PokéCenter
Author's Note: No pairings (as of yet), angst, or otherwise. Just a cute little Trauma Center romp in the Pokémon world.
Special thanks to TCGeek for being the best BETA reader ever! 3
- - - -
Victor found it infuriating.
Absolutely infuriating.
In his mind it wasn't as if figuring out the next step should have been that difficult. In fact, to him, a genius like himself should have had no trouble with the answer at all. Yet there he was, brows knitted, dark circles under his eyes, and hunched over paperwork looking for an answer that just wouldn't reveal itself.
Victor was so angry, in fact, that he didn't see a certain blond-haired doctor walking towards him until it was too late.
"Victor!"
The researcher winced at hearing his name uttered from Dr. Chase's lips.
"The last thing I need today," he muttered, setting down his papers with a scowl, "Is Tyler Chase."
Ever since Tyler had first stumbled upon Victor, hunched over lab reports and test tubes, he had had made it his personal goal to aggravate the man whenever possible. This usually lasted until something was flung, usually rather violently, at his head. However, injury was never one to stop Tyler.
"What's shakin', bacon?" Tyler smiled, and his facial expression reminded Victor vaguely of a cat about to pounce on its prey.
The researcher grimaced, picked up his papers, and half-heartedly attempted to glace over them again before responding.
"I can't seem to get this one strain to react to anything," "he mumbled, failing to go into more detail. Victor figured that Dr. Chase's mind couldn't handle it anyway.
"Have you tried, you know…" Tyler trailed off, his mind searching for the perfect phrase to annoy his friend, "…poking it?"
Victor snorted, spraying his coffee everywhere, including on the papers he was working on
"Mission accomplished!"
It was the last thing Tyler thought before being escorted out by a test tube aimed at his face.
After Dr. Chase left, Victor mulled over the papers for a few more hours, before finally stumbling over to the couch in his office and immediately drifting into a deep slumber.
- - - -
When Victor awoke, he wasn't exactly where he had remembered going to sleep.
Looking around with both curiosity and annoyance written on his pale face Victor noticed that instead of his office, green and brown marshland surrounded him.
"I have to be dreaming."
He rubbed his fingers through his black hair in a pitiful attempt to straighten it, and then stood up. His mind was telling him that his body was aching from laying on the hard ground for so long, but his mind also told him that any sensory feeling he got during a dream was a false one.
Needless to say, Victor was perplexed, and not for the first time that night.
He was even more perplexed when out of the mud encompassing marshland squirmed two small creatures.
One was blue and shone in the night sky, the other, closer one, was a dull shade of green.
Victor was undeniably a man of many words, and yet, there was only one that came to mind when describing these creatures.
"Blobs," he laughed, and a sardonic smile crept up on his face. "They're like little blobs with a leaf coming out of their head." He wasn't sure he'd ever seen anything like what he was looking at now, and that just reinforced the idea in his head that he was in some sort of dream world.
Both creatures stared up at him with large, puckered lips, but the green one moved even closer, stopping only at his feet where it looked up at the man expectantly.
"Gulpin?"
"You… speak?" Victor didn't know exactly how to react to the little creature. His specialty was test tubes and intractable diseases, not gelatinous dream animals.
The blob didn't respond, but instead continued to stare.
Victor prodded the creature with his foot, nudging it gently away. He had never described himself as an animal-rights type person, but he also didn't know exactly what this thing could do to him, dream or not.
The green creature failed to respond.
After a few moments had passed and nothing happened, Victor decided to act. Before he knew what he was doing he had brandished a pen, and after he knew what was going on, he only looked on in horror, wondering how low he had actually sunk.
The researcher leaned down, pen he always kept with him in hand.
…And poked the blob.
"Gulpin?" The creature looked up at him, as if questioning his actions, before it opened his mouth impossibly wide. And before Victor could react, his entire hand, pen and all, was in the blob's mouth.
"Damn it!" He immediately pulled his hand away, a bit angry with himself for actually taking Tyler's advice.
Then he cursed himself: for when he had removed his hand, he had not taken the pen with him.
"Great," he leaned over again, gingerly picking up the anamorphous thing, making sure to hold it's mouth away from his body. "You little punk, you're not supposed to swallow sharp objects." He moved so the creature was an arms length away. "Now I've got to get you to a…" he paused, "well, a veterinarian or something."
In the distance Victor could almost make out the silhouette of a large structure. He sighed, and began walking toward it.
- - - -
Victor walked into the building, still holding the "gulpin" out in front of him. The first thing he noticed was that it was full of people, each dressed more garish than the next, and most holding some sort of green and brown colored balls. The second was that he had gone totally unnoticed when he entered the building. He was used to getting all sorts of looks from peoplp; finding that after G.U.I.L.T's eradication, wearing a Caduceus uniform was a great way to get noticed.
Not that he cared.
"Sir, did you catch that Pokémon?"
It took the researcher a moment before he realized that the woman sitting at the desk to his right was addressing him.
"Excuse me?" He raised an eyebrow and directed his attention towards her. He had thought she had said the word "Pokémon", but he must have been mistaken, since a verifiable genius as himself would have heard of the word before, and yet it sounded foreign to him.
The woman shot him a quizzical look, as if he were some sort of fool. "The Pokémon you're holding," she paused, "If you caught it you should put it in a safari ball…." She leaned in towards Victor, her voice growing soft to a hushed whisper, "Otherwise people are going to think, well… you know…" She trailed off, nodding to him, as if that was supposed to help him understand.
Victor was more than mildly annoyed by this point, not only did this woman seem to be speaking a different language than he was used to, he got the distinct impression that she thought he was below her. "Which," he clarified for his own benefit, "Is certainly not the case."
The researcher leaned in, mimicking her hushed tone, "No, I don't know. Maybe you'd like to explain it to me so I can know what the Hell you're talking about."
She rolled her eyes, "People will think you stole it…. And that you're a member of Team Galactic."
Victor straightened up abruptly, causing the woman to jump a bit. "Team Galactic? What kind of dumb-ass name is that?!" He was now positively seething. Already fed up with his current predicament, the only thing he could think of to do was grab the marsh-colored ball out of the woman's hand, and walk away.
"Really," He thought to himself, clutching the Pokémon under one arm, the ball in the other, "This unimaginative farce is the best thing my brain could come up with?"
With that, Victor stormed out of the building, and into the world of Pokémon.
- - - -
In the next chapter: Tyler watches TV and meets a little plasma friend. Victor pokes Gulpin some more! And…. An actual story picks up! YAY!!
- - - -