I read that in the document. So far it seems to be a mix of both, that she'll repair over time but everything takes crystal energy. Oh!" He dropped one of the papers back to the table. "Have you seen their skin yet? It's so cool, especially when you see it in action."

The fact that AI Sada was wearing a midriff over what seemed to be a muscular torso hadn't escaped Penny, but she knew that wasn't what he meant. "I assume it's a lot different from regular skin."

"Yeah! Come here, let me show you. No one else is here right now so we're not interrupting anything." He beckoned for her to follow.

But she stood where she was, feeling a sudden weakness in her knees. "Um..."

He slowed down and turned back to face her. "Hey. They're not gonna power on any time soon. But if you want, I can cover their faces."

She wrenched her eyes shut and suddenly wished Clemont or Thorton were there. "...We'll see. Try it and I'll see if I can manage it."

"Gotcha." He disappeared into the room for a moment, and she could hear fabric rustling. "There, all covered up. Think you can?"

"I'm gonna try." Her voice was too low for him to hear, but she was quickly at the door to the side room.

Inside, she saw that the male robot had been covered entirely, giving the room the impression of a morgue. AI Sada, though, was only covered along the upper body, that midriff about where the sheet ended. There didn't seem to be a mark on her. Volkner stood beside a small table with various tools on it, but didn't pick any up just yet. "Are you all right with this?"

Penny took a closer look, and tried to ignore the morbid covering behind them. "I think so." After a step, she was able to take in more. "She looks so real. Obviously nobody would give a robot real human skin--"

"--Someone probably would. But that would be weird."

She hid a small smile. "---but it looks just like it. It's even got tiny pores. Are they for energy input?" It wasn't just like human skin. It lacked hair, save for a bit on the arms and legs, but they seemed to be just where those elements would be most visible on a human (she wasn't going to ask about the underarms, or anywhere else), to fulfil the illusion of being an exact double of her creator. But the illusion was utterly phenomenal regardless.

"I'm not sure. It could just be a texture thing. His are a little different, and the pore-like texture seems to just be a surface thing, but it could have some sort of purpose. Anyway!" He held up one of the tools from the table, a scalpel. "Let me show you what I was talking about!"

Penny took that advanced step back immediately as Volkner pressed the scalpel to the robot's torso and made a long cut, revealing traces of an interior that shone like a tera crystal. "Is that safe to do?"

"We've been opening them up like this for a while now to get at their interiors. But watch this." He set the scalpel back where he had gotten it and pinched at the wound, joining severed skin back together as if no cut had taken place. "Isn't that cool? It just zips right back up! Even the part we cut off to study went right back into place once we pressed it in there."

"O-oh..." She had to take a closer look, even closer than before. "That's amazing. Thank you for showing me." Sure enough, there was no visible seam, and she found herself touching the site and feeling no telltale signs. Though a moment later she jerked her hand back. "I'm sorry. I should have asked."

Volkner laughed. "Hey, we're all scientists here. Who could resist feeling this? It's great.

Maybe she would have felt more comfortable if the exposed area had been the robot's back instead. "So, this is how you can cut her open and still leave her ready to wake up?"

"Yep! It's great. Honestly if we could apply this to organic skin, it would have some really awesome applications in medicine. We'll have to bring some biologists in to take a look at it." He sighed, hands on his hips, and smiled. "It'll be amazing. But we'll have to ask them what we can share about their creators. Probably be best to let them take charge of everything once they can. It's getting them to that point that's the hard part."

Penny's hand tingled slightly. "I hope they understand."

"Oh, I'm sure they will." He adjusted the sheet idly. "They're scientists too. I try to think 'what would I want done? What would I be ok with?'. Though I don't know, maybe I'd be ok with a lot more than regular people."

She started to turn around, hoping he would follow her back to the main room. "I think we all would, to some degree."

He laughed and stuffed his hands in his pockets, taking the cue to follow her. "Pretty sure Cyrus wants to just be a robot. Not even an AI or anything, just a flat out robot."

"He could talk to Clemont about that. He could probably make a great Cyrusbot."

"Yeeeah haha." He slipped past her and returned to the table. "You wanna give me a hand with these documents?"

"I've got to check how the data is coming along..." She glanced over at the computers but didn't approach them right away. "...but after that, sure."







"Hey, Penny! Get stuck fighting dragons again?" Clemont's cheerful voice through the phone was the last thing Penny wanted to hear first thing in the morning. First thing in the mid afternoon.

She groaned, flopping over in bed. "No, I just...still asleep."

"Oh...feeling ok?"

The day before had been rough. All of that data all at once was overwhelming. It wasn't like hacking the League, or anything else. It wasn't a structure she was familiar with. It wasn't anything she had ever done before. And she knew she could learn it...but it was going to take a while.

Before she could say anything, he continued. "I didn't wake you, did I?"

"Don't really know...one of those times where you can't really tell if you're asleep or not" She brought an arm over her eyes to block out what little sun was creeping in around the edges of the thick curtains. "All night long all I saw was code. Except it was glowing."

"Glowing like a computer monitor? I know there's a special lens you can get for your glasses that--"

"Like tera crystals."

