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POSTED ON Jan 2, 2021 9:30:10 GMT

Adrian Malcolm likes this

It was rare of the Safari Zone to reach out to League authorities for reputable volunteers.

Anyone in the region could have taken the offer if the Safari Zone had made their need public but not everyone in the region could be trusted to not poach the pokémon, abuse the knowledge they would gain of the grounds during their next paid visit as patrons or otherwise disturb the set pieces in undesired ways.

The reality was this rotation of the Safari Zone was more or less exclusively a night cycle leaving the entirety of the day for cleaning and set up.

It wasn't high stakes, nor glorious but it was work that called out to him. Something about cleaning the shrines and helping restore the temple sets washed away the guilt he felt.

In the coming over to a new year, it seemed just below his conscious thoughts Sénon desperately wanted to wash away the blood on his hands. ". . ."

Seemingly, he wasn't the only one who felt that way.

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POSTED ON Jan 3, 2021 21:42:21 GMT

"Hey." Adrian announced his arrival.

Senon had arranged for them to meet here, although he wasn't privy to the details. He knew just enough to know it was work, and that it paid. But even so, the promise of coin hardly seemed to stir these two so sequestered in their thoughts.

Unleashing a Mr. Mime with SCREEN CLEANER, he'd set it to work, helping out where he was needed but otherwise taking the opportunity to quietly enjoy his company. For the sake of being polite, he asks: "How've you been hangin'?"

The air hangs over them, looming as the shadow of a storm on the horizon. Both had been encumbered by their own emotional baggage.

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POSTED ON Jan 3, 2021 22:12:57 GMT

Adrian announced himself seemingly aloof as always. Seemingly.

He remember a much more chipper guy at the ren-faire in Fortree where they had first met those months ago. It seemed somewhere along the line Adrian had lost that air of positivity and openness he'd once displayed so carefree.

During one of the two dozen Poison Patrols he'd been sent out on Adrian had been the missing case and the subject of search on top of some mountain and the League sent a few skilled trainers to look for him included Sénon, and they found nothing.

Then by the time the last of the Patrols were being assigns there Adrian was again, maybe a bit more brooding than he had been before.

It had been sometime since babysitting those brats and even usurping the Drift King they hadn't sat down and shot the shit in quite a while. In either of those assignments it had either slipped his mind or it just felt like the wrong time to ask. Even now still felt like the wrong time to ask.

Instead, Adrian did the asking.

"I'm alive" He forced a smirk. "Can't say the same for. . ." the flashes of his fallen pokémon, made him shut his mouth just as fast as he'd opened it.

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POSTED ON Jan 4, 2021 9:28:15 GMT

"...Right."

It's the sting of salt in a wound. What might've been a casual question was no inextricably more complex, compounded by the myriad sacrifices made facing threats against Hoenn. Of course they could try to find solace in knowing they did the right thing; did all that they could to avoid it...

But life comes at you fast.

Adrian stumbles around the safari picking up litter and otherwise trying to spruce the place up with Senon in tow, but he can't help feeling like he's looking for something more. "Did you earn it?"

Adrian's face is tense, his brows rigid and furled as he glowers at Senon. "Did you earn the devotion they showed you in the end?"

That was what helped Adrian cope. Knowing he tried to do his best by his pokemon day by day.

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POSTED ON Jan 4, 2021 11:55:58 GMT

He dusted and adjusted, shooed away the contest pokémon and swept the floors, all the while contemplating if his efforts were worth the loss of life.

"Did you earn it?"

"It?" He pondered a mile a minute on what that it was. "The nightmares? The feelings of failure or fatherly betrayal? Seeing that space-shadow thing every time I see the shadow of some inanimate object?"

"Did you earn the devotion they showed you in the end?"

"Oh." "Can't say that I did, not for all of them. Some of them were so new that their first orders from me were the last they were got." He gripped the handle on the broom so hard he crushed the tin frame a bit. "They slipped through the cracks of that thing so fast. . ."

From among the supplies provided, he replaced the burned the melted candles with fresh ones, "The way I see it there's nothing I could do to justify that Mal." before moving on to the next shrine.

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POSTED ON Jan 4, 2021 12:45:23 GMT

Sénon Game likes this

"Well... it's what they deserve."

