Gotta Catch The Pretty Ones
© 2011-2014 by Mr. David R. Dorrycott
Chapter Fifty
Later they sat at the dining table, Sara, Penny, Patricia and the Investigator Dell Leopold, his leather case on the floor beside him holding a single Pokeball. A pokeball that held the impossible so the majority of humans believed. Within it, it held one Mrs. Kara Graham an innocent victim of a very dark secret. In the Pokeytech building a second and much older Guild Inspector, one Mrs. Gidget Johansson, was going over everything in the Pokeytech tower with a fine tooth comb while they talked.
“I was told by everyone that it was impossible to capture a human, I even defended that belief while getting my hunting licence” Sara said softly, her coffee in her hand. “I lost a hand defending the Guild Dell, I almost lost my life and now I am told that it was always a lie.”
None of the three were worried about their secret getting out now, for not only had they practiced this interview for nearly a year their shock of someone else discovering the secret was cover enough.
Dell looked at Patricia who simply looked back at him, not with fear or accusation but curiosity. “You don’t mind Miss O’Donnel hearing this Sara” he asked calmly, he wasn’t worried himself as Patricia already had a reputation of being slightly off balance and with very good reason, she couldn’t even stand as witness in a court of law anymore, not until a panel of Doctors declared her legally sane. That would never happen now and everyone at the table knew it.
“We are a family Dell” Sara answered, carefully keeping her voice steady. “There are no secrets between us and no one in Stonehome will ever believe such a thing as this even if she were to declare in the Market Square, anymore than if she claimed to be captured by a Pokeball herself. So no Dell, I will not keep this from her anymore, if one of us vanishes all of us do so we should at least know why we are all suddenly cold meat in some forgotten grave.”
“That won’t happen Sara, Penny, Patricia” Dell Leopold promised. “I know that my word is worth the granite that it is carved in but it is the truth, you passed the one test needed to prove your ability to keep a secret years ago, so in your cases everything is clear. What worried the Committee most are the Tech’s that did not report the man or even look at his ball. They will never advance above the place that they hold now, that is if they remain poketech’s and their fines will be half a years pay, so maybe next time they will pay attention.”
Penny held up her hand, the same one that Sara still had Dell noted silently. “Mrs. Richards” Dell said, nodding to her.
Penny reached to each side of her, taking the other two women’s hands before she spoke. “There need to be changes sir” she explained in a slightly higher than normal conversational tone. “Your inspectors came to my sisters and claimed that I was trying to capture women, it wasn’t until they checked all the balls I had with me and searched my sisters home that one of them called the Guild Hall and discovered that they had misheard their instructions. They denied my sister the legal right our government guaranteed her to call her husband, her husband who is a law officer. They acted like their word was the law and all other laws were jokes, why they almost wouldn’t let her change her babies diaper or care for her children. We were scared, I thought that I was going away for the rest of my life. I pissed my pants” she finished in a stronger voice. “My pants, on my sisters couch.”
“I understand Mrs. Richards and I truly apologize, all I can tell you is that the Guild Master himself went to your sisters home and apologized, the couch is being replaced while those two Inspectors were brand new out of the box, they are now restarting their training from day one. It will be four years before they have any authority again, honestly that is all that we can do.” He played with his mug for a few seconds. “It isn’t common that this happens ladies, once every ten or so years on average. Twenty-five years ago a rather famous woman died and left her pokeball collection ‘to be released by a qualified Poketech.’ That tech was horrified to discover that the woman had a collection of over fifty young men that she had started ‘collecting’ in her teens. That this surfaced here in Stonehome, it is truly in the middle of no-where. So far you have had two court cases involving Pokeballs, Miss. O’Donnel’s terrible horror and a young girl who accidently damaged a live pokeball in a fit of anger. That my friends is less than a city tech see’s in a year so you are not some magnet for disasters.”
“And the battery” Sara added gently.