"Oh..." It was good that she didn't have to explain.

"Yeah. So if you could pass the message that I'm taking the day off, that'd be great. I'm gonna get some lunch and try to pass out again." But even as she said that, she knew that would be another day before she could achieve that vaunted understanding she craved. "Or not. I don't know."

"Cyrus is off today too. And Lysandre and Raihan of course, but by this point that kinda goes without saying."

The statement made her smile just a bit. "If either of them ever shows up, I think it would be a catastrophe."

"Raihan's not a bad guy. He's overbearingly sunshiney sometimes, and the Big Important Influencer bit can get old, but he's nice."

Penny groaned. "Sounds like my dad."

"Haha! You know I'm imagining some middle aged guy somewhere trying to be a social media influencer, right? Selfies all the time and stuff."

"He does have a website..."

Clemont whistled. "I imagine you're not going to tell me where it is."

"No. Arceus no!" She grabbed a pillow with her free hand and jammed it over her head. "No one can know! If he ever shows up here someday, which I do NOT put it past Lear to do, I swear I'm going to go underground or something."

He laughed on the other end, but Penny's thoughts were already drifting.

"...Hey uh...he's not that bad. He's just annoying sometimes is all."

"Your voice got real quiet there, Penny." Clemont's own voice was thick with sudden concern. "What are you thinking about? He paused. "Though I guess that's obvious."

"...he's there at least. And he loves me, even if he's got a thing to learn about personal space. He didn't...you know...ditch me to go live in a cave."

Clemont let out a long sigh. "Yeah. I learned a lot I wish I hadn't. Sometimes it's better not to meet your heroes. Or their...robot doubles. All these great scientists with these fantastic breakthroughs and they just keep...breaking."

Penny had never heard him sound so bitter. "You ok?"

"...just real glad Lysandre never shows up to these things. That's all."







The next day, Penny slid into her seat as if nothing had happened, and Clemont greeted her as if nothing had happened.

"To catch you up," Thorton started out of the blue, "we've just been going over what the compiler told us. But nothing is standing out. Everything we've suspected has been holding true, so that's good for many reasons." He paused to take a drink from a large water bottle. "On the other hand, my back is absolutely killing me and I must remember to stop and stretch every fifteen minutes!"

"Yeah," she agreed. "I've got to get better at that too. I feel like lately I've gotten more aware of needing to pay attention to my limits."

"It's a valuable life skill!" Clemont agreed. "Maybe we could do those calisthenics that elderly people always do in the park early morning."

The thought of the group of them doing tai chi on a misty morning was probably funnier than it should have been, but she only slightly snorted in reaction.

Thorton nodded. "I'm trying to imagine Raihan getting a video of us engaging in this group activity and Cyrus breaking his phone."

"I doubt he'd care enough to do so. But it would probably give that International Police officer a headache," Clemont added. "Honestly, we're an odd group, aren't we?"

Penny pondered that for a moment. They certainly were odd, and perhaps could only get odder. "Say, it just hit me. If this does work, if we get these two running again, they'll be sticking around Pasio for a while. Do you think they'd join the Gadgeteers? They're scientists, after all."

"Oh god, that's a question, isn't it?" Clemont laughed a bit as he tabbed down in the program. "We'd be the only ones they could really talk to for a while, thanks to the NDA and everything that we're under."

"Not that they're aware of it," Thorton mused. "There's probably a few people outside our group they'd think they could talk to about the time machine. Oh, your friend Nemona, right? She knows all about that."

Penny leaned back in her chair. "Yeah, but she wouldn't be interested in any of that. She'd just want to battle them. And they don't have any pokémon with them so Lear would have to hook them up."

"Yeah, Lear and his bodyguards--"

"--simps," Thorton tossed in.

"--whatever you call them, his entourage, they know about this too. But I can't imagine the robots would want to talk to him for very long."

"Can't imagine anyone would," Penny murmured.

They all three nodded.

"So yeah, Penny, to answer your question, I certainly wouldn't turn them down, but I feel like Lear is the one who decides all this anyway." The last part was said as Thorton stretched his arms out long behind him and then over his head, wobbling his peculiar ribbon of hair. "Think he indicated a few days ago that we may be getting someone new soon anyway. I kinda skimmed that message though."

Penny hadn't opened it at all. Any message from Lear that didn't say Urgent tended to get ignored, and sometimes even then. After all, his announcement of mugs with his face on them had been deemed urgent. "You remember who it was?"

"Hard to believe we've only been working on this for a few days," Clemont added.

"Yeah. I don't really remember. No one I'd ever heard of. Made a pokedex app I think."

"Oh, that'll be fun. Hopefully we'll have the AIs up and running by then." The gym leader smiled, and stretched his arms too. His Aipom Arms backpack followed suit, stretching above him to the ceiling. "But if not, another programmer would be useful to have on board."

"Be awkward letting a new person in, with all the secrecy we have. But I guess that isn't typical." Penny paused. "I'm assuming."

Clemont grinned conspiratorially. "Weelllllll, there was that one time..."

"Weeeellllll," Thorton grinned back, "Aaaand the other time..."

