Pocket Monsters
By Neil A. Hogan
Commander Slither smashed his dark green claw against the space skipper controls, and the ship hopped up a few meters before steadying itself.
“GPS faulty again,” he yelled.
A younger, lighter-green salamander-like alien with wings, scuttled forward and prostrated himself in front of Slither.
“Your majesty. My abject apologies. Earth atmosphere. The EM field is…”
“I don’t want your excuses, Lizardos,” Slither yelled at his subordinate. “Fix it.”
The creature slid away, its wings tucked hard into its back in fear. If it didn’t fix this, it would be egg food.
Slither turned to the control centre where flying green scientists were swiping screens, as the skipper turned sideways and began hovering over one of the Earth highways.
“Score report,” said Slither.
“Human capture rate in this atmosphere is slow, but you only have two left of the 784 to get of the humadex,” said Lizardos. “The last two may be difficult. An Australian mother and her baby. They’re a bit jumpy. Hard to catch. Many are hiding in vehicular metal protection units. We need to wait until one of them reappear.”
“Refueling? I think we’re running out of capture devices.”
“A stop is coming up on the corner at the left, your majesty.”
The greenish-purple ship banked right, extended a large tube that attached itself to a red pipe stuck on the edge of a walkway, and drained the hydrogen from the pipe.
“Full power,” said Lizardos.
“Excellent,” said Slither, rubbing his metallic claws together with a clanging sound. “We’ll be able to complete the dex! Be careful with the power though. Make some low, medium and high power capture devices. More low ones than high ones.”
Inside the ship, systems went to work converting the hydrogen into energy that powered massive dimensional dams, folding space/time into portable portals, then encasing vortexes into spherical doors.
Slither laughed as several ball-doors rolled down a ramp towards him. He grabbed a few of them and headed to the firing space.
“Any targets?” he asked.
“Systems indicate a couple of wild humans have left their metal shields and appeared nearby. One baby male that will need incubation, and one mother human. They seem to be standing in a flora area, rocking back and forth.”
“It’s unusual these monsters stay in one place,” said Commander Slither, musing.
“Yes, sir. This one looks like it might be moving soon.”
“Are we in range?”
“Affirmative,” said Lizardos.
Slither swiped a claw, and the view window unlocked and slid down. He could see that the creatures were in amongst the vegetation, but very visible. One of them had long yellow hair. The other was shorter, with no hair at all. He took one of the red dimensional balls, threw it, and missed.
He hissed. “They’re going to get angry if I miss again. It gets harder the second time. I don’t want to have to feed them. Get closer.”
The skipper shifted slightly closer and Slither targeted the baby monster. This time he chose a blue ball. The ball shot from his hands, the spherical doors opening briefly and enveloping the creature in a dimensional dampening field. With a flash, the pocket monster was reduced in size to fit, then the ball closed again.
Success!
“100 points, Commander,” said Lizardos. “Quite a find. A male Australian baby human.”
“I need to get the Australian mother,” Slither said, deep in concentration.
He chose another blue ball and got ready to throw.
#
“Oh, my God, my baby!” screamed Esmeralda, as a strange red ball enveloped her child, then disappeared.
“Where are you? Where are you?” she scanned the trees around her.
Then she saw it.
A strange, alien, greenish-purplish, egg-shaped thing with tubes, and a lizard creature with wings sitting at a window at the front, hovering in front of her.
How could she have missed that???
“Give me back my child, you alien!” she yelled.
“Uh, oh,” said Slither. A wild human that’s not scared of aliens.
Esmeralda looked about for a weapon.
Nothing.
All she had was the stroller. Thinking fast, she quickly pulled the covering off and ripped the drinks holder from the front. As a weapon, it was pathetic, but as a shield, quite another matter.
Slither shot a blue ball at her and the woman simply batted it away defiantly, then ran towards the ship, screaming. “Give me back my baby!”
Inside the ship, Lizardos approached Slither, carefully. “Sir, perhaps, in this instance, it might be wise to send the child to the professor, and leave?”
“I will catch this monster,” said Slither, laughing maniacally. “I’ve got to catch them all.”
“Your majesty, forgive me for saying this but, there are seven billion humanoids on this planet. It’s not possible to catch them all.”
Slither turned to him, “I know that, ingrate. It’s our slogan. Of course, we can’t catch them all. But at least we can catch the ones that annoy us.”
Momentarily distracted, he didn’t notice that the woman had climbed a tree, and had launched herself towards the front of the hovering ship, landing directly on the long nose and wrapping her arms around it to steady herself.
“Oh,” said Commander Slither. “These pocket monsters are a bit more dangerous than I thought.”
The woman pulled herself up, raised the piece of deflecting material she had been carrying, and triumphantly smashed it through the empty window at Slither.
It bounced off his protective forcefield, and flew into the surrounding flora.
She looked at her hands, then him incredulously, then pushed herself forward, quickly wrapping her arms around the viewing area, as though trying to prevent him from seeing where he was going. It looked like she wasn’t going to leave without a fight.
