Chapter One: Waterboarding



The interrogation room was dark, damp, and smelled of chlorine. It was also in the basement of an indoor swimming pool, which accounted for the smell and humidity. It also accounted for the constant dripping splashing onto the head of the small Cubone-shaped creature that the interrogator, Gatekeeper Misty, currently had tied to a chair.



Normally, the drip would have merely slipped off the Cubone's skull. Only the Cubone wasn't wearing it. Misty twirled it casually in her hands, admiring the curves and the marks of the cracks and tears on the skull.



"All right, Zom-Bill," she taunted. "TALK."



Despite being tied so tightly to the chair that he couldn't feel his legs, and facing a rather annoying water torture that felt laced with a chemical slightly more potent than pool chlorine, the Cubone grinned. If Misty expected him to show any pain, he was going to disappoint her.



"You know, everyone wants me to talk until I actually start," he remarked casually, as if he was not currently tied to a chair by a psycho woman. "Then they tell me to shut up. Sometimes with blunt instruments that, by the way, I wouldn't advise using on me. That could loosen the ropes."



Misty, to her credit, took the advice and slapped him instead.



Bill winced. "Ow... all right, I'll bite." (Misty quickly pulled her hand back in case this was literal.) "I might as well get to know you before I escape anyway."



"You're not. Your crystal dragon empress won't save you either. Every single Gatekeepers building is wallpapered in three layers of Cleanse Tags. Nobody gets in without the Gatekeepers knowing about it."



Giratina was more of a shadow dragon than a crystal dragon, Bill thought, but he felt no need to divulge the information. "Why bother to interrogate me? We both know you have clairvoyant powers. You've heard the Voices in your head back before, during the Carbuncle War." Which Bill only knew because of the message the other Bill had left him, the message that had stated that Misty had heard voices in her head that wanted to beat her. He doubted that other-Bill had realized the significance of that statement, but perhaps he had, and had intentionally left it in the CD message to him as an offhand remark, a warning sign. Not that it had done him much good.



Misty merely grinned. "Your secrets are already mine, Billy Boy. You might as well confess."



"So you can have it on record? So the rest of the Gatekeepers know you're not crazy?" Bill yawned loudly. "The not-crazy woman who hears voices in her head and turns grown men into Cubones for entertainment. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to know you can't be replaced by a machine."



Misty gasped, and Bill smiled to himself. Buttons pushed: one.



"That... that IS NOT TRUE!" Misty yelled, hitting Bill so hard that the chair he was on wobbled, changing the path of the chemical drip from above him. Unfortunately, this placed it straight into Bill's eye, and he screamed involuntarily at the burning sensation.



Misty pulled her hand back, laughing in grim satisfaction. "Heh... see? Lie to me and you get burned!"



"I wasn't lying. If you actually have clairvoyant powers worth a pair of Wingull's kidneys, you must already know I'm not lying." Bill tried to twist his head away from the drip, or at least so that it wouldn't be in his eye. "Admit it. They built the machines based on you because they didn't trust YOU, didn't they?"



Misty punched the Cubone so hard that she knocked the chair over. "WHO'S ASKING THE QUESTIONS, ME OR YOU?"



Bill laughed despite the pain and the reverberations from the collision of chair and floor. At least he was out of the path of the acid. "Ding ding ding! You didn't say 'no.' You don't trust them either, do you?"



Misty simply glared at Bill, her veins visibly throbbing on her forehead. "You... You're trying to make a fool of me. On public record!"



"Correction: I'm not even trying. You're doing it for me, fantastically well."



Misty swore a green streak, stomping out of the room with her fists clenched. "Deputy Chief Roberts! Take this Cubone into the solitary confinement detention chambers RIGHT NOW!"



Bill rolled his eyes. Deputy Chief Roberts? He could handle Deputy Chief Rob...



And then suddenly found himself and the chair pulled upwards by the biggest, baldest, most clinically obese Pikachu he had ever seen.



"Youse ain't goin' nowhere, Bill."



The Pikachu had a police baton in one hand and a half-eaten donut in the other. Bill only tasted one that night.



TO BE CONTINUED...