Welcome to another exciting installment of Spacemon, the tale of a Pokemon TRPG campaign! It is a sci-fi space epic played using the Pokemon Tabletop United (PTU) system and GMed by fellow TAY author DragonStorm247. You can get caught up on the entire Spacemon saga here!
Alex and H ran across the Belaviure campus, away from the auditorium, pulling the confused Dr. Armstrong along with them. They soon made it back to the mag-train station, conveniently just as the train was arriving, and safely boarded an empty car.
It wasn’t until the train departed that Armstrong started to get his bearings and snap out of his stupor. “What’s going on?!” he shouted.
“We’re saving your ass, Gramps!” Alex shouted back.
“Wh- What happened?”
“There were people trying to kill you!” Alex informed Armstrong, jabbing her finger at him.
“Wait, there were?” H asked, looking confused. “What?”
“Yeah, the shady guys in the back,” Alex explained to the cyborg.
“There weren’t any shady guys,” H stated matter-of-factly.
Alex frowned. “Yeah, there were.”
“Couldn’t have been.”
“You were too busy focusing on the lecture to notice, dummy.”
“Hmm …” H grunted.
Shane arrived back at the Helix with Morgan and Dmitri seemingly only a few moments after Alex, H, and Armstrong. “There you are!” Alex called out to the trio as they approached.
“You make it back okay?” Shane asked her.
“Mhm,” Alex nodded before they all boarded the ship.
“Looks like you made the evening news,” Minerva said as they walked past the bridge. Shane looked over at the viewscreen and saw an aerial drone feed of the Belaviure campus on the news report that it was displaying.
“I told you we should have dressed up like Space Ninjas!” Alex blurted out.
“We weren’t planning on it,” Shane told Minerva, ignoring Alex’s comment. “Just get us the hell out of here.”
“Don’t wanna be on TV?” Minerva asked as she fired up the engines. “I don’t blame you. Being on TV’s overrated anyway.”
As the ship took off, Shane led Armstrong to the living quarters to speak with him. As the crew all sat down in the mess area, Dmitri wandered off and locked himself away in his room. Shane knew they would need to talk to him about what happened, but now wasn’t the time.
“What happened?” H asked as Shane turned his focus back to the group. “Why did we have to take Armstrong?”
“There were people there to kill him,” Shane explained.
“I told him that already,” Alex said. “But he didn’t believe me.”
“Hmm,” H grunted. He then turned to Armstrong and said, “Apparently there were people trying to kill you. And they were there … but they weren’t.”
“Well there’s a reason we didn’t tell you,” Morgan told the cyborg. “We wanted to avoid conflict.”
“That’s pretty usual for your decisions,” H reacted. “Armstrong, how are you feeling?”
“I think I’ll be fine,” the doctor replied between breaths, still winded from the run to the ship.
“I’m offering this as a courtesy,” Shane said, looking at the doctor as he sent D.E.R.P. out. “I can have my Inkay here make you forget everything after the talk, but it’s your choice.”
“Perhaps it is best to just forget,” the doctor replied. He looked right at D.E.R.P. as the Inkay’s eyes started flashing and fell asleep right in his chair on account of their hypnotic power.
“Does he seem … off at all to any of you?” Morgan asked, a concerned look on her face as she glanced at the sleeping doctor.
“Resurrection does weird things to the body,” H replied. “Or, at least, I would assume so.”
“What?” Alex asked, a confused expression forming on her face.
“He was resurrected so that he could teach me how to become the perfect being,” H stated. “That’s why we were looking for him. And apparently he’s important to some other people or something.”
“H … I don’t think resurrection is possible,” Morgan said.
“Nor do I, but he’s living proof so … anything’s possible.”
“Well, don’t you think we should ask him what happened first?” Morgan asked. “Maybe he didn’t die.”
“Hmm … That may be … But it doesn’t explain what happened when everyone died.”
“What do you mean ‘everyone died?’ What happened?”
“I woke up one day in the lab and … no one was there,” H explained. “All were gone and I was left as the chosen one.”
“Maybe they just left you there,” Alex suggested. “I can see why they would,” she added under her breath.
“It was an incredibly complex and secret lab facility,” H scoffed. “Followed by the fact that everything was just gone. Things just don’t magically vanish. People would move, there’d be bureaucracy, there’d be complications.”
“Maybe they took everything with them,” Alex suggested.
“Over the course of a few hours?” H asked incredulously. “Impossible.”
“How do you know it was only hours, huh?” Alex asked. “It could have been days, or weeks, or years even. I’ve seen movies! I know lab experiments can wake up after years and not remember anything right!”
“I would know,” H firmly stated. “I know this day better than any day I can remember. This was the day I was chosen. Of course I would know.”
“Yeah? Well … you’re just a stupid robot man!”
“Stop it,” Morgan told Alex. “That’s not helping. H, more about this day. You say you woke up and everything was gone?”
“Precisely,” H said. “The building was abandoned. Everything was gone; it was simply an empty building. All that was left was #1 and myself … And it was at that point that I knew that, through the process we had begun, I was the one who was chosen in the end. I was chosen by the Divine, so the rest weren’t needed. Or so I thought, until now.”
“Chosen for what exactly?” Morgan asked.
“I was one of many subjects, experiments,” H explained.
“So you were born in a test tube?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know how I was born,” H told her. “Do you remember how you were born? No, you don’t. No one does. I grew up in the lab, raised and created and molded in the lab to come to perfection through testing, through trials. The inferior were weeded out, but I was the one left standing. I was the chosen one, and as such, I was to lead Humanity’s perfection, which is what I have been doing ever since.”
“Right,” Shane said, rolling his eyes.
“The lab itself is what helped me gain perfection,” H continued. “This is a man from the lab. Everyone vanished from the lab when they were no longer needed. Apparently he has been needed again, so he is back. I can only assume he has been resurrected for a divine purpose because I am lacking in what I need.”
“Did it ever occur to you that he never died?” Shane asked the delusional cyborg. This line of thought was out there, even for H.
“Of course he died. That’s why he left.”
“Death is not the only way to leave.”
The conversation continued for a while, with H’s crewmates not grasping what he knew to be true. Typical. Thankfully, Armstrong soon began to wake up. He would be able to explain things to them.
“Where am I?” the doctor asked as his eyes opened.
“Welcome to the UAS Helix,” Shane told him.
“Why am I here?” Armstrong asked.
“We just wanted to ask you a few things,” Morgan said.
“Such as?”
“Such as why you’ve come back from the dead,” said H.
“Only he believes that,” Shane told Armstrong, prompting H to scoff again.
“I’ve never been dead,” the doctor said.
H’s face contorted in confusion. “Your memories have been tampered with once,” he said. “Why … Where did you go? Do you not recognize me? I am Experiment #1749XQR5Z-H.”
“Come again?” the doctor asked.
“Experiment #1749XQR5Z-”
“-H,” the doctor finished, snapping to alertness. He sat up straight and started poking H in the face, seemingly not believing the sight before him. “Is it really you? After all this time?”
“I am the one who passed the tests,” said H.
“I am amazed that you are still alive.”
“So am I. You’re the one who died, although you don’t remember it.”
“I never died,” the doctor emphatically stated.
“As I said, you don’t remember it.”
“You two know each other, then?” Shane asked.
“Yes,” said the doctor. “Although I have not seen him since the project got shut down.”
“Shut down?” H asked, his confusion returning once again.
“Yes.”
“I thought it was finished. That’s why everyone left.”
“He says he woke up one day and everyone was gone,” Morgan said.
“The project was shut down rather abruptly,” Armstrong explained. “Our major funder … removed all his support.”
“Because there was no more need,” said H. “I was … chosen … I was the completed product.”
“Has he always been this weird?” Shane asked Armstrong.
“They all were … a little different, yes,” the doctor replied.
“What was this project exactly?” Morgan asked.
“We were … creating the next stage of Human evolution, of Human life. A stronger man-machine interface. A next-generation cyborg, if you will.”
“Wait … You were making Eliminators?” Alex asked another of her dumb questions.
“Machines disguised as Humans … not the same as Humans becoming something else through machines. They’d be of poor use to Starnet!”
“You didn’t think you were the only one who’s seen the film, did you?” Armstrong asked when Alex gave him a surprised look. “What we were working on was something much … more. But the project was incomplete.”
“Incomplete in the sense that I was able to go out and continue to grow,” H said. “But complete in the sense that I had passed the trials.”
Armstrong looked right at the cyborg and said, “We were only just beginning. We were lucky to find a very generous benefactor to fund our research, as long as we delivered results.”
“Was this benefactor, by any chance, named Mr. Silver?” Shane asked.
“Yes,” Armstrong nodded. “As long as we delivered results on schedule, he answered questions.”
“How long has it been since you delivered results?” Morgan asked.
“We kept to the schedule perfectly for years, providing him with progress updates, and occasionally, he asked for one of the subjects,” Armstrong explained. “We would send them, and would never hear back.”
The doctor paused and took a breath before continuing, “This was the arrangement for years … until, one day … he withdrew all funding. We begged Mr. Silver to continue the funding. We were just about to reach the next stage: augmenting the remaining subjects on a micro-level.”
