by KJ Harlow
If being eye-catching was a prerequisite for being mayor in Sapphire, it was clear why Trev Arlington won. Instead of board shorts, he wore fluoro pink and yellow striped speedos. Most of it was obscured by his gut. He had rainbow suspenders strung tightly onto his shoulders that looked like they clipped directly onto his swimwear. “Dearest Sapphirans. I will be gone for a while as I clear up some… misunderstandings with the leaders of Ohno.” He smiled, face relaxed and warm. “Do not fret. Remember, wetter is better!”
The Chernoires led him away before the media throng could get any more out of him. Sam stepped away from the crowd and once again addressed everyone watching.
“With the leader of Sapphire unavailable, this begs the question of who will occupy the office of the mayor? It is believed that his son–”
“Yoshi.”
He blinked several times. He was looking at a new pair of trunks, quite similar to the pair he lost in the slides. Crystal was standing behind, holding it up.
“Oh, thanks Crystal.” He took them and put them on, standing up quickly and double-knotting the strings at the front. By the time he looked back up at the screen, the news report had already finished. An advertisement for limited edition, anti-slip water skates was playing. People who had been standing around were now going back to their own business.
“I love this place,” Flick sighed. “Can we stay here a bit longer? Pretty please?”
“Well, we’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” Yoshi responded. “I need to get a new GF-wiki. Then, we need to go to the gym and beat their leader. I need to train you guys up for that, catch the girlfriends around the area. See if there are any grass or electric-types. That will help me out a lot.”
“This place sucks. Let’s go somewhere else.” Soph complained. She was busy preening herself, yanking out a split feather on her shoulder. Yoshi was pleased to notice that he was already completely dry, thanks to the continuous stream of warm air lazily blowing out of the vents.
Flick dove back into the water, barely making a splash. “It’s just too dry up there. My skin’s going to crack.”
“Can you find out how to get to the Guild? There’s a directory over there I think.”
Flick followed the direction he was pointing in, then disappeared under the water.
“Why do you want to go to the Guild?” Starry asked.
“I know what all the other things Chester spoke about are. I’ve never been to a Guild before.”
“Sounds like a place where you might find tough trainers,” Soph said, picking another feather out. She stared so hard at it Yoshi was convinced lasers would shoot out of her eyes at any second and obliterate it.
Yoshi watched Flick break through the water. The digital sign had multi-colored signs and symbols pointing in all different directions, lit up with LEDS. She asked someone else passing by, who pointed at another set of slides to the right. Flick turned around, gestured at Yoshi and pointed in the same direction.
Yoshi hitched up his bag. Not going to make an ass of myself this time.
Turns out holding onto a bag and pinching your nose is easier said than done. He didn’t swallow as much water this time, nor did he lose his new pair of swimmers, so he considered that a success. Yoshi walked out of the water, standing under the heated vents as his girlfriends came after him.
“So this is the Sapphire Guild huh?” Flick said, squeezing water out of her faded pink hair once again.
The words “GUILD” glowed cool and blue from a plaque at the front of the building. It was a long building that arced in a semi-circle, as if embracing its visitors in welcome. The sun had set long ago and Yoshi could see shadows of several people inside in the windows that stretched along each arm.
“Let’s head on in.”
They crossed the quiet courtyard and a murmur from within the guild picked up slightly. Starry abruptly stopped in the dark. “Be careful of these–”
THUMP!
“…Doors.”
“Ow.” Yoshi rubbed his nose ruefully. Soph started snickering, but to her credit cut it short.
“Wooden doors,” Crystal said matter-of-factly, laying a hand on the gnarled, textured wood.
“Why the hell would they make…? Ugh.” Yoshi gripped the two round handles and pushed forward.
The doors creaked open and a wedge of soft, orange light filtered out, bathing the newcomers in warmth.
The moment Yoshi stepped in, he knew it was the right place to be. All the excitement of the day had finally caught up to him and his stomach grumbled in protest. Or maybe it was actually telling him to head toward that scrumptious smell that permeated through the entire building.