Slither laughed, and shot a yellow ball at her, programmed to easily shift through the field.
Point blank range, no chance!
The door of the ball opened, the mother creature was sucked inside, and the ball homed back to its storage compartment in the back of the skipper.
“200 points,” said Lizardos. “And an extra 50 for that slight curve.”
“That was fun!” said Slither, “Let’s get some more. We probably need some back ups.”
#
Inside the dimensionally transcendental space/time folded bubble of the spherical holding cage, Esmeralda looked about despondently.
She was trapped.
Then she realised. She wasn’t actually looking around.
Her body was frozen. Time-frozen. The device had shifted her into a non-time envelope. But her consciousness was still active. And she could feel and see in all directions, no longer trapped in a body.
“They made a huge mistake capturing an engineer,” she thought.
Then she observed her frozen self and decided, there really wasn’t anything she could do. What could she do from here?
But, her baby boy!
The frozen field afforded her something that she couldn’t have as a regular physical human. She could expand her consciousness beyond the ball.
She felt herself increase her awareness through the ball on all sides and fill the room beyond.
It was a room filled with other balls containing other humans.
All balls were a lot smaller than the average human, which seemed impossible, and she could feel that they contained examples of humans from around the planet.
The alien was collecting them?
It looked like a new shelf had been added. A lone red ball sat in a depression on the shelf next to hers.
Her baby son. How was she going to get him out?
Think, think.
She shifted about the area, observing the alien technology, trying to make sense of it. An escape hatch in the floor, a hydrogen energy system, an atomic assembly system. Some kind of dimensional warping field that froze time. Monitoring systems with schematics of how the balls worked.
A six-foot-tall human could fit into a one foot diameter ball. It was incredible.
She checked the monitor screens of the equipment. The schematics were complicated but not impossible to understand. The symbols were alien but in this state, she could understand their meaning without needing to know the words for them.
She understood, as she compared the energy fields, that the simplest reaction by the people inside would cause the ball to open. A safety precaution to protect the contents.
Could she cause that to happen from this energetic form?
She shifted her awareness back into her ball and looked about.
Energy lines crisscrossed the internal structure. Vibrational wavelengths unmoving. Perhaps if she concentrated…
Focusing all her energy, she sent her consciousness into her body and made her twitch a finger. A slight twitch, that was all that was needed. It wasn’t the finger twitch that did it. It was the electrical impulse from the brain, down the nervous system, to the finger that did.
With an explosion that rocked the ship, Esmeralda was released by the sphere. She stumbled to the ground, then ran to the escape hatch, and pressed the round button that opened it instantly.
Alarms began to go off inside the ship.
This will be interesting, she thought.
Then she realised that all the spheres had round buttons on the outside of them.
Very interesting.
#
“What is that noise,” cried the Commander.
“Sir, someone has escaped one of the balls. We have sent people to…”
“Whaaat?” roared Slither. He pushed Lizardos aside and headed to the back of the skipper. He knew who it had to be, and he pulled out his cutting claw in readiness.
She would pay for her insolence.
Suddenly, the ship started to tip backwards. He ignored it and used his momentum to run through the corridors, hitting each door opener between the sections as fast as he could.
However, when he got to the humadex room he was surprised to find that she wasn’t there.
And all the balls were empty.
“Lizardos!” he screamed. “Find them. Find them and kill them all.”
Suddenly, the ship lurched, and Slither was thrown to the ground, sliding along the floor. Balls piled up on him and, much to his horror, one of them got enough momentum to bounce and launch at him. With a snap, Slither was sucked into a door-sphere.
The ball snapped shut with a clang, and disappeared into the other pile of balls.
#
Underneath the skipper, having jumped through a bottom hatch, almost three hundred humans had gathered under the ship, and were helping the last to jump free. Others on the ground had taken care of Esmeralda, and many who could speak multiple languages were explaining to officials and police what had happened, where everyone had come from, and what they needed to do next.
The skipper had almost been vertical due to the sudden appearance of extra weight from humans escaping the balls, and when they left, the ship was thrown forward again, its nose almost smashing downwards into the dirt.
Esmeralda cuddled her baby son, and was pleased to find that her stroller was still there.
“Miss, can you come to the station?” asked one of the officers. “We need you to make a report for us.”
“Of course,” she said. “But, there’s just one thing I need to do.”
She pulled a large yellow ball from her jacket pocket. It was quite heavy but she had seen the alien throw it. She also knew how much it could hold.
She put her baby in the stroller and walked to where the front of the ship was, still struggling to right itself. She could see the aliens running around frantically inside. She held up the ball for them to see, and was pleased to see one of them hold up their hands as if to say ‘no, stop,’
Then, with a satisfied smile, she threw it at the ship.
With a flash, and a grinding noise, followed by a ping, the ship was enveloped in a dimensional vortex and captured inside the yellow ball.
It fell to the ground, rocked a few times, and was still.
She picked it up and gave it to the officer.
“Here is my report,” she said, with a grin.