[attr="class","hth"]

Months had passed.[break][break]

His fingers hammered on the keys—command after command filtering across his screen, letting the computer run through its diagnostics, picking apart the latest problem he had encountered. The room is pale, white, and silent. The lights overhead flicker, unable to remain consistently lit, despite the whirling of the Slateport Power Plant as it hummed with life.[break][break]

Brownouts were still frequent within this confined space; the plant was operational. The rest of the city was not. Slateport rested in darkness, watching as the hours wane late into the evening. Desmond Kelley knew that it was already past daybreak, even if this room offered no windows. He can tell by the ache in his back and the exhaustion of his eyes—burning from the white of the screen that had burned him for hours.[break][break]

Only an idiot would presume that restoring power to a city would be simple—the problem was far greater than a broken off switch.[break][break]

Nonlinear loads had overvolted—some had undervolted. Outside of the Power Plant, massive segments of the power grid were inaccessible or destroyed due to the collateral damage, meaning that unless someone decided to re-route the grid with new power lines, those sections would remain untouched even with the plant operational.[break][break]

The diagnostics were complete; charts were neatly compiled on the screen for his mind to process.[break][break]

The numbers were wrong. His hand sought the communication device on his desk. “We're running under capacity, could someone please check the perimeter and see if something is interfering, before we have another system shut—” and before the Rocket Scientist could finish his sentence, everything goes dark.[break][break]

“Again—?” and then came the sound of a fist being banged against the closest surface as he vented his frustrations; air rushed out of Desmond Kelley's body, but it failed to drain the frustration. When he spoke into the device, he reverted back to cool and calm, even if he broiled beneath the collar. [break][break]

“If another pikachu found its way into our systems, I want that rat dead,” and he cut the line, fetching the closest flashlight as he readied himself to patrol the halls.[break][break]

It could be another electric pokemon. It could be the League. It was why he fetched a pokeball from his waist, releasing his Manetric—the perfect pokemon for pest control.[break][break]

Light scanned down one of the dark halls as he directed the plastic torch. Some Rocket members frequented this place, but only those in the lower brass—they knew that this place was avoided after the success of Slateport, because it burned as the only failure.[break][break]

A failure that Desmond was still cleaning, even if he had nothing to do with it.[break]
tags shiv