To the left was a hall with the words “BATTLE THEATER” at the top. A buzzer went off, the screen next to the door lit up and showed the identities of two trainers. They got up off their respective lounges and made their way into the hall.
Right ahead was a circular pit with several large screens set up around its perimeter. They would flicker every so often and trainers huddled around would quickly note down something and then leave.
“I call shotgun on the Battle Theater,” Soph said, a glint in her eye.
“Hold up, let’s check out those screens first,” Yoshi replied. Maybe it functioned like a community notice board? Maybe he could he ask all the trainers in the room at once if they knew of a place to get a new GF-wiki cheaply.
He took the five steps down into the pit and made his way to the least-occupied screen. He jostled his way to the front and observed the screen.
MISSIONS
Donors wanted – go into the draw to win a GF-wiki Cascade X!
Catch me a Starlotte (min. lvl 15) – Reward 840 Coins
Trade Request: my Blushy for your Grass type
Help me train my Larissa– Reward 540 Coins
Looking for SM23 (1,000 Petals) – Reward 1,400 Coins
OPGF Capture: Scardino - Reward 200,000 Coins
Yoshi frowned. All of the missions seemed to relate to catching particular girlfriends, girlfriend swaps, items or information. He turned to leave, then did a double take. GF-wiki Cascade X? A free GF-wiki? For donating what?
He stepped away from the screen and turned around. That’s when he noticed the help desk off to the side at the top of the steps. He didn’t have to wait long before he was speaking to the Chippie at the desk.
“Hi, welcome to the Sapphire Guild,” the rodent-kin greeted cheerfully.
“I was just wondering what sort of donations trainers are required to make for that first mission?”
The field mouse girlfriend smiled a bucktoothed smile. “Best if you talk to the boys at The Breeders Club. They’re holding a seminar right now.” She threw her thumb over her shoulder. “Head on through, past the dining hall, Room 8.”
5
The Breeders Club
“Good evening trainers and girlfriends, I am Professor Thorn.”
Although Thorn looked younger than Professor Poke, his hair was disappearing all the same. The difference was that his was receding and looked about 50% complete. He swept a glance across the packed room, light glinting off the front part of his head.
“I know why you’re all here.” He looked straight ahead, to the back of the room where Yoshi and his girlfriends were standing and clasped his hands together. “You saw the first mission on the board outside, or specifically the reward for the first mission.” The suspense started to climb.
“First, let me tell you what it is I do. I research girlfriends, but unlike many of my peers who study origin, evolution and diversity, I study genetics.”
“Boring,” Soph droned.
“Sssh.” Yoshi poked her in the side.
“As most of you know, within a particular species of girlfriend you can have a wide range of variances in the wild. The Attack, Defence, Special Attack, Special Defence, Speed and Health can be all different. No two girlfriends are the same.
“I’ve been approached by the Breeders Club of Sa
pphire—” he nodded to a man in a pinstripe suit sitting behind him— “to explain how breeding works. Now obviously, we as trainers know the mechanism behind breeding.” Chuckles rippled among the men. “But what you might not know is how TPs work, specifically how they are transferred to offspring.”
There was something unsettling about the man wearing the suit. He would stare fixedly at one trainer then move onto the next one, systematically doing this for an entire row before moving to the next. It was as if he was scanning and storing data from each of them.
“TP stands for Thorn Points. I know, I know, very original. Anyway, when you breed with your girlfriend—” more titters amongst the males— “three TPs are passed down randomly from Attack, Defence, Special Attack and Defence, Speed and Health with a weighted distribution according to their species and type. TPs also have been correlated to predict which stats will get more points when girlfriends level up.
“‘So what?’ you might ask. Well if you raise a girlfriend with inherited TPs in areas where typically they aren’t as strong, they will serve you better in battle. For example, many rock-types will have TPs skewed towards high Defence and Special Defence, but very low in Speed. But what if you were able to systematically breed them to have higher speed? It’s still a matter of chance though and can take several attempts before you are successful.”