Penny groaned loudly. "Oh my god you two." She called out to Cyrus, who was headed to the door. "Hey, was there anything that needed a NDA before this?"

The man paused. "I could tell you..." he started. But rather than finish, he kept walking, exiting before anything else.
 
They Hate Him For His Autistic Swagger And Also How He Froze A City New
Chapter Seven: They Hate Him For His Autistic Swagger And Also How He Froze A City​


The next few hours were much the same as that morning, slow and even with tiny slices of progress through the code with no real revelations.

"It looks like she's pretty solid in there," Clemont mused during their break.

This time, they were meeting outside, the chill in the air somewhat invigorating to the usually homebody Penny. "Yeah, it looks like the bulk of things is going to be on the power side."

Thorton took in a deep breath, but sneezed repeatedly immediately after. "Ugh! For all my genius I'm still a slave to allergies."

"We don't have any chemistry or genetics experts, do we?" Penny asked.

"Nah," Clemont said with a bit of a frown. "I think the only one on Pasio of either of those things is Colress and we avoid him."

She frowned a little. "You all reacted really strongly when I mentioned him a while ago. Why is that?"

"Ok so," Thorton started. His body language changed, adopting into a more intense pose, arms prepped for elaborate hand gestures and usually slack eyes pinning in excitement. "You know about Team Plasma, right?

"Oh, this is gonna be good," Clemont grinned.

"I have been sitting on this for DAYS, boy!" Thorton declared dramatically. "Ever since Penny brought up that smug...DIPSTICK!" It seemed as though he was vibrating as he sorted through the words, and somehow that was the best he could come up with. "I've been waiting to dump on him ever since that day! Colress is a slap in the face to everything it means to be a scientist! His recklessness, his disregard for proper testing, his utter..." His hands shook with the search for the proper word, as if he was shaking a dictionary in the hopes that one would fall out "...disdain for any sort of common decency!"

Penny nodded. This was a new side of Thorton, and it was greatly amusing to watch the usually detached trainer absolutely unhinge himself.

"The complete lack of any sort of social graces, the sheer ego of slathering every conversation with his own research no matter the subject..." He took a deep breath, cheeks puffing just a bit with the intensity of his rant as he thought of the most suitable words to contain his rage. "And the utter and complete dismissal of his own crimes!" He thinks he's entitled to stroll about like the rest of us when he knows damn well what he did!"

"Get 'em!" Clemont cheered.

Penny started to ask "What he--" but was quickly cut off.

"We may be mad scientists ourselves!" Thorton continued, "but ones with ethical considerations! Colress would have you believe that such things are mere suggestions! Rather than a simple eccentric like us three, he is rather the image of a cartoon villain, caring nothing for what his actions do to the world around him!"

It was starting to sound uncomfortably familiar to Penny. Not only the everpresent shadow of Paradise, but above that shadow, a vile hand pulling at the reality over Galar. "I can imagine," she murmured.

"His actions in Unova should have gotten him cast in irons," This was emphasized far more than anything else, "and yet he struts around this island as if he DIDN'T freeze over a major population center!"

"Wait." Penny couldn't possibly have heard that right but at the same time, she wasn't entirely surprised. "Like by accident or..."

"NOPE!" The word came out raspy as if Thorton was trying to hold back a sardonic laugh, or perhaps choking. "He's one of those Plasma freaks!"

She wasn't quite sure what that meant but nodded anyway.

"And!" He took a step back and raised his arms in a broad summoning-like gesture that looked especially silly with his constantly sleepy expression. "We have some shady characters around! Even in our little enclave we have that damn emotionally constipated professional nihilist, who was a far more DIRECT threat to my home region!" One arm drew around in a sweeping gesture to, Penny guessed, indicate the land around them. "And I would still rather work with him because he can at least be CIVIL! He respects the scientific process!"

"--If nothing else," Clemont added.

Thorton continued, "Facts and figures ought to bring us all together! Immutable truths we all exist with should be a unifying factor in our lives," His hands curled with contempt. "And yet people like Colress exist, who act as though reality is a mere suggestion! Cyrus is a dastardly man but he has never tried to deny his actions! Colress acts as though the mere act of feigning scientific curiosity can pave over his past misdeeds!"

Clemont smirked ever so slightly and nudged Penny with his elbow. "Oh, hey Cyrus," he said with a bit of a wave, gaze out behind Thorton.

"Ack!" The older boy jumped, only to find nobody there when he turned in alarm. "Don't do that! I can only take so much!" He brought a hand to his chest with a sigh. "My poor ticker..."

The Kalosian boy laughed. "You were getting uncharacteristically tilted. I think Penny gets the picture."

She nodded, though she still didn't know what a 'Plasma freak' was. When Thorton had asked if she knew about Team Plasma, he hadn't waited for an answer. Though she was also still relatively in the dark about what Cyrus had done too. Everyone had their secrets, but none of this seemed to be much of a secret. She nodded instead. "Bad guy, stay away. Gotcha."

"Gotcha," Thorton repeated with a bit of bite to it. He had started to lean against the building with an arm extended. "Good lord, Clemont! You could be a supervillain yourself with that sort of subterfuge."

