"Bureaucratic stick-in-the-mud," Delilah muttered as she flashed a gesture at the blank videophone. Sighing in frustration, she sank into the chair, her head resting on one palm.

"Mime?" the house's resident Mr. Mime inquired from the other room.

"What?" Delilah called. "Oh, it's nothing, Mimey," she said, assuming the pokemon's question.

Mimey put his broom down and shuffled into the sitting room. "Mime?" it asked again, adding an are-you-sure-you're-telling-me-everything tone to the question.

Delilah shrugged. "I'm just a little worried, that's all."

Mimey cocked his head and held his hand shoulder-height, indicating someone that high, or at least small.

"Oh, yes," Delilah continued, getting Mimey's cue, "I'm worried about Ash too. But I..." She snorted in frustration. "You'd think they'd let a husband call his wife every once in a while. But no, all I get is the same old crap about him being in a 'classified location' that's 'isolated from contact.' What's an old woman to do?"

Mimey frowned and held his hands in front of his face as if he were framing Mrs. Ketchum in a picture.

Delilah laughed softly. "Flattery will get you nowhere, Mimey," she said with a smile. "But still... I can't help but worry..."

p{center}. * * *

"The report says you're progressing nicely, Mewtwo," Jack Ketchum said, flipping the pages on the clipboard. Seated across from him in the nondescript break room sat what many believed -- or at least hoped -- was the most powerful pokemon on the planet. He was roughly humanoid-shaped with a cat-like head, two fingers and a thumb on each hand, and a long, thick tail that didn't twitch so much as pulse.

Should there be any surprise? Mewtwo answered. Lacking any usable vocal chords, he preferred to speak through telepathy rather than perform the "pathetic" attempts other pokemon had at communication.

The comment seemed to interrupt Jack's train of thought. He put aside the clipboard and leaned forward, looking Mewtwo directly in the eye. "What's bothering you?" he said.

Nothing, Mewtwo said as he met Jack's gaze.

Jack smirked. "I've stared down worse than you, boy; don't even try it."

And what could possibly be worse than me?

"A lot of things, actually, since I know you won't hurt me."

Mewtwo didn't move, but his gaze softened slightly.

Jack relaxed as well. "What's bothering you?"

Mewtwo closed his eyes and hung his head. They tell me I am an experiment, he said. They say I was made by humans and I belong to humans. They say I only exist to serve them, but... He looked Jack in the eye again. What they say cannot be true! Tell me, am I just a... a tool?

Jack swallowed. He had expected this question for some time now. Mewtwo had only come into the world a few months ago, but his mental development was heavily accelerated. It was only natural that he would begin to question his existence.

"Do you want the truth?" he said. Mewtwo nodded. "Promise me one thing," he said. "Promise me you'll hear me out through the whole thing."

Mewtwo nodded slowly.

Jack bit his lip. "You are... You are the result of a cloning and gene splicing experiment, Mewtwo. As you know, you were made by combining a sample of Mew's DNA with human DNA, and all this was engineered to make you as powerful as possible. We -- we didn't know if you would survive, if you would have any defects, so in that sense, you were -- and still are -- an experiment. And you were commissioned..." Jack tried to swallow again, but his mouth was too dry. "You were commissioned so that we could study Mew more carefully and more throughly -- at least, that's what they told us."

But that's not the truth, is it? Mewtwo said.

Jack looked off to the side. "This study is funded completely by Giovanni Rozzo, and I don't doubt that once we are through studying you, he will want you for his personal collection. So I suppose, that was your ultimate purpose. That was why you were made. But..."

But what?

Jack's eyes lit up. "You are _alive,_ Mewtwo. You think, you have feelings, you reason, you make decisions, you possess all of the characteristics necessary for a fully cognitive being, just like any other pokemon in the wild. Your methods of birth may have been slightly... _unconventional,_ but that doesn't change the fact that you are very much a living creature. And that is something no man can create on his own.