“Yoshi, I’m hungry,” Starry whispered.
“I know, just… let’s wait until he’s done.” Truth be told, Yoshi was getting hungry too. The kitchen was still churning out dish after dish and the smells were wafting down the hall.
“While the TP database of girlfriends is well-developed and documented, the one for males is not.” A smile curved onto his face as people looked around in confusion. “That’s right; we also have Attack, Defence, Special Attack and Defence, Speed and Health points too. However, due to the Divergence, we are significantly weaker than girlfriends. We also don’t have the ability to cast Special Attacks and we have virtually zero Special Defence. New research findings from my lab – published in The Girlfriend Compedium last year – state that your offspring can also inherit one TP from its male trainer. This means that your offspring can get up to four TPs from its parents.”
This was news. Was there some point a long time ago where men were able to fight with the same power as girlfriends? He also mentioned the Divergence: a theoretical event several eons ago that supposedly accelerated the male and female evolutionary pathways such that females retained and grew their powers and males lost them. The occurrence of this event was still debated in religious and scientific circles.
Flick was leaning against the doorframe, trying her hardest to keep her eyes open. He lifted Flick’s hand and looked at his own. Both looked nearly the same. However, one was capable of calling forth the power of water and sending rock-types careening across gym stadiums.
“A lot of my contemporaries have rubbished my publications, calling me a lunatic for suggesting that men once had the same powers as girlfriends, but I digress.” Thorn cleared his throat.
“This isn’t about me. This is about furthering our understanding of gene transfer, which in turn will help us refine breeding practices. Ultimately, it will allow us to raise stronger girlfriends. At any rate, if you haven’t already figured it out by now, the donations we are asking from trainers today are sperm donations.” About a quarter of the room stood up and left.
“I understand that this might seem strange to many of you, but the more data we can collect, the better we can map male TPs. Breeding will become more of an exact science. We may also find ways to increase the chance for particular genes to be passed onto offspring. Now before too many more of you leave, let me show you all what you came here to see. Thank you, Mr. Crocop.” The suit-wearing man picked up a box on the side of his chair and handed it to Professor Thorn.
“This is the GF-wiki Cascade X.” Thorn took it out of the box and held it in the air. It was rectangular and thin with curved, aluminium edges. Its front and back were made of glass. Thorn demonstrated its transparency by looking straight through it. All the remaining trainers in the room leaned forward.
“This latest version will not be made available to the public. A set number have been released by Winza Tech to certain individuals, me being one of them. In exchange for their generosity, I have uploaded my entire TP database to their servers.
“Upon capturing a new girlfriend, it will show you the standard details. It will also now show TP details for all girlfriends my team has collected this data on. If you have any interest in raising or breeding stronger girlfriends, this new feature will be indispensable. To make things fair, I’ll be announcing the winner by drawing a name at random after I collect enough samples. Lucky for everyone in this room, I should have enough before I leave Sapphire so you’ll find the winner pretty soon.”
A trainer at the very front put his hand up. “What will you be doing with our donations?”
“After I analyze and classify it, I’ll be adding it into my database of other samples,” Thorn said. “My current paper will be a cornerstone piece that aims to create a model to predict which male TPs will be passed down to offspring in relation to female TPs. My goal is for the paper to be as long as the appendix, where I thank all the people from who have donated samples so far.”
“How many’s that?” Yoshi asked.
Thorn squinted through his thick glasses to the back of the room. “1,000.”
“1,000 trainers?”
The professor let out a snort. “1,000 trainers would be statistically insignificant for this study. 1,000 pages.”
“You might have a chance, you never know!” Flick urged.
They sat at a round table each digging into their own dinners. All five, except for Soph, were eating curries. She was pecking away at a long, wholemeal baguette cut up into chunks, dipping each piece into pumpkin soup.
“Did you hear what he said? 1,000 pages of names. If it’s 100 names per page that’s what, 100,000? And what if it’s double-sided?”
