Kepler pulls his turtleneck up more as he weaves between the bodies of the general science crowd. Nerds, like polar molecules, tend to attract each other. He’s small, so he skirts through without much notice.

The fuck the league chant is dying down. Kepler did not participate. He’s never been one for sports-game motifs.

He doesn’t know how he feels about the whole teleport the rock thing. He didn’t get to Hoenn in time to really help come up with a better option. Lulu Flint says she has one, and he trusts her. But theories and laws are different and fