Chapter 15: In-advocate Overtime

Chapter 15: In-advocate Overtime

In a normal week, the weekend was supposed to be a light break from Club work and the recruitment process. Unfortunately, given their circumstances, a break was the last thing Jermy knew they needed.

The four of them — himself, Mathew, Joey, and Meowth — were hiking their way through Pawalmtry Forest, each carrying brittle plastic bags they had dug out of the corners of Meowth’s condo. Jermy hadn’t been interested in paying the mystery dungeon surrounding Kalmwa’er a visit on their off-days, but Mathew and Joey had insisted on it.

According to them, in addition to this new hike to Misery Cave they were arranging, Minichino had given them the idea to do some off-the-clock work over the weekend. Somebody with a camera, like ORB, could record it, so they could show it to David and Dit. It seemed a bit excessive to Jermy, but he supposed the excessiveness was the point.

The pikachu couldn’t help but be a bit curious about the whole matter. He had no idea when, where, or why the Club members had crafted this new plan — he’d just been told it had happened. Jermy didn’t even know if his bosses had approved of it.

On top of his confusion there, Jermy still needed to keep an eye on Meowth. To tell the truth, he had no idea why he had come with the three of them. They hadn’t really asked him to join. Didn’t he dislike cleaning?

In any case, the lot of them were here, and already Jermy was quite tired. “Go…on…without me,” he mumbled, throwing himself into the side of the steep hill they were trying to climb up in their search for more trash.

“Wow, tiring out already?” ORB asked, effortlessly rolling his way up the incline.

“Easy for you to say,” he said, lifting his head out of the dirt. “You have wheels! Would you be so cocky if I knocked you over?”

“And you would?”

“…Faaaaaaaaaaaaaair point.” Jermy climbed to his feet and pressed on.

Mathew, Joey, and Meowth were waiting on him at the wide, oval-shaped summit of the hill. Up there was a whole assortment of litter and waste dotting the space around the trees and brush they would inevitably have to navigate around to clean the place.

“Hah… If only these mystery dungeons could magically put all this in a nice little pile when they shift, working overtime would be easier than a balk in a breezeway…” Joey muttered.

“If you let the dungeon shuffle at least three million, two hundred forty five thousand, nine hundred eighty two times, maybe you’ll be able to get that pile,” ORB said. “Not that it would stop any of you from complaining about having to climb that, too.”

“Well, on the bright side, we already know how to make this a lot less boring…” Mathew looked to him. “Jermy?”

“Huh? Oh, right!” Jermy had almost forgotten their strategy in Asulaguah Beach.

“That seems like a bad idea,” Meowth remarked, leaning against the side of a tree with a paw.

“Hey, it made work a hell of a lot better on the clock,” Mathew snapped back. “Why not off the clock, too?”

Meowth’s body language quickly shifted, pushing off of the tree and becoming more defensive. “Fair enough,” he said, not retaliating against Mathew at all.

Jermy wordlessly got ahead of the group, towards the center of the hill. ORB was just behind him. “This time, let’s not charge up the Round too much,” he advised.

“You should pick a shorter song then,” ORB remarked.

“Right…” After having to keep up with a classical song for five passes, Jermy was more than willing to go with something easier, that didn’t require a backing track. “Let’s do this…” The pikachu backed up, then gathered the energy. “Ooooooooooooooooooooh who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” As Jermy passed it off to ORB, he caught Mathew staring at him, his expression a mix of stunned and confused.

Luckily, ORB didn’t need any commands to recognize this. “Sponge-bob…” He passed it back.

“…Square-pants!” He cried, spinning and smacking the ball of musical energy into the ground with his tail. A smaller, much more controlled shockwave burst from it, kicking up a lot of dirt and a lot of plastic waste straight into the air.

“Yeeeeehhhaaaaa…awww.” Joey’s hype quickly died as the four of them realized how much of a mistake retrying this game in Pawalmtry Forest was. Much of the trash had been launched from its safe placement on the ground right into the trees, catching on branches and leaves — not very conductive to catching. “I reckon we should’ve thought this out a little more,” he said.

Meowth, still standing away from the rest of them, remarked, “I tried to warn you.”

“Oh, piss off,” Mathew said. “Saying ‘this is a bad idea’ and not elaborating is hardly a warning!”

“…Yes it is?” Meowth seemed confused.

“Oh, fuck you,” he mumbled, out of earshot for Meowth but definitely in earshot for him and Joey. Jermy could only sigh — this feud between them had hardly improved over the past few days. He wished he could make it stop, but it’s not like he could magically repair a relationship…

“Y’all, is it really necessary to yap at each other over… Uh, Mathew?” Joey now seemed less concerned by Mathew’s comment and more concerned by Mathew’s actions; the cubone had approached a tree and hugged himself around it. “What in tarnation are you doing?”

“Knocking the trash down. What else would I be doing?” Mathew answered. Slowly, carefully, and with great effort, he began to scale the tall trunk.

Joey scrunched his maw at that. “I reckon I should do that. Between the two of us, I’m pretty sure I’m still the better—”

“I insist!” Mathew said firmly. He settled one foot onto a branch, and then the other. “I’m the one who brought up the game and started this. I need to be the responsible man and fix it myself.” He threw himself down, wrapping his arms around the branch.

Jermy began to panic. That branch hardly seemed like it could hold Mathew. “Hey, you don’t have to do it so riskily!” he told him, approaching Mathew from below but carefully avoiding the space directly beneath him, in case he fell. “I know a bunch of these things called ‘circus maneuvers’ for problems just like this! I could launch you up and—“

“You and Demurke already helped last time!” Mathew exclaimed. He shimmied himself along, making his way towards a dangling plastic bag. With every movement he made, Jermy could see the branch wobble more and more. “Now it is my turn. It is my turn, and I am going to—aaaah!”

SNAP.

Mathew, as well as the low-hanging branch his weight just broke, tumbled to the ground. Jermy barely had time to leap away before the crushing weight dropped on top of him. Mathew smacked against the thin wood on his way to the grass. The cubone squeaked in pain, sliding off of it and clutching his chest.

“Mathew!” Jermy exclaimed. He, Joey and Meowth were quick to come to his aid, gathering around him.

“Scans show no signs of major breakage,” ORB remarked. “He’ll be fine.” A collective sigh of relief flowed out from all of them.

“Well…” Mathew looked up at them all. “Guess I was barking up the wrong tree there,” he muttered.

Jermy could only sigh. Mathew was so steadfast in his goal that he was putting himself at risk to get things done. Had the increased pressure from the time limit really motivated him so much?

“Jermy, we gots to talk about your work with da humans,” Dit had said. The pidgeot was failing to give him his full attention, splitting his focus with some kind of letter he was writing between statements.

“What about it?” Jermy had asked. “Sure, maybe the game didn’t go all that well, but trust me, they’ve got more than enough things rolled up their sleeves that’ll totally—”

“It’s not about what dere doing,” he had clarified. “It’s about how dere going about it. They want da job, yes, but they’re not buying what we’re selling. Mathews is here for da good life, and da croc…I dunno what he wants.”

“…And?”

“Dere supposed to wanna fight, Jeremy,” Dit had reminded him. “Making ‘em hankering to do that is your job. You gotta stop handling it like one of your little science projects. It’s not just about da status reports and progress markers. It’s about getting them to believe in da cause.”

Jermy had cocked his head. “Is it a crazy big deal if they want to be a part of OCEAN for a reason other than believing in the cause?” he had asked. “I thought priority number one is just to get Mathew on-board with the business enough that he’ll trust us when we tell him…y’know.”

“Is it a crazy big deal if I roll over your foot for saying something so inaccurate?” ORB had chimed in.

“See, youse got some sense, robot,” Dit had remarked. “Jeremy, trust is all about loyalty! Knowing we all gotta be dere for one another… If dey aren’t willing to scratch our feathers, how do we know dey’ll let us scratch dere’s?” The pidgeot clutched the parchment he was working on with his wings and held up the backside towards Jermy. He couldn’t make out any of the words from this angle, and Dit seemed to want to keep it that way for now. “I’m doing what I can tah see if loyalty is here. Meanwhile, you gotta hold up your end of the bargain. If you don’t stick da landing, dis plan is toast.”

As Jermy helped Mathew back up, Dit’s reprimands lingered in the pikachu’s head. Maybe this venture through the forest could be another shot at getting his head in the game? Jermy could only try…

After things calmed down, they quickly made work of the tiny plateau. The litter on the ground was handled by Jermy, Mathew, Meowth, and even ORB, while Joey took on the role of knocking off everything that had caught on the trees. Luckily, the branch Mathew had broken was the worst damage they did to that hill.

The task was going swimmingly…until the sound of shuffling could be heard. A lot of shuffling.

“Do y’all hear that?” Joey was the first to notice, pointing down and away from the hill. Jermy turned and —

“Whuh oh…” At the base of the hill, Jermy’s eyes made contact with a whole mob. A little sea of ratatta, both in purple and black shades, had congregated below them, about twenty strong.

“Get away from here!” one of them cried.

“Those are our scraps!” another exclaimed. Following it was a whole rumble of declarations, some quite threatening in nature.

Mathew looked down upon them all judgingly. He wasn’t having any of this. “What the hell do you even want with this stuff?” he asked, holding the filled plastic bag over his head. “It’s literally trash.”

“Scraps have food scraps in them!” a black-furred rattata said.

“We want our scraps!” a purple-furred rattata demanded.

A chant arose and erupted from them all. “Scraps for scraps! Scraps for scraps! Scraps for scraps!” Then, suddenly, they all burst into a charge up the hill.

Jermy’s ears and tail tensed up in panic. “ORB, how bad is this gonna be?”

“Vital scans indicate collective malnourishment,” ORB informed them. “Conclusion: they are numerous, but very puntable.”

Mathew brandished his bone club. “Then we’ll punt them.”

As Jermy admired how much Mathew’s capability in combat had increased between his training in the Waregle and with the Club, the pikachu realized that an opportunity had been handed to him on a silver platter. He leapt close to the cubone and called, “Stick close!” just as they came upon them.

These were the rats, alright. Gnawing at their legs, headbutting their chests, trying everything to wrest their bags from their grips… The floor was blurred with purple and black. Jermy, grunting with pain as he tried not to let the rattata ground him, had no sight of ORB or Meowth — all he could do was back Mathew up. He fired an electric bolt into the crowd, but they were surprisingly aware and nimble, with only a few getting singed as they leapt out of the way.

That changed when, descending from above, a small spout of water sprayed a purple-furred rattata, causing it to squeal in pain. “Jermy!” Joey cried from above, sitting pretty in the nearby tree. Jermy realized what he had to do — before the rattata had a chance to regain its bearings, the pikachu sent a searing thundershock its way. It cried out before falling over, unconscious.

One down, nineteen or so to go…

Behind him, Mathew was holding back the crowd with just his club alone. “You know you all could just…join society if you want food, right?!” Out of the corner of Jermy’s eye, Mathew smacked a black-furred one right out of the air. “You could get jobs, get your ugly mustaches trimmed…” the cubone gasped in realization as one of them bit down on his club and started pulling at it like a dog pulling a toy from the owner’s hand. “You could go to college and become frat boys!”

“They don’t even know what the word ‘college’ means!” Jermy reminded him as he whirled and lobbed lightning towards the rattata on the club. It passed by the immune Mathew and fried it out of commission.

“Thanks!” Mathew exclaimed, throwing the creature off of his club.

As Jermy sweeped a pair of rattata with an Iron Tail, Dit’s advice once more echoed through his head. It occurred to him that he needed to keep encouraging Mathew. “You know,” he said with a pant, kicking one, “If you could handle this, I bet you could handle any bad boy that gets in OCEAN’s way!”

Jermy expected Mathew to give a glare so snarky that you could just tell he was smirking beneath his mask and reply ‘So you noticed!’ Instead, he was met with a confused look. “Aren’t we out here to not end up in the military fighting—shit!”

In the moment Jermy had distracted him, Mathew had been overtaken by a purple-furred rattata that had leapt onto his chest. The cubone fell back to the ground, his head towards Jermy. The pikachu panicked, but before he could answer, the clever little thing grabbed the nose of the Cubone’s mask with his teeth and pulled it up, using it as a shield. His electric attack bounced off, striking a random rat, but not the one on top of Mathew, now scratching at his shoulder holding the plastic bag full of trash.

Jermy fumed, which wasted just enough of his time for a black-furred rattata to make a searingly painful bite at his tail. He yowled as the pain shot up, hardening his tail with an iron sheen in response, but now a couple of them were trampling him over from the front!

Bite. Scratch. Bite. Copious amounts of pain came upon him, from all sides. Jermy was incapable of launching any attack from this position. He groaned, trying and failing to get them off.