“It’s not like you need it to catch girlfriends,” The bird-kin said pointedly before throwing a hunk of bread in the air and snapping her beak shut on it. “We could tell you the girlfriends’ names in battle.”
“It’s not the same.”
Yoshi slouched in his chair, his curry half-finished. He eyed the trainers coming out of the corridor. Professor Thorn’s own girlfriends were apparently doing the “sample extractions”, which would explain the relaxed looks on the trainers’ faces. Were his girlfriends dressed up in lab coats and glasses?
“I don’t know,” Yoshi said. He felt guilty for making his girlfriends starve for his own selfish purposes. Especially when he didn’t go ahead with it in the end. There was just something fishy about the entire thing, especially that Mr. Crocop in the pinstripe suit. He didn’t say anything the entire time. He was just doing his analytical stare, trainer to trainer. Did he have a role in Thorn’s project? Yoshi shivered. After the ordeal with Tozuck, he wasn’t that trusting of men in lab coats. There wasn’t any way around it. He would have to beat hundreds of trainers, save up and buy a GF-wiki.
“You know what, Soph, you’re right. I don’t need a GF-wiki to catch new girlfriends.” Yoshi pushed his chair out and stood up. “After you guys are done, we’ll find a hotel and crash for the night. I’ll take on one of these missions now so we can start making some dosh first thing tomorrow.”
Yoshi excused himself and weaved in and out of the crowd, making his way toward the mission board again. Let’s see…
MISSIONS
Donors wanted – go into the draw to win a GF-wiki Cascade X!
Missing Person: have you seen this man? – Reward 30,000 Coins
Help me train my Larissa – Reward 540 Coins
Looking for SM23 (1,000 Petals) – Reward 1,400 Coins
OPGF Capture: Scardino - Reward 200,000 Coins
Trade Request: My Suzy for your Tina
Missing Item:
Golden heart locket – last seen at Abandoned Glasshouse – Reward 1,200 Coins
Missing person huh? Yoshi tapped the mission issued by the Sapphire Police and it expanded across the screen. It showed a picture of a man with a neat crewcut in his 40s. The counter next to the mission already showed that 85 other people had added it to their accounts. Doesn’t hurt, I guess. He became the 86th.
Oooh, there was a Trade Request for a Suzy. Yoshi hadn’t seen a wild Tina yet either, so that was a good way to grow his collection. Wonder if there’s a link to the GGN here? Yoshi turned around and bumped into someone’s rock-hard pecs.
“Oh sorry – Spence?” Yoshi looked up at the tall, rich, attractive trainer.
“Yosh!” With a wide grin on his face, he stuck his hand out and squeezed Yoshi’s hand in a knuckle-busting grip. “What are you doing here?”
Yoshi put his right hand behind his back, massaging blood flow back into it. “I just got to Sapphire earlier.”
He crossed his arms, muscles in his forearms sliding over one another. “That doesn’t make any sense. I beat the Onyx Gym a day after you. You should have already flown over here by then.”
“Nah, I didn’t fly. I went through the Caverns.”
His eyebrows knitted in confusion. “How did you manage that? It was being patrolled by Labbies 24/7.”
“Hey, is your dad behind the new GF-wiki Cascade X?” Yoshi asked quickly, changing the topic.
“Oh, you were in on that meeting with Thorn as well? What a snoozefest, huh?” He chuckled. “No idea, don’t think he was. He’s mainly in charge of the commercial arm, not the R&D. If you’re trying to score a free GF-wiki off me, it’s not happening,” Spence said, reading Yoshi perfectly. “Tried that. No cigar.”
Frank’s balls.
“What else you been up to since you got here then?” Yoshi said, swallowing his disappointment.
“Not a whole lot,” Spence said, looking around the room, hands on hips. “Took on a few of these missions, caught some new girlfriends. Building up my harem.” He slapped Yoshi on the shoulder and just about dislocated it. “I created my first mission earlier today, did you see it?”