"Yeah, keep telling yourself that," Clemont laughed, and rested a hand on Penny's shoulder. "Hey, want to ditch our jumpy compatriot here and get back to work?"

The dark clouds over her thoughts dissipated a bit at that. A hand in friendship was better to think about than a grim hand of destruction, and the world had so many more of the former than the latter. "I'd like that."

Thorton's face had returned to his typical dull, heavy-lidded expression. "I'll get you for this," he muttered, but it was lost into a thick barrage of sneezes. "After I...go get some allergy medicine."

Penny laughed. She wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but it was some nice levity. And it was good to get outside. Not long ago, she couldn't have seen herself getting out of her comfort zone so completely, but not only had she broken out enough to go on an adventure, and then another, and then to Pasio. The Penny that had returned to Paldea, that barely would have left her room if not to help her friends, would never recognize the Penny of today.

When she went back in, she did so with a smile.








"So, we're going to take a few days off," Volkner announced to the group.

Thorton stretched out. "News to me. I'd like to be informed of such things in advance."

"No, I mean me and Cyrus and Sophocles. We need extra parts and we can't do much until they come in. Which means they have to be manufactured first."

"It's going to be awesome!" Sophocles interjected. "And Cyrus is paying for most of it! You must care a lot about the project."

Cyrus continued his stone-faced expression without any change. "Do not mistake this for empathy. I simply cannot tolerate unfinished business."

Volkner seemed to stifle a laugh, but continued regardless. "So the three of you programmers are going to have the place to yourselves. Try not to trash the place too badly."

"You hear that, my companions?" Clemont said with a grin. "It's lightswitch rave time!"

Penny was vaguely reminded of what someone had said a few days prior, about Volkner's actions resulting in a blackout, but smiled just a little. "I'll have to introduce you to the works of DJ Vice. We'll have a real blowout."

With a snicker, Thorton tapped something onto his tablet before setting it aside. "We'll have everything cleaned up right as you approach the building."

"Given you three, I have a feeling any party you cobble together is going to be, like...a LAN party or something," Volkner said, smirking. "Diet soda, pretzels, and in bed by nine pm."

"With all due respect," This came from Sophocles, "nine pm is when all the good overseas cartoons start airing."

Penny sat a little bit forward at that and didn't catch it for a moment. Sophocles smiled at her excitement.

"Ok I think we've wandered further and further from the actual point," groaned Volkner. "Come on, you guys, it's like herding Glameow sometimes. Anyway, you can be trusted to handle things while we're gone, so I'm putting the utmost faith in you."

"All right, all right." Thorton folded his hands over his tablet. "I assume that we're not to go in the mechanics room."

Cyrus glanced at the door to the back room for a moment before returning to his usual sharp eye contact. "Correct. It is not as though you could do anything to further their repair anyway."

"Ohhhh my god am I the only adult in the room..." Volkner murmured, starting to massage the bridge of his nose, as Sophocles looked up at Cyrus with a disappointed pout. "Anyway I'm pretty sure that's all you need to know. Us three will be out and we'll see you later."

With that, Cyrus immediately headed for the exit without any further word. The other two glanced at each other, Sophocles muttering something about at least saying goodbye.

Volkner shook his head. "I might be ducking in tomorrow though. Lear wants me to fix something in the power grid so I'll need my supplies once I get specifics."

Clemont took that opportunity to ask "was it something you caused?"

"Shush." He picked up a satchel and walked off towards the door. "You all got it from here. It'll be a breeze after this."

"Hopefully." Sophocles had wandered over to look at the programming displayed on the computers. "Wow, this is incredible! I haven't really gotten a chance to take a look at things yet, but this is some really high level code. I don't understand much of this at all." He turned back to the others with a giant grin. "But that's the fun of groups like this! You're constantly learning!"

From the doorway, Volkner laughed. "Every single day."

Once the two were gone, Clemont stretched out. "He never answered my question."

"It's not really a question if you already know the answer," Thorton sighed with a theatrical level of drama. "Regardless, we may as well get our part worked on as much as we can."

Penny nodded in approval as she stretched her legs on the bench. "It already feels a little empty in here. I guess when you get used to having someone around, you know?"

"Yeah."

As she took her seat at the middle computer, she paused a bit before getting out her phone. "Would you guys mind if I put on some music?"

They found that Giacomo's compositions were the perfect backdrop for their studies.
 
An AZ's Honedge Situation New
Chapter Eight: An AZ's Honedge Situation​




Penny stretched out at her seat. It had been a few days with no major news, but their slow chipping away at the code had piled up. "I feel like we can't really get much farther. It seems like we've done everything we can manage."

Thorton rubbed at his eyes. "That may be the case, unfortunately. I had thought that one of the others could assist us, but it seems that won't be necessary."

Clemont was already standing, getting a bottled water out of the nearby fridge. "Yeah, let's take a break. I'm pretty confident in how far we've come."

"Same." Penny rubbed at her legs as she stood up. It was an especially long session, and bright moonlight was streaming through the window. "I may just go straight to bed tonight."

