the blanketing grey clouds that dim lilycove's atmosphere are befitting in the wake of rocket's attack on slateport. what happened was unspeakable, and yet zeke rainey finds himself desperately wanting to talk it out of existence. he can do no such thing -- slateport is fallen, and he was there to watch it turn black.

it was the league's responsibility to protect its most important piece of the economical puzzle of hoenn, and they rolled over. and the police? they were laughable. zeke knows he was not much better, though to try and fail is better than to fail to try at all.

within 3 days of his escape from the siege, zeke's uniform was hanging in some dusty closet in the back of the mauville police department, his letter of resignation gingerly resting on top of a stack of papers on his boss's desk. he pulled out the business card from silph and dialed it on his way out the front door. his resignation is immediate, a weight off his shoulders.

fuck the bureaucracy of it all.

it feels strange to meet in lilycove; zeke wonders just how much this has impeded silph co.'s activity as he paces outside of the cafe at which he's agreed to meet silph. how he has any time at all to entertain zeke's employment shocks him, but perhaps desperate times call for desperate measures and an extra dose of muscle on the right side of the fight. he practices what he'll say when silph arrives.

suddenly, as if by force, the lines that he rehearses for the pitch stop altogether. the pacing stops. "oh...my god?"

the meaning of regirock's vision elucidates alarmingly quickly, the shock of its prescience materializing on zeke's face in the form of a frozen gaze into the ground. the black tendrils... silph tower...did regirock know rocket would come?

and was he supposed to know, too?

FERNANDO SILPH