As they both carried out their tasks, Adrian taking a cloth and sanitizer to any dusty surfaces, he tried to share what 'wisdom' he thought he'd picked up recently. It was something of a resolution of his.

"But that's just my two cents."

But Senon's case seemed more particular, and thus troubling. "I am... sorry to hear that, man."

Stopping abruptly in the middle of his task, contemplating himself in his reflection, Adrian offered some more of his personal insights.

"But if it helps, maybe you should think of it like this: It's not like anyone else is blaming you... You're the only one blaming yourself."

...At least among the living. Dead are a maybe.

Adrian wasn't so sure he wanted to divulge Senon his experiences and confide in him his reassurances about any feasible afterlife, so he avoided the 'they're in a better place' spiel...

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POSTED ON Jan 4, 2021 18:45:20 GMT

Adrian's word were comforting. It was nice to hear that someone let him off the hook for his mistakes, but the hook was where he was supposed to be.

Begrudgingly he admitted the other man's words of earning worthiness held weight. "You're right, working harder to be worthy of their sacrifice is the only thing I can do to honor what they gave up for me." With a hot soapy rag he wiped down railings and relics alike. "Even if it feels like drops of water in a bucket."

It wasn't just nobility and a desire to save to the world that urged him on in that shadow realm, that place of darkness of beyond their world, whatever it was, where ever it was.

It was vanity, hubris, ego and thirst for glory. Those reasons were just as prevalent for his actions as any desire to protect the world. Remembering the ones he sacrificed; an Eevee gifted to him from a child trainer who trusted him to raise it properly. A precious fletchling raised by his own hands...

He likened himself a monster for sacrificing them and eleven others to that thing.

For a while he waited for some news report or League debriefing to shed light on what exactly happened, on what it was that they faced. He waited for closure but it seemed he would have none. "I guess I have to forgive myself, I'll never get the chance to ask that forgiveness from them."

He sat down on the steps to take a break. "What about you?" He spoke to Adrian but his own eyes were to the bright skies above them. "Is it something you can learn to live with?" A shame it would be for the guilt to consume them slowly over time, like a cavity untreated.

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POSTED ON Jan 6, 2021 9:09:01 GMT

"It's not about living with it." Not even he was truly so callous. Simply put it was a matter of not wasting their effort by taking half-measures. It was about sticking to your guns once you'd settled on something. Making good on your part. For them.

"It's about what they wanted from us."

Pokemon were not so much the indentured servants they're made out to be, forced to carry out a will not their own. They chose the life...

Adventure. The chance to be nurtured; molded into something formidable, even more powerful.

Yet that did not make them deserving of blame. All in all they were still very much the victims.

"We give them a calling they'll never find on their own out there... A chance to be..."

...Great. Legends in their own right.

He stares wistfully past the shrine as they continue their work, resting his chin on his wrists as he holds the handle of a broom he'd claimed after discarding the glass cleaner and wash cloth.

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POSTED ON Jan 6, 2021 21:11:28 GMT

He liked that, it was first thing he'd been able to smile about all day. "You've got the heart of a poet Mal."

Once again Adrian was right his insights clearly having evolved beyond Sénon's more weighted and self-critical viewpoint of eating all the blame until his stomach cramped. "You're saying not to forget the fundamental fact that we were acting as a team." It had been so long since the ranger had a pokémon refuse his orders in battle he'd nearly forgotten they could. "Both sides had equal agency even if not equal consequences."

Yet still, when he made the call, they attacked without holding back.

It was only his own unwillingness to lose them all that caused him to stop ordering the attacks. Maybe he hadn't given up one of his own could have stopped that Necro-whatever and the losses wouldn't have felt so needless.

Gathering the cleaning materials after giving much the shrine a dry wipe down he descended down the stairs, feeling better than he had when he first arrived. "How are you the younger and the more insightful one? This duo doesn't make sense."

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POSTED ON Jan 15, 2021 2:02:35 GMT

"What about anything, makes sense anymore?" His tone finally became more exasperated, and maybe the thin veneer of his calm began to peel back just enough for Senon to realize: "Outlaws, aliens; It almost makes you wish it was just Team Rocket we were dealing with..."

He begins the descent a step behind Senon, lagging behind as he focuses on the discussion. "It's been a bizarre year," he begins hurriedly shuffling.

"So let's be glad it's behind us."