He turned back to H and said, “Everything we did to you up until then was just to prepare you for the second phase … Wide-scale cybernetic reconfiguration on a cellular level.”
“Genius,” said H, recognizing the brilliance of the plan.
Armstrong nodded and continued, “As soon as I told this to Mr. Silver … He withdrew all support. He was done. Without him, we were unable to complete the experiments … We had to pack up, move on, give up.”
“What happened to everything else?” H asked.
“There was nothing else … This Mr. Silver … He took so many of our subjects. You were the only one left.”
“And why was I left?”
“You would have been the next … We would have grown a new batch and continued, but you were the last when he withdrew his funding.”
“But can we continue now?” H asked. “We may not have his funding, but we have funding enough, at least somehow, apparently.”
“If you’re willing to fund this yourself, H, then feel free,” Shane told him.
“Wait …” said H, turning back to Armstrong, “You said grow another batch … How could you replace me? I’m the one that worked, succeeded.”
“You were all the same,” Armstrong told him. “You were all clones. The others … didn’t fail, we gave them to Mr. Silver.”
“Wait,” said Alex. “The other day you said this Mr. Silver guy was a man-mime-Pokemon thing … But what does that even mean? Who is he anyway?”
“Join the club,” Shane said.
“He’s a man we did some jobs for,” Morgan explained. “We never saw his face, never saw who he really is. He communicates through a network of cybernetically implanted Mr. Mimes with screens for faces. No one knows who he is. Our old friend Arlon Jett is convinced that Mr. Silver lies at the heart of a Galactic conspiracy … That’s why he asked us to find Armstrong. He believes that Mr. Silver wants him killed and he wants to find out why.”
“Well, now that that’s out in the open air … Do you have any idea why Mr. Silver might be after you now?” Shane asked Armstrong.
“Perhaps he is after my research …” Armstrong told him. “Perhaps he wants to silence me, destroy it … I cannot say. I never understood him.”
“Perhaps he wants to prevent the next step,” H suggested.
“Perhaps … It certainly was a … controversial idea.”
“Controversy is the only way to change.”
“I agree, yes … But perhaps Mr. Silver feels otherwise. I cannot say … It would appear that nowhere is safe for me now.”
“You are welcome to stay on the ship with us,” Shane told him.
“I present a danger to you. Are you sure—”
“Trust me, we’re already enough of a danger to ourselves.”
“Fair enough,” Armstrong nodded. “I accept your gracious offer. Thank you”
“If I was simply one of many, then why was I left?” H asked Armstrong. “Why was I not moved with the project or—”
“The project was over.”
“Yes, but why was I left behind, why not dealt with or sent to Mr. Silver as a consolation prize?”
“Mr. Silver cut off all communication. He said that … he had all he needed and had no further interest.”
“Then why was I simply left alone in the building?” H asked. He needed an answer.
“An oversight perhaps? I do not know …”
“Perhaps it is a divine blessing,” H said. “I was chosen. I survived so that we might begin again!”
Dr Armstrong thought for a moment, then stood up and put his hands on H’s shoulders. “My boy, if you’re willing to continue … then so am I.”
Session Notes: Well that was super enlightening! Not only was Armstrong H’s creator, but he was working for Mr. Silver! That’s not entirely unexpected though … Mr. Silver is connected to everything. Mr. Silver used this project for his own ends, whatever he needed, which clearly wasn’t what the scientists were aiming to achieve, he got it, and cast the project aside. Mr. Silver is a dangerous man.
Surprise, surprise, H isn’t actually some chosen one, even though somehow he has still managed to convince himself of that … for the time being. I’m sure DragonStorm will find a way to break him down … Same for the rest of us. But there was some super cool backstory revelation here. I can’t wait for the next session!
Update 11/16/21: Another easy touch-up. Originally, this chapter was just one scene written from an inconsistent perspective. I cut the beginning down into a couple smaller scenes, then left the rest as a longer one. The first made sense to be in Alex’s perspective and Shane seemed to work for Shane. The rest made the most sense to be from H’s perspective. I tend to avoid writing from his perspective because it can get weird, but it gave it more impact to do it for this scene. Other than that change, I just added some extra bits around the new scene transitions and did the usual past tense conversion.
That does it for this chapter. As always the Spacemon gang and I will be monitoring the comments to foster discussion and answer any questions. Feel free to give feedback and critiques of the writing so I can improve it for the future, or just leave a comment with what you think about what went down in this chapter or what you think might happen next! You can also revisit past chapters, check out the rest of the Spacemon saga, join the Spacemon Discord server, or like our Facebook page to stay updated on all things Spacemon! Click here for the next exciting installment of Spacemon!
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