picture_prompt_fun | The New Master Bedroom (picture #15 & #16) -- Mother 3, Pokey, G/Gen

Title: The New Master Bedroom

Fandom: Mother 3

Character: Pokey

Length: 644

Rating: G
Warning: spoilers for Mother 2 and Mother 3

Pokey's new bedroom was going to be incorporated into one of the electric eel tanks. Not only did the young (Old? Young-Old?) master get to sleep better (and it seemed to take him so long these days...) to the relaxing sound of the water and the aquatic life swimming around in circles above him, he could also amuse himself by pulling grotesque faces at the eels to annoy them into letting out their electric shock and powering the generators.

(Nobody on the base wanted to say anything but the Master's face was looking weirder every day even when he wasn't bugging his eyes and sticking out his tongue while making leering noises. Whatever the hell he was doing to himself, it was turning him into a living zombie. They all wished they could talk him out of it but none of them wanted to be the first to comment on it, not with the constant threat of 'reconstruction'.)

Whenever the generators came on, coloured lights and music would start playing across the diorama - Pokey didn't really like relaxation all that much, or sleeping for that matter - and several reconstructed dolls would come to life, start dancing and splaying the national anthem, an inspired piece that listed Pokey's many outstanding personal qualities. The dolls were designed to all look like a favourite maidservant from Pokey's previous life, when he was briefly in charge of a billion dollar corporation, and would also serve him tea and cakes on silver platters.

(Add some kind of failsafe, remembered the chief technician suddenly, so that it's impossible for Pokey to actually fail to activate the generator. He still has the same attitude to losing as he did when he was two years old, he just wrecks more things - and lives - in his tantrums these days.)

Things from his past were mostly what Pokey liked best these days. He had caught them painting the outer walls of the bedroom white and demanded to know what the hell they thought they were doing and hadn't he told them that everything had to be blue by the end of the day if we were going to subdue the local populace. The painters had just gone along with it - the blue theme had actually inspired the aquarium idea - until someone asked the old Professor from the Chimera Lab and he explained that Pokey had also been the leader of a cult that brainwashed people by painting everything blue.

That said, Pokey's response had been rather unexpected when he was first asked what he thought of his finished new bedroom.

"It'll do, for now," he had replied, "But you do understand, don't you, that it won't matter once New Pork City is ready? Nothing in this tired old world will matter. We're all going to New Pork City, you and I and these fish and the maids, and we're not ever coming back. We'll have better things to think about, much more exciting, once we're all gathered and the time is right."

After that, he had demanded to be escorted to his playpen, his favourite robot maid booted up, the cabinet unlocked with the yo-yo his friend had once given to him as a birthday present. ("Even my mom and dad didn't get me real presents," he explained for the fiftieth time, "Only weird things like stocks and shares and that horse the one time.") He made them all sit in the room with him while he watched old holiday albums of his friends (or enemies, or both, nobody could really tell) on their adventures, talking loudly over the whole thing as usual. Only then were they sent back to their regular duties, relieved to be away from the unpredictable tyrant but still unable to shake the gnawing fear of whatever was awaiting them in New Pork City.