“Okay add the battery, it is still fewer incidents than are seen in any city. I myself am involved in at least ten incidents a year and I am just a traveling inspector, I like coming here because it is so quiet and you two are so competent with your work that you make mine a breeze.” He drank from his coffee and nodded to Patricia, “Almost as good as Penny’s, why if she was available I’d marry her just for her coffee.”
“Back to the subject at hand” Sara chimed in, dragging Dell away from Patricia’s eyes which had obviously entrapped him. “What will happen to Kara?”
Reaching down into his bag Dell removed the pokeball, setting it in the center of the table. “She can hear through you right Sara” he asked.
“So she told me and gave me enough information that I believe her, why” Sara answered.
“Very well, standard operations procedure is that the pokeball, with its occupant is taken to a vault under the main guild hall. There it is attached to a battery backup system and left, never to be seen again. That Sara is the Standard Rule but there is an option that I can take a recommendation from you as to what happens. Obviously we can’t let her free but we didn’t know that occupants in their balls experienced time or knew what was happening around them.”
“In all this time no one knew?” Penny asked, real disbelief in her voice. “Why not?”
“Because no one ever bothered to ask” Patricia answered, staring at Dell, her expression changing as her voice filled with anger. “That’s it isn’t it, you just insured that a person was really in the ball then shoved it in a vault and turned out the lights, leaving them to quickly go mad right?”
Dell stared at the ex-huntress stunned by the emotion in her voice as well as her statement. Finally he swallowed and nodded yes. “I think you have it right” he admitted. “Some of those balls are type ones, no one suspected.” He placed his face in his hands “God in Heaven we sent them to Hell.”
Everyone remained silent then, Sara and her group because they knew exactly what to do but dared not admit it, Dell because he was working out a plan of action that he would present to the Guild Committee as was his responsibility. Thus though Sara’s group knew that the answer was to maintain all pokeballs under one owner so that they could communicate with each other, they would have to wait for the Investigator to come to a decision that had taken them years to discover. Finally Dell Leopold looked up at Sara, his eyes red.
“Can they talk to each other while in the balls?” he asked softly. “Does it matter if they are ‘owned’ by different people or does it have to be the same one.”
“I don’t know” Sara lied, then she reached over to take the ball into her hand. Very deliberately she pointed it at an open space and triggered the release. In seconds Kara Graham was sitting on the floor, a bit un-lady like then she had been sitting in a chair when last taken. “What do you think Kara” Sara asked softly.
Mrs. Graham stood carefully, brushing her skirt off as she did so. “The question?” she asked, looking not at Inspector Leopold but Sara as Sara was her ‘owner’ by rule of the balls software. “I can here what you say Mrs. Richards but no one else, at least not clearly.”
“That answers one question” Sara admitted, then she carefully laid out the others for Kara to deal with. As a long time Pokemon huntress she had a great deal more experience than Sara anyway.
“Well then, since Sara is my owner I will try to answer your questions Inspector but first, please shoot me if the plan is to leave me alone in that ball for hundreds of years. Since Mrs. Richards does not own any Pokemon I can’t tell you if I can talk across to other people in my position. My husband did have dozens of Pokeballs and I could hear them chattering to each other though I kept quiet. I think that they knew I existed as an owned pokeperson but since I didn’t try to talk to them they seemed to respect my silence.”
She looked around, found a chair and looked to Sara again. “Go ahead” Sara agreed. With those words Kara pulled the chair up and sat, still facing her ‘owner.’
“I was never able to detect anyone else’s pokemon though my Mistress” the older woman continued. “So I think that Mr. Leopold has it right that it must be one owner to allow the bridge between balls.”
“Do you sleep when in the ball” Dell asked, at Sara’s signal Kara turned to face the man.
“Yes but I do not experience hunger, cold, heat or thirst. Time is something else, when I was in your bag I just slept, it seemed like seconds passed but when Sara had me on her table time was normal.”