After a long sigh, Thorton started to rub his own shoulders. "I imagine you're the sort to stay up late."

"Always," she admitted. "Especially when I'm marathoning something. I'm almost done with the remake of Magical Hazel."

Clemont snorted mid-drink, nearly sending water everywhere. "They remade Magical Hazel?"

"Yeah, a few years ago. And they're actually releasing the whole thing worldwide now."

He whistled, a sound distorted by stray water. "Wow. That's my mom's favorite series. Or it was when she was our age." A laugh. "I have a picture somewhere of her cosplaying Coconut. Though she said she had the biggest crush on Pistachio."

Penny smiled. "Who didn't?"

Thorton leaned back, watching them both upside-down. "I've never seen that series. Would it prove interesting?"

"You have to have a high tolerance for some really stupid teens in love," Penny shrugged. "Lots of things that would be resolved if they just talked. Also if you watch the original, the grandpa is a massive pervert, so it didn't age well."

Clemont was already texting a message. "Yeah, that was a lot of stuff. But he got his comeuppance, if I remember."

By this point, Thorton had finally made his way to his feet, and was stretching a leg on the table. "Any good technology in it?"

"It's not really that kind of series. There's a jet pack involved at one point, and the main character has a fancy outfit that makes her immune to most pokémon attacks, but that's about it."

The older boy thought for a moment. "That would be interesting. Do they get into detail on how it was made?"

Penny was opening a soda. "Not really. It's just there."

"Ah. Drat." Suddenly bored with the subject, Thorton's attention shifted to the back room. "Say, is there any real reason for us to stay out of there? It isn't as though we're unaccustomed to machinery. Clemont, you built a robot yourself once, didn't you? And you and I both build many machines for daily life."

"Um." Penny took a step back, setting her drink aside without tasting it. "I'd rather just go back now if you don't mind."

Clemont looked at her with caution. "Yeah, we may be good with that sort of thing, but we haven't been part of the process, so we don't know how things are going or what sort of state they're in."

"I'm just gonna take a peek. I'm not gonna go in." He headed for the door.

"Wait-" Penny objected, arm held out but legs rooted in place. The image of a crystalline hand, an outstretched arm, flickering eyes, a desperate and distorted plea to run. If it had been under any other circumstances, she was certain she wouldn't have been reminded. But under other circumstances, she wouldn't have been stuck where she was, frozen by the sudden flash of memory

"Just looking should be fine, right, Penny?" Clemont tried to reassure, only glancing at her, not noticing the wideness of her eyes, nor the stiltedness of her breath.

Thorton opened the door without hesitation and glanced around before closing it again. "It's a bit disappointing," he sighed. "They're all covered up, and all the equipment is put away. Makes it look like a morgue on a television show."

Clemont's expression tightened. "Thorton, don't say such things."

Penny felt something within her release, and her hand finally fell to her side. "I asked you to please be more respectful," she stated in a voice that was a lot calmer than she would have thought, though she felt as though she was floating somewhere outside herself.

The older boy stopped. "I'm sorry. I didn't think taking a look would be bad."

"I didn't either," Clemont admitted. "But saying that it looked like a morgue was rude."

Penny nodded, coming back to herself but still feeling shaky and uncomfortable. "...I just..." she muttered before flopping into a chair at the common table. "I just want this to be over. Either fix them and we just ask them how they are, or we find out there's nothing we can do and we send them back to where and when they came from. Having this hang over me is like..."

Clemont slid in beside her. "Sounds like a real AZ's Honedge situation." He was about to touch her hand when he paused. "...though I guess that term doesn't really apply. Had to reconfigure some of our idioms when AZ actually showed up. But the story was that there was a Honedge dangling over--"

She smiled weakly. "I know the story. It's funny to think about, isn't it?"

Behind them, Thorton sighed before leaning against the wall. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to be rude. It was just how I saw things."

"I know." She sighed too, heavily and tired and a bit uneven. "It's ok. It's late and I'm tired and...the gesture I made accidently reminded me of her. When she was begging us to run..." She put her head down on the table. "I've got to differentiate myself from these things. You guys aren't going to know anything about the specifics. Distance myself. Um..."

Clemont patted her on the back. "Yeah, you need to go to bed." There was a smile to his voice. "But also maybe take tomorrow off. I think it would be good for all of us. We've done about all we can do, so unless we really want to have that lightswitch rave here, I think that's going to be it until the others get back."

Thorton grinned and moved his hand to the nearby lightswitch, flicking it a few times with a small laugh. "Sometimes it's the simple things in life, you know? Though it's funny to say that in this regard, given how many thousands of years of technological advancements have gone into things like harnessing electricity to the point where this can be considered commonplace."

Penny looked up. Her eyes were just a little puffy, but there were no tears. "Yeah. The fact that we can take these things for granted is amazing. But I hope that..." She shook her head. "I hope that living robots never become an everyday thing. Porygon is all well and good, but it's not a person, you know? And especially not a double of a specific person."

"As amazing as the technology is, yeah, the ethical matters are just too big." Thorton moved to sit at the table with the others, taking up the seat at the end. "If they could make something that was more of a blank slate like Porygon and let it develop from there, then I'd be more for it. Clemont, isn't that what you did?"

