บท 70: A Terrible Plan

I've had a terrible idea.

With my grumpy attitude made worse by Serena and friends awakening and being quickly released from the hospital by some grace of luck, I've decided to do something drastic to alleviate my thoughts.

Some may consider this idiotic, but this problem has been a solid thorn in my side for weeks. Plus, judging by the readings from my own reality detector thing that my dad gave me the blueprints for, this thorn in my side will soon become a thorn in Ash's side as well.

Now, I can't deal with Team Rocket or Team Magma right now. As most people know, murder is illegal. So, as I approach the warehouse with questionable power consumption wearing the stupidest outfit of all time, I ready my plan to deal with those Malamar once and for all.

I've taken the fact that these crystals I love so much have extremely high capacitance. There's also the fact that, despite being dense, they still follow normal energy equations and rules.

Let's use regular batteries as an example. The graph that depicts its charge is increasing, but concave down. This is because electrons repel each other, so as more are shoved into the battery, it becomes harder to put more in since they repel each other.

Now, let's take a crystal that essentially absorbs any and all types of energy fired at it except certain frequencies of light due to impurities. If, for example, psychic energy is fired at the crystal, then most will be absorbed by the crystal. However, if the crystal becomes saturated, then the psychic energy will be repelled.

Thus, with much painstaking effort, I have made a two-centimeter-thick suit of crystal to counterattack against Malamar. Luckily, pokémon moves have type energy that is also easily absorbed by the crystal.

When you get down to it, you should really ask yourself the real questions. For example, does this suit weigh a ton?

Yes!

Is your range of motion limited which will make escape difficult?

Absolutely!

Was this a terrible idea by almost every conceivable notion.

Oh, 100%. You've got it!

But I'm simultaneously bored, angry, and going through several stages of emotional turmoil that I feel like I can blame partially on Gwen, so I'm going forward with this terrible, terrible plan.

Still, caution is to be advised, so, while literally as psychic as a rock, I sneak in through a hole in the rundown warehouse that Malamar resides… Well, I guess three Malamar.

From the rafters, I see three of those thorns in my side controlling a bevy of people. The center one looks like the leader and probably the one I've dealt with in the past. However, from this height, angle, and limited perception through crystal lenses, I can't really see what they're having their thralls work on. There are some unusual structures in here—pillars about the height of the warehouse in a conical shape. Luckily, they're tall enough for me to inspect from the rafters.

As I approach the pylon, its purpose becomes somewhat more apparent as electricity arcs from the tip to my hand. I'm fine since my armor conducts around me, but it does inform me of the massive quantities of electricity that they're siphoning from the city.

I tap my crystal-enhanced multimeter onto the pylon to get some info on it…

Well, I'll be damned… Actually, I guess I am, given previous events? Anyway, these pylons are essentially batteries. About three stories high and a single pylon has the same capacitance as a chunk of crystal the size of my head.

So, Malamar is doing something that requires a lot of energy. They probably kidnapped a bunch of scientists and engineers to find a solution to their problem, and I decided to walk in here with the perfect energy solution for them.

Well, I should get out of here, but I'm kind of curious as to what they're doing with all this electricity.

With the grace of a boulder, I climb down a support beam, attempting to avoid the eyesight of any thralls. I don't really think I did a great job, but nobody is immediately coming after me, so I think that's great!

Approaching a terminal somebody in a lab coat is using, I plug into it from the back with my massive Octillery Arms and begin scouring through the computer. I'm beginning to wonder if they have any backup plans due to the lack of security around here, or are they that confident in their psychic abilities?

Hmm, well, no expositional diaries or logs of any sort, so I guess I'll have to analyze whatever these blueprints are…

Wait.

Wait just a minute!

Ha…HAHA!

Right, well, the threat of the Malamar has dropped to a near-zero! Essentially, they're trying out an old plan I worked with Clemont on long ago: time travel. Believe it or not, Clemont and I actually used to be more friendly with each other, but then we kind of got into a rivalry that's spiraled out of control.

We had the idea of being the first ones to discover human-made time travel. The plan…kind of didn't work out. We hypothesized that our machine did send items into the future, but we inadvertently sent them through a collapsing black hole that turned whatever was sent through into atoms.

Without a reliable test source, the project was scrapped. We had an efficient way to dispose of evidence, but that never went anywhere. I could probably reproduce the device with the crystals, but I'm afraid I would get the same result. Without a consistent source of time travel to test against, or viable temporal data, my time machine project is going nowhere fast.

These Malamar are holding these humans captive to have them build a time machine. Whether to the future or past, I don't know. But I do know that these Malamar are on a one-way ticket to death if I don't intervene.

With much more joy in my heart, I sneak out the way I came in, sending a quick message to my dad to prepare a rescue squad with a psychic threat. He can probably arrange that, right?