“Dell” Penny said, breaking into a conversation again. “As a librarian I am quite used to research, what you need is someone or a small group to just sit down and talk to these captured people, at least the ones who are still sane that is. It will be the fastest way to get your answers though from what I know of Pokeballs after talking to Kara they mess with your mind. My wife has been going through the code one line at a time trying to find out why one ball cannot hold two or more creatures, I’ve watched her over the years and can tell you that she hasn’t finished half of the open code. She tells me that there is a protected code that she cannot get to as it will destroy itself if she tries, so anything really important is probably in there. That means that your true answers might be in there as well.”
Dell didn’t respond instantly, instead he looked around him, studying the room he was in. His position of Investigator was one that had trained him to look for the unobvious as well as the obvious. Certainly the women before him were in no way able to hide certain things from him or his well trained eye, unfortunately for Dell they did though have a chance to trip him up. “Penny” he finally answered, “That code has been gone over by thousands of Poketechs, dozens of Grand Masters had dipped their fingers into it. What in the world makes you think that Sara will find something that they didn’t?”
“It isn’t the open code I am talking about Mr. Leopold” Penny explained, “It is that locked code, if there is an answer it is in there.”
Dell bit his upper lip, then looked at the ceiling, freshly painted he noted. Finally he looked back down and locked his gaze with the Liberians. “Not even Grand Masters can get into that Mrs. Richards” he explained softly. “The passcodes that allowed such access was lost some hundred and eleven years ago when Grand Master Gregory Miller was lost at sea, he and his entire research library. Back then certain things were held by only one person, since that disaster at least three people have to know the secret, preferably five.” He closed his eyes before continuing, “That section of encryption is handled by machines, themselves encrypted with the same set of passcodes. So if your Sara can find the password somehow she would receive the Guilds highest award and probably elevated to Goddess by the Guild. You cannot imagine the number of unites that have been forever ruined in attempts to rediscover the way in.”
Penny sat in silence, thinking while the rest awaited the Librarians next words. Finally she looked over to Sara and smiled, causing the Poketech to groan in dismay. With a sigh of acceptance of the inevitable Sara turned her eyes to the waiting Inspector.
“You give me authorization to try and crack that code Dell, I have a bunch of otherwise useless pokeballs in storage as you know. If I crack the code no big reward, we just get left to live our lives in this quiet little town and you keep inspecting us. Oh, and you take us all out for a dinner.”
“That’s all” Dell asked, surprised. “Seriously Sara, this is a really big deal. At least ask for a reward or something.”
Sara thought a bit then turned to Penny. Ideas?”
“Well I’d really like it if they didn’t accuse me of something I can’t do, while scaring my sister and her family at the same time.”
“Okay,” turning back to Dell, the only man in the room right now Sara smiled, a really friendly smile. For a land shark that is. “The PokieGoons keep off us, especially Penny and Patricia. Penny’s done nothing wrong and Patricia’s on a thin thread anyway.”
“Deal.” Dell agreed.
For a moment there was silence as Sara mulled over this odd deal, she was planning on trying to crack the code anyway, this just made it totally legal. “What about Kara?”
“I’ll ask that they set up a compound somewhere and release her there, along with as many of the others that are still sane.” Dell decided, writing the same in his notebook. “Maybe an island but they are going to need an owner aren’t they?”
“I don’t know, look if you leave Kara here I can research that, or someone in the Guild with more letters after his or her name can. But the ones who have gone insane? Beyond my pay grade and I never want to know if you kill them.”
Dell tapped on his knee for a bit, then shook his head yes. “As Principle Investigator here I can authorize leaving Kara in your care a month, that’s about how long it will take for some air head to arrive and trump me. Still find out what you can and if you discover the how, your going to answer a massive question that has been over our heads since year pokeballs were first created. Sara, we really don’t know the full story, only that about ninety years after the first pokeball was sold an elderly pokehunter died and three young women were found in his collection.”
“So it really is supposed to be impossible?” Patricia asked, wonder in her voice.
“It really is supposed to be impossible” Dell answered. “Yet somehow, some way about forty plus hunters have found a way and it is driving the higher ups out of there wigs. I think over two thousand systems have been fried trying to duplicate the event in every possible way with volunteers yet like Kara, they keep popping up randomly.”
“Challenge Accepted” was all Sara said.