"Uh? Um, not really. Clembot just follows simple commands. It's really his gait and ambulation that I think of as being really advanced." Clemont slid Penny's untouched drink back to her. "It's a really difficult thing to do, but he doesn't have independent thought or anything."

"That's for the best," she said, taking a drink at last. "It must be terrible to be built only to be used as a tool, but have a thinking mind."

Thorton got a drink of his own as well as a bag of chips. "I'm sure we're all on some sort of list with our search histories anyway. Imagine a computer than could tell the feds what sort of equipment and blueprints we're looking up."

Penny could tell he was joking, but at the same time, wondered how much of her double life he knew about. She shook her head and took another drink. "--They don't have this flavor much in Galar. It's more prominent in Paldea, but even then not much. In Galar it's unpopular because it tastes like medicine."

Her attempts at changing the subject were successful. "So it tastes better in other places?"

"I guess so. It doesn't taste like medicine here. But I think Lear gives us the good stuff anyway because we unofficially work for him."

As she drank, Clemont examined the bottom of the can. "Ah, Castellia Boardwalk Soft Drinks. Makes sense."

Thorton swallowed the remains of a chip before speaking. "So, ARE we going to come in tomorrow? Or should we just wait until the others get their parts in?"

Clemont looked expectantly at Penny, waiting for her to take the lead.

"Oh um..." she sputtered at the realization, "I think we can at least take tomorrow off. We've done all we can until we can do live tests on them and make sure the security programs are really shuttered." Her voice was shaking and she cleared her throat to cover it over.

"It seems pretty secure right now. And even if it's not, there's nothing they can really do about it," Clemont said with a reassuring smile. "They don't have a time machine here to get anything from, and they can't catch anything wild here. And you said even with everything, she never tried to harm you herself. He must be the same way, given how identical his programming is. Plus, we know how to disable them if we have to."

"Absolutely! I'll give them a few scans with my data-interpreting machine as well, just in case," Thorton added. "But I don't think there will be much of an issue. Or if there is, it will be on the physical side, and hopefully we can get their consciousnesses up and running enough that they could guide us through the rest of the process. It will be much more efficient that way!" To punctuate his point, he downed the rest of his drink and tossed it into the recycle bin before anyone could say anything else.

"Are you feeling all right?" Clemont asked softly as the can sailed overhead.

Penny nodded, but she paused. She hadn't really thought about it, but her reaction had come entirely from within. The AIs were still inactive for the time being, and her fear had been based on a memory rather than anything present. "Um. I think so." Her voice was a little softer than she wanted it to be. "I've wanted to take a little time off anyway. And I just had a little..." She sipped from her soda before continuing, feeling a bit dry. "Um. When I froze up earlier...maybe I should explain that."

"If you want to." Thorton turned the back of chips in his hand to offer her some.

The small gestures of the two around here were a deep comfort, and Penny felt more settled than she would have believed. She took a deep breath. "All right. So...when we entered the time machine room..."
 
Unity Across All Barriers New
Chapter Nine: Unity Across All Barriers​



--Penny, it's Nemona. I was wondering if you wanted to do anything tomorrow

--hi, didn't see this until now. was working hard. sure
--but
--i can't talk about the project

--That's ok. Are you doing all right?

--yeah. tired. been working a lot. but we're taking tomorrow off anyway so you have good timing

--Ok! Do you want to wait and see what time you wake up before we set any plans?

--what did you have in mind
--don't say battle

--batt-aww.
--Want to see a movie? Lear just opened a movie theater. There's a few choices. And we could do lunch. My treat!

--maybe
--nowhere too loud

--Gotcha! And maybe we could check out that new accessories shop

--didn't take you for a fashionista

--Not for me, silly! I want to test out some new strategies with Pawmot. But they have non-battle items too. Do Sylveons really like ribbons or do they just like their own?
--You know what I mean.

--i think lunch will be fine. maybe a movie. idk yet

--Penny, are we ok?

--yeah. just think things through next time

--After we talked last, I felt really bad about approaching Lear with my suggestion. I should have talked to you first. I should have known that you and your gadget friends would have been the ones saddled with this job.

--probably. i hope they understand

--they?

--she. she.

--Ah. Though I guess we don't really know that for sure. She doesn't see herself as her creator despite the memories, and there must be some sort of mental disconnect between those memories of self-image and a robot body.

--hadn't thought of it like that.

--Well, we can ask her/them/the robot once you finish up! I think she'll have fun seeing everything that Pasio has to offer. I offer my services as tour guide!

--you realize that she didn't have any pokemon on her so you're still not going to get that battle

--

--nemona?

--

--nemona it's been five minutes i know you got my text

--Oh! Sorry. Bettie was calling.

--ok good i thought you went into shock from the knowledge that you can't battle her

--I'll help her find a partner! I'm sure she'd make a fantastic sync pair with someone! Maybe a Golurk could find its way here and we could see how they vibe.

