The Psychic (Pokemon)

You who are rich and whose troubles are few might come around to my point of view...

Hum as you work.

The room you are in is unremarkable. Most rooms were built to the same standard, for the same purpose. The most important factor outside of getting results is security. The glass is dark, keeping anyone outside from looking in. Steel panels could be deployed at the touch of a button, delaying any attempts to break in until a contingent of guards could apprehend them.

All of it is unnecessary. No one knows about this base outside of the people stationed here and High Command. The boss was getting paranoid, albeit not without cause.

Team Rocket couldn't risk their work here being discovered. It might be enough to unite the world against them, and if they didn't have their weapon by the time that happened, they were done for. If they did, then it wouldn't matter who knew. No army would be able to stop them.

It was too bad that the creation of said weapon was impossible. They had failed.

Their project was supposed to be a clone of the legendary Mew, ancestor to all modern pokemon. Mewtwo, they had unimaginatively nicknamed it.

Mew had been versatile. Projections and recreations had shown that it was supposed to be able to use all the attacks that modern Pokemon could. This versatility had come at the expense of power, however. As an example, the Charmander evolutionary line were powerful fire-type Pokemon. Over the course of several millenia, natural selection had first favored Charmanders with inner oil sacks and then Charmanders with larger oil sacks. This meant that over time, data showed a trend to larger, more powerful fire-type attacks.

Mew, as an ancient Pokemon, lacked all the adaptions that its descendants went through. This meant that while it could use fire attacks, the attacks would be weaker than that of it's fire-type descendants. It could use ground attacks, just not as well as a ground type. It could use dragon attacks, but not as well as a dragon type. The pattern maintained itself throughout all the major types.

While reviving the species wasn't completely without merit, for a large organization like Team Rocket, it wasn't worth the trouble. It made more sense to bring teams of specialized Pokemon.

Mewtwo was different. It's primary purpose was to serve as a super-weapon capable of devastating armies. From Mew, it was supposed to have inherited a diverse move pool, including some of the most powerful elemental attacks possible. Buttressed with psychic powers, it would have been unstoppable.

Would have been... if it had worked.

By their original time scale, they should have been done nearly a year ago. The first extension request had irritated Giovanni. The second brought anger. The third, rage. After the third, their old guards were moved out, replaced by hunters. Everyone knew what that meant, even if they didn't speak of it. They wouldn't get a fourth chance.

Hunters weren't guards. They were Team Rocket's elite executioners, used to hunt down either traitors or people who had displeased Giovanni.

There were three weeks left until the deadline and the specter of the reaper drew closer everyday. In another room, your colleagues work tirelessly to make something work. To discover a permutation that they had missed; a combination in the genome that could unlock the secrets to cloning.

Every prototype so far had died, and after so long, you had concluded that the Mewtwo gene didn't exist. That said, you weren't willing to lie down and die either. With the last weeks available to you, you had decided to gamble.

Raise a vial containing pale blue liquid to your lips.

Over the course of having worked on the Mewtwo project, you had learned a lot about psychic powers. This vial was meant to unlock your own.

The task was possible. The Saphron City gym leader, Sabrina, had proved that human psychics were possible. She was also far weaker than what you would need to survive the coming challenges. You would need more- and so you aimed for more.

The vial was supposed to give you psychic abilities equal to what Mewtwo was supposed to have. Your projections showed that it would work. As a basement filled with dead prototypes proved, projections weren't perfect.

There was a chance that this would just be an ornate method of suicide, at which point you'll have died three weeks before the rest of your team. There was a chance that this could do nothing and you'd die with them in three weeks. Or there was a chance that this could work and you would survive this ordeal.

There was nothing for it. Shaking hands brought the vial to your lips and you knocked back the drink. Blackout.

Wake up floating. You are alive, and given that you were hovering in mid-air, you would say that you had succeeded in giving yourself powers.

You want to celebrate, but the lights are distracting you. Mental lights, each radiating a complex array of feelings. Prevalent among them, desperation, sadness, and a foreboding sense of gloom. What you had been feeling before you succeeded.

Concentrate on one. We're going to die, we're going to die, we're going to die. The boss is going to be so mad.

You aren't an imbecile. If you were, you wouldn't be assigned to this post. You had been trying to give yourself psychic powers. It wasn't surprising that you were able to use telepathy. What else can you do?

Think back to your studies, to the powers that psychics were reported to have. As the most powerful psychic in the world, you were likely to have them all.

The first one that occurs is one that you are currently using. Transvection was used by most psychics to hover in place. They could float backward and forwards slowly, but most would teleport wherever they wanted to move unless something was stopping them.

After a few seconds thought, you recall the list (link: https://fanondex.fandom.com/wiki/Psychic_Abilities) and immediately dismiss most of it as irrelevant.

Energy manipulation had the potential to be useful, but not in your current situation. It would be helpful in a direct fight, but if things came to a direct fight, you would probably lose. The hunters had pokemon that had trained for years. At best, you would have three weeks of training. Consequently, iIndirect tools like telepathy, empathy, and precognition are more likely to succeed.

Optimally, you would use precognition to scour the future to determine a scenario in which no Pokemon's were released. Then you would attack the human trainer with a mixture of telepathy and empathy, enslaving them. At that point, you could use them as proxy agents, adding their Pokemon teams to your command and fighting your way out.

Once you escaped, you could go ahead and start enjoying the fruits of your labor. You start humming once more, a smile on your face, as you imagine it.

I'll say come let us taste, a cask of Amontillado.