She hummed a thoughtful note, thinking back on her childhood and wondering if she could remember what all she’d gotten wrong then.

“Dinosaurs,” she says, suddenly. “We all got dinosaurs wrong. As kids.” It’s a knee-jerk reaction to utilize humor to soften the edges of the situation; she doesn’t deal well with closeness and she expects Mars doesn’t, either. It’s a lot, she realizes-- see how she’s making all these little discoveries about him, piece by piece, like she’s putting together a puzzle-- for him to talk about his past. There’s a weight to his words and a nonchalance to the way he throws them out that say it’s just a glimpse-- like he doesn’t know why he’s saying these things but they’re not important, so have them.

But they are important.

Her head falls back and she looks up at the stars, thinking.

“Funerals are expensive. Gravesites are also a limited resource.” She shrugs. “I hate the idea of being put in a box in the ground.”

The Honedge blocks their path like a stalwart sentinel, blade flashing in the moonlight. Atticus materialized out of the darkness behind it, startling it by gripping it’s handle and brandishing it. The Honedge shivered, a metallic, otherworldly hum in the darkness, and Atticus stabbed it into the ground, up to the hilt. He stood up straight, dusted his paws, and disappeared into the gloom again.

Cyg sighed, tapping the handle of the twitching, angry Honedge with a Pokeball as they passed

---

notes catch attempt honedge! ghost/psychic babie <3

Martín del Mar

☉

She grins at Mars and looks him right in the eyes. Come on, you’re a smart cookie-- you’ll figure it out. And he does, and she’s thrilled at the laugh he gives. It’s like one of the stars above has fallen to earth and she is filled with its light.

“All fossil Pokemon are pretty whack,” she agrees. “Also, I’m not entirely sure the reanimation process brings them back with brains.” Grog was a prime example. He was nearly nine-foot of big, angry rock-- but not a whole lot of sense, common or otherwise.

A little Solosis floats through a beam of moonlight, reflecting off of the organs contained within. The poor thing doesn’t even notice Atticus materialize out of the darkness until it’s popped with a night slash, wheezing like a punctured balloon and deflating on the grass beneath it. Cyg tossed a Pokeball on it as they passed.

“Yeah,” she says, still trying to deflect with humor, “just-- shove me in a tree trunk and let me rot there.” She makes a face. “Okay. Maybe not that much. But I don’t like the idea of a corpse party so people I didn’t care about can swing by and be sad. If you want to remember me, donate to a cause in my name, or something.”

---

notes catch attempt solosis! ghost/psychic babie <3

Martín del Mar

☉

Fossils were one of those things that were super cool in theory but once you got down to the nitty gritty of it, they were just bones. Bones that took a hell of a lot of work to dig up and protect, for relatively little reward.

Cyg’s eyes go bright at the word Tyrantrum. “Oh, yours too?” she claps a hand to her chest, shoulders going up and back in a shrug of mock relief. “Thank god, I thought mine was the only one.” Grog was-- well, he was Grog, that was for sure.

She watches Xanthos deal with the Yamask with remarkable precision, and thinks of Muirne; she wonders if Mars’ new Yamask will be a freak when it evolves, if that’s the fate of all Yamasks.

“Yeah, like, I don’t like enough people to have them show up and genuinely be sad for me,” she says. “They’ll just gather around my coffin and talk mad trash. Even my mom. Especially my mom.”

There’s an odd cracking sound as a sun-shaped headstone moves, and Cyg realizes it’s not a headstone, but a Solrock. Attikus is on it in a second, grabbing it by one of its sunbeam-esque protrusions, and hits it point blank in the face with a night slash. He then drops the dazed and cracked rock in Cyg’s path so she can easily collect it.

“Cremation is an interesting concept,” she says, unprompted, “but-- do you think your ghost is trapped wherever your ashes go?”

---

notes catch attempt solrock! ghost/psychic babie <3

Martín del Mar

☉

Cyg smiles at the Yamask in the same way someone smiles at the child of a really annoying adult: with the secret horror of knowing what they’re going to turn into, someday.

“Ehhhh, they’re, like, not my favorite people,” she said, doing the so-so hand wiggle, voice pitching up an octave. Hopefully, she was laying on enough sarcasm. “My mom’s just a good-for-nothing drunk who lies and spends and manipulates and she would literally turn me dying in an accident into a targeted attack against her. Which is silly, because if I’m haunting anyone in the afterlife, it’s my supervisors at GMH.”

And her coworkers, of course. And the stupid people that called from those three weeks they had her in IT. Cyg and a desk job were like oil and water.

She'd be a very busy ghost.

“I just think that if I haven’t seen you in so many years, you can just. Mourn me from a distance.” She shrugged. “Not that I’d have a bunch of people showing up to my corpse party, anyway.”

She watches Xanthos deal with the Gastly and has to hide her smile behind her hand, masking it as a yawn. It’s cute, the way he tries to maul the thing like a happy puppy, but has to pull out his wicked darts instead. Ah, Pokemon.

“Maybe?” she ventures. “Maybe you have, like, a range, where your ashes go. You can go anywhere in between. Or maybe you do go, like you said, somewhere important to you. Like a traumatic death, right?” Oh, god, she was trying to make things less morbid. Damn it, Cygne. “It’s fine. Maybe the meteor’ll hit us and we’ll all just keep doing what we’re doing without knowing that we’re dead.”

It was supposed to be a joke but it came out flat.

---

notes skipping ! ghost/psychic babie <3

Martín del Mar

☉