--classic nemona, one thing on her mind

--Hey, there's more on my mind than battles! Having a pokémon partner will be good for someone like her. She didn't get many opportunities to connect with others emotionally, and pokémon are easier to talk to than humans. So for someone in her position it will be really advantageous to form an emotional connection with something that isn't human but that humans also connect to.

--you actually thought this out more than i thought
--im impressed

--Well...you gave me a lot to think about last time we talked. I really do take these things to heart, you know.
--I can be a deep thinker if I want to be!

--still not over that whole "family reunion" thing
--but im glad
--and golurk sounds like something she might enjoy
--but you never know. maybe she'll surprise us

--I hope so! I hope she'll be really happy here. Pasio is really fun!

--thats the goal
--g2g really tired

--See you later! Work hard, play hard! And sleep hard!

--i have no idea what that even means
--see you






A few days later, the group gathered at the Gadgeteer base once more. Sophocles bounced on his heels outside the lab door as Cyrus typed in the entry code.

"All right, so, to recap," Volkner narrated behind them, "the new energy parts have succeeded in our tests. So now we're going to install them and see what's what."

"I can't wait!" Sophocles cheered as he followed Cyrus inside.

Thorton frowned a little as he glanced down at his tablet before pocketing it and following. "Patience is a virtue, so they say. But convenience can speed things up. So it's give and take."

"Profound," Clemont added with a bit of an eyeroll, but he couldn't hide his excitement either.

Penny was the last one inside, and by that point the door to the back room was already open. She noticed, with no fanfare or buildup, that the sight of it no longer filled her with dread, and the suddenness of that realization grew and faded in her as if it was nothing but a fleeting thought.

"Are you ok?" It was Volkner asking. "You look a little peaked."

Penny had no idea what that meant but shook her head. "I'm all right. I just..." She smiled, a little cautiously. "I'm ready for this."

He patted her on the back. "That's the spirit."

Behind him, she could see Cyrus frown. Or more properly, she could see his typical frown deepen.

Thorton was peeking into the open door. "I'm excited too." His usual dull expression didn't change, but the enthusiasm seeped into his voice. "I wonder how long it will take before they're up and about. But it really feels like this is the home stretch!"

Sophocles nodded. "I hope they're happy here. The report said she really wanted to have adventures, so this is a great place for that."

"If everything goes according to plan, they'll be able to go anywhere they want," Volkner asserted. "Our expert programmers have removed their dangerous programs, so they could even go back to Paldea without the machine reactivating."

Clemont grinned broadly. "We do have to run more tests once they're active, but it shouldn't take long at all. Especially since we'll have their input at that stage." At the end, he looked over at Penny, but didn't seem to be prompting her for a response.

She replied anyway, her smile still present. "I do feel good about this. And I'll be glad to see them up and about."

"That's the spirit!" Volkner repeated. Behind him, Cyrus flopped dramatically into a chair and raised a hand to his head as if he had a migraine. Sophocles patted him on the shoulder with a sigh bordering on the sarcastic.

"Are you ready for another day at the grindstone, Penny?" Clemont's smiling face was utterly beaming, and there was an earnestness to him that was deeply comforting.

Such a disparate group, working together for this goal. In a way it reminded her of her friends in Paldea. And that was it, wasn't it? The sight of everyone, all together, made it clear. Her sudden acceptance of their goal, of the imminence of some sort of result whatever it was, it was fine, because of everyone there with her.

There would be some setbacks, and maybe the fear was never really going to leave her. She knew that crystalline image would always be at the back of her mind. But things would be better.
 
Present Is Prologue New
A few more days turned out to be closer to a week and a half. Penny leaned back in her chair to stretch her back for a moment. To her side, Thorton rubbed at his eyes. Clemont took a long drink from a water bottle with a Lumiose Tower sticker on it.

When suddenly, a shout from the back room startled them all. Sophocles's voice, high and insistent--

"T-they're ALIIIIVE!"

Clemont choked, sputtering the water down his shirt. Thorton shot to his feet with such force that it knocked his chair to the ground. And Penny flailed and nearly toppled, but managed to catch herself with her feet hitched under the desk.

The door burst open and Volkner practically erupted from it, grabbing onto the frame in order to skid to a sudden halt. "You guys! They're awake!"

The three programmers jolted over, but Clemont stopped suddenly. "We shouldn't crowd them. One or two of us at a time."

Thorton nodded, though neither of them were facing him. "Makes sense. Who should--"

But Penny had kept walking. Volkner stepped aside for her, and Sophocles gestured inwards like a doorman.

The AIs were still lying prone, but AI Sada's eyes were open, blinking rapidly in the manner of someone emerging from a deep sleep. Which, Penny thought, was exactly what had happened. The other one slowly raised a hand to his head, hiding his expression, but he seemed to be wordlessly moving his mouth.

Cyrus remained in the room, but moved to closer by the door, giving Penny a better route.

The girl approached, feeling a lump in her throat. This was what they had worked for. This was everything they had put together, all together, and now it was time to see just how much it had worked. Hesitantly, she put a hand over AI Sada's. "H-hello. It's good to see you again."