“ORB…H-Help…!” Jermy called. Where was his machine? He heard the sound of his laser firing, but it wasn’t in his direction. Why couldn’t it have been towards him? He needed ORB. He needed him, just as he always—

A gray blur dropped onto a pair of unsuspecting rattata, and with two furious swipes, both of them went down. The fading Jermy watched as Meowth slashed the rat atop Mathew, popped a Reviver Seed into his mouth, and put him on his feet. Then, shortly after, he came to his aid too, freeing him from the dangerous buck teeth and short claws. The soothing juices of an Oran brought Jermy back into the action in no time.

The fight didn’t last very long after that. With Mathew, Jermy, and Meowth all working together, the remaining dungeon pokémon didn’t stand a chance. Eventually, the number of rattata matched the number of them, and that prompted them all to flee.

“We got scraaaaapped…” one whined as they ran back down the hill.

Jermy panted as he watched them go. “That was close…” he carefully stepped over one of many beaten, unconscious rats. “Guess they found out how much trouble they could get into.”

“Not a lot,” Meowth remarked, patting his emergency kit. He turned towards Mathew.

Mathew gave him a stern glare, then peeled his eyes away. “How did you even get to us, anyway? There had to have been at least four of those things in the way.”

“I helped shoot down the ones around Meowth like a big ol’ turret!” As Joey shimmied down the tree, he eyed Mathew and added, “I reckoned he could use it more, since he was alone.”

“Well…” A beat. “Thanks.”

There was a stillness in the air now, much unlike the chaos of moments ago. As Mathew continued facing the direction the remaining three or so went, Joey and Meowth shared a look Jermy couldn’t really get a read on. At this point, the pikachu was lingering on another thought.

He had been trying to encourage Mathew earlier, bolstering his ability to believe in the cause OCEAN was giving him…but the results had been catastrophic. If he had just not said anything, Mathew wouldn’t have been distracted, and Meowth wouldn’t have had to waste one of his kit’s reviver seeds.

As they all quietly got back to work, going around their fallen enemies to clean up the hill, Jermy could not get past that fact. So much so that he could hardly think about their work.

“You missed this one,” ORB said, using his claw to point at a piece of sheet plastic coated in a gross-looking substance.

“Oh, thanks.” Jermy held it by the edge and stuffed it in the bag before walking forward.

“And the one on the bush,” ORB pointed out.

“Oh.” The pikachu fumbled as he pulled a tiny fragment of cardboard from the bush.

ORB continued to trail him, as always. “I’m detecting incredibly high levels of tilt from you, Jermy.”

Jermy grumbled, “Well, maybe I am tilted.”

“You should go stomp it off,” ORB ordered. “The others will notice you getting so distracted.”

“Fair enough…” Jermy sighed, before turning and calling out, “Hey, guys, I’ll be right back! Gonna skedaddle out on my own and see if I can find more trash.”

“Oh, really?” Mathew seemed a little surprised. “Alright. Just don’t get your ass kicked while you’re out there, I guess.”

“Thanks! I don’t plan on going too far, don’t worry…”

A dozen paces down the hill later and Jermy was alone with a revelation he had been ignoring for some time: he wasn’t cut out for this recruitment job. At all. He could sell people on a project just like that, but a mission, cause, or belief? He had no idea how to articulate that, or even introduce the concept. The fact greatly frustrated Jermy — all this time he was spending with Mathew and Joey, and he had barely improved.

How had he even ended up at this position, anyway? It wasn’t his specialty or line of work or anything like.

He thought back to the moment this arrangement had formed. He had been rushed through the elevator to the Resort by David and Dit, making a beeline for Mr. Persian before he began his workday. Luckily, they had caught up to him sharing a private chat with Demurke in front of the elevator.

“Is something the matter?” he had asked, looking concernedly at the out-of-breath trio. While Jermy had been the only one to sprint the whole way, using wind to push themselves forwards had, appropriately, taken the wind out of both David and Dit’s sails. Both the cat and Demurke backed up against the wall to give them all space in the cramped staircase.

“We need you to…change…plans,” David got out past his panting. “A human’s been dropped in…Pawalmtry Forest.”

“Two humans,” Dit clarified.

“Oh!” Demurke exclaimed, a mix of excitement and worry. “Y-You want me to help take care of them?” she presumed. “It’s been a wh-while since I’ve d-done that, but…”

The pidgeot nodded. “But dere’s something you gotta know—”

“One of the humans didn’t come through the normal method. Our trackers suggested a portal that doesn’t belong to us cut into Solceus. I can’t say for sure, but…we think it might be Mathew.”

Demurke’s eyes widened, knowing exactly what this meant. “Oh.” She eyed Jermy with a worried glance. Jermy gave one back in return.

