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by limniris

limniris I can never get any of my Colress fics above 1k words, but I think the characterization for this one turned out well so here you go!
Colress looked over the deck of the Frigate with a calm smile. Things were finally coming together, and he couldn’t be more pleased.

Grunts walked up and down the boarding point, carrying tall stacks of boxes. He had ordered them to bring the crates below deck, preferably in some corner of the labs, but they had run out of space pretty quickly. Now they were just storing them on the deck itself.

The boxes contained information from before Colress joined Team Plasma. Most of it was merely records, but he was sure that some of it related to the projects his predecessors created. Colress was most interested in the G Project, as he had been unable to find the reports from it anywhere on the Frigate. One of the scientists had suggested they might be with all the original Plasma files, so he set off a few days time to find and sort through them.

He hadn’t expected there to be so many of them, though. What had Ghetsis been up to, with this many lab reports? Colress had been under the impression that the prior incarnation of Plasma hadn’t had much in the way of a science team, but he was starting to question that.

“Boss, these’re the last of the boxes.”

“Oh, yes, good.” He hadn’t noticed the grunt approaching him, so lost in his thoughts he was. “Hm… which ones are marked as holding lab reports? I need the ones on Genesect.”

“Gotcha, boss.” The grunt wandered off again, shouting orders to the rest of the grunts.

Colress watched, slightly concerned, as they unstacked the boxes. They weren’t as uniformly labeled as he would have liked, but he had seen quite a few crates with scrawled-on tags about projects. With any luck, it wouldn’t be too hard to find the ones on the G Project.

The grunts seemed to be having an unusually difficult time, though. They weren’t very composed at their best, but somehow they managed to make a particularly astounding mockery of the task given. Colress frowned as one grunt dropped a box directly on another one’s foot. He pulled out a pokeball from his pocket.

“Magnezone, help them out, would you?” Typically he didn’t use his Pokemon for anything but battle data, but he’d read some interesting theories about Pokemon skill sets that he was curious about.

Magnezone were not Pokemon designed for carrying boxes. He might have been better off with a Machamp, or some other bulky fighting type. The article’s theory had stated that Pokemon changed to suit their trainer’s requests, and how drastic the change was depended on how much the Pokemon liked their trainer. Colress didn’t have a very close bond with Magnezone, so if the theory was right, Magnezone wouldn’t be able to carry the boxes well.

Something tapped him lightly on the back of his head, and he jumped.

“Doctor Colress!”

Oh. It was Angie. “Shouldn’t you be carrying boxes?” he asked, unable to keep the miffed tone out of his voice.

“Shouldn’t you be working on whatever latest project you have, instead of standing around?”

“I’m not standing around,” he mumbled, “I’m testing a theory. Something I read in a scientific article. It states that Pokemon adapt to the tasks their trainer gives them, depending on how much they like their trainer. So I’m having Magnezone carry the boxes. It shouldn’t do very well, since it doesn’t have a close bond with me.”

She looked confused. “Your Pokemon doesn’t like you, so you’re making it do tasks you know it’ll fail?”

“Well, certainly. To test the theory.”

A mix of emotions went across her face before she settled on annoyance. “Fine.” She stormed away, shouting at some grunts when they dropped several boxes in surprise.

He turned back to Magnezone. “Sort the crates, keeping the ones labeled as containing lab reports. Put the rest in stacks.”

Its gaze had been on him when he turned to it, but it averted its red eye jerkily when he gave it orders. Floating over to a stack of boxes with a whirring hum, it awkwardly tried to pick up a box between its magnets. They were too far apart, though, and not strong enough to carry such a heavy object. Colress took notes.
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