The AI's eyes flashed briefly, a small red light, but Penny had suspected that would happen. Her friend had described the light as unsettling, but that was because it had accompanied the news that the person who had called everyone to the lab was not the real Sada. Knowing that from the beginning, even though a robot with glowing red eyes was a mainstay of science fiction, the sight was still oddly comforting, as if it was a natural part of waking up.

The robot blinked again, more steady this time, and turned her head to face Penny. "...st-udent num-ber 803B121..." Her voice was soft and creaky, but it was a voice, one connected to an active consciousness. "I am...s₀rry..."

No no no no no, it had to work, it had to. Even the jolt down Penny's back at the distorted voice could be set aside as she gripped the AI's hand tighter, trying desperately to keep her focused and conscious. "It's ok. We can fix you! You're with some of the best engineers in the world. You'll be--"

The AI smiled up at her. "...to have scared y-y₀u..." She squeezed Penny's hand back, a weak grip, especially for a robot, but one that was oddly encouraging. "The maɔhıne cannot resta-art...This place is...it will be safe..." Her voice was still catching, but the issue seemed to be working its way out the more she talked.

"You're on the island of Pasio," Penny told her as she reached out a hand to brush stray hair away from the AI's face, thinking back to a time where she had been scared and her sister had done the same gesture to her. "It's ok. We've got a group here that helped you. And...I helped with checking your programming." She couldn't help but smile a little.

"T-thank you..." The AI's own smile relaxed.

"You came here because of a pokémon named Hoopa," Penny explained. "It can bring people and pokémon from anywhere it wants, including other times or even timelines."

The AI's eyes gently closed, but Penny wasn't worried. "I see. That would explain the r-ring I saw before losing power..." Fewer catches, good.

"Yes. I know that must have been terrifying for you."

"It was...but I sense this is a place of safety."

Penny brushed another stray hair away. "And um...you weren't alone. Hoopa found another robot..."

That red light was visible even through the AI's eyelids before she looked up in shock and tried to struggle to a sitting position. "Another--!?" she exclaimed with a sharp peak to her voice, as if the surprise had knocked her audio ever so slightly out of whack even though such a thing wasn't possible.

"It's all right! It's all right!" Penny insisted. This was getting a little much for her, and she glanced towards the door. Cyrus was still there but watching silently, though at her look, Clemont tapped him on the arm and gestured for him to exit. She looked back at the AI and hoped that this would mean Clemont would come in. "The other robot seems to have been through the same thing you did. Um...he's from another timeline. He has to be."

The AI fumbled to her feet, stumbling, putting her weight on the table to resteady herself, but didn't stop. "Another--" This time, it came off as an interrupted thought rather than an exclamation.

Penny wasn't sure what to do. If the AI fell, nothing would happen. Any physical damage would be minimal, less than a human, but she was clearly troubled by the sudden distress before her. But a hand on her shoulder and Clemont smiling in the corner of her vision helped the girl focus. "He's right there," Penny offered with slight hand gesture towards the second robot, but it was unnecessary, as there wasn't much else to see in the small room.

A few seconds on her feet and AI Sada was already steady, her advanced ambulation correcting any mistakes. As she approached, the male robot lowered his arm, taking his hand from his face, and looked up at the newcomer with a curious tilt of his head. "Oh, you are--"

AI Sada paused, taking in the sight of the other robot, and the shock on her expression softened into a comfortable smile. "So you were...I see. Something unforseen has happened."

His eyes flashed as well, blue rather than red. "A strange timeline indeed...I am grateful to be here." He didn't smile back, seeming to stop just short of it, but there was an equal softness across his face as he met her gaze.

They watched each other for a moment in stillness before AI Sada put her hand over his.

"We should given them some space," Penny whispered. Clemont nodded and drew her out of the room, Volkner softly closing the door behind them.

From inside, they could hear muffled talking.

Thorton offered a hand in a high five. Penny laughed, relieved, and slapped the hand in return, with Clemont following the gesture. The others followed suit, even Cyrus, whose returned five was a passionless tap before he moved past the others to sit at a table. He was followed by Sophocles and Volkner, who waited until he was farther from the door to declare the project a tentative success. Thorton agreed, and threw open the fridge to pass around celebratory drinks.

Penny hung back, though, so Clemont did as well. "It seems like they're getting along," he whispered with a smile to his voice. "And moreover, they seem to be working just fine. We'll have to get him up and walking to make sure, but she adapted pretty quickly. And she seemed to recognize you, so I'm glad for that too."

She nodded, slow and sure. "She said the machine can't restart, and 'this place is safe'. I'd trust that she would know that much." Even if the AI was incorrect about the machine, it seemed that Pasio was at least far enough away from Zero Lab to ensure clarity.

"How do you feel?"

There were any number of ways Penny could have answered. Confident, if not in the situation then at least in the ability of her surrounding company to fix any issues. Brave, for being able to face things without retreating to her room. Like a better programmer, with everything she had learned along the way. Stronger, somehow, in a way she couldn't really explain. A little freer, a lot more experienced, and even a touch more mature.

So she turned to him, a sparkle in her eyes. "I'd say...'Cassie' is doing just fine."
 
Back
Top Bottom