“I don’t recognize that name, but if it’s somebody of importance, we will find them,” Mr. Persian said, looking confused but respectful of their worry. “I’ll shorten their hours and have them work in Pawalmtry Forest so Demurke can search.”

It should have ended there, with Demurke setting out alone, rescuing Mathew and Joey, bringing them to David, and monitoring them on her own. But then…

“Wait, wait, dis isn’t right,” Dit muttered. “Mathew’s leaping through one of dose portals, right? Don’t that mean he’s gonna have everything still in his noggin? Memory Printing, or something like that?”

“Theory of Conscious Memory Imprinting, yes…” It took a moment for the decidueye to fully register that. “Oh, you’re right. He probably wouldn’t respond as well to the regular recruitment process, wouldn’t he? Especially considering us having…”

The murkrow’s eyes flicked between Dit and David. “Wh-what would you like me to do, then…?”

“Nothing you gotta do,” Dit responded. “You’re gonna hafta have some backup. A recruiter who’s techy, and could get right on his level.”

David turned his head towards the ceiling while thinking…and then, he looked down upon Jermy. “…What’s with the funky look?” he asked David.

“How much time do we have?” the decidueye asked everyone else.

Mr. Persian grimaced. “I don’t know how long I could stall without looking odd. A few minutes, maybe?”

“Hardly enough time to find anybody else…”

Jermy’s mouth dropped as he realized what David was thinking. “Are you suggesting I should—?!”

“I’ve caught up, you speedsters.” The elevator doors opened to reveal ORB, who had struggled to keep up with the three of them and had fallen behind. “If you don’t want to lose me, maybe you should start carrying me.”

“…Um,” Demurke began. “How d-did you push the buttons with your…?” She gestured to his arcade claw.

“Very carefully.”

David groaned, picked up the robot, and shoved it into Jermy’s hands. “We don’t have time to get anybody else, and you’re familiar with Mathew as much as I am — maybe even more! If they think you’re just a higher-up here to inspect the Club, that just happens to be interested in working there for a time…”

“David, this is a kooky plan,” Jermy said mildly. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“You can do this,” he assured him. “I’m confident in that. I’ll even clear up your schedule so you can get this done, if I have to.”

Mr. Persian studied the pikachu. “Erm…welcome to the Club, Jermy?”

And that was that. He’d hardly said any words, and suddenly he had been thrust into being Mathew and Joey’s caretakers with no proper experience or really even knowledge. He could have fought for his position in the science division, saying he was too essential to take on the project of recruiting Mathew. He could have suggested one of the actual recruiters that did dabble in both the army and the technology take them on. He could have given an idea for how to buy time so that somebody with experience could have joined Demurke.

In the end, he had done none of those things. He didn’t have the guts to speak up.

Jermy sat down next to a wilting patch of flowers as he pondered. Maybe that was the reason Jermy had struggled for all these years. He was stuck living beneath the foot, paw, or talon of others, doing their work, completing their tasks, in the distant hope of making Solceus a better place.

But was all this subservience, exhaustion, loss, and stress really worth that reward? Was giving up everything he had once been living for again and again, getting trampled over like these wilting flowers, really what was best?

Jermy peered left and right, making sure nobody was watching…and then, he reached out his hand overtop of the flowers and curled a finger. In an instant, the patch all rose up, bursting and blooming with life.

The pikachu made a resolution then, helping these flowers. He didn’t know what it was going to look like, but from now on, he was not going to let his superiors steamroll him over. He, too, needed to straighten his stem and take in the sunlight he had been missing. He would cut his own path and do things his own way, however that emerged. Even though he hadn’t acted on it, even the thought of doing this made the pikachu giddy, putting a spring in his step as he walked through the forest.

“…ermy…J-Jermy!”

He stopped in his tracks. Was that…Demurke’s voice? Jermy sprinted back towards the others, and sure enough, there the murkrow was, conversing with Mathew, Joey, Meowth, and ORB. “Demurke? What are you doing here?” Jermy asked.

“I-I could say the same to…y-you guys!” she retorted. “But th-that’s not a big d-deal. One of Mr. Persian’s bosses needs to see you. It’s about s-something…really important.” When she said that, she glared at Meowth for a long moment.

The cat could only shrug. “Fine. I’ll go back to the condo. You guys have your meeting.”

As Demurke led them back to town, Jermy could only wonder what would prompt OCEAN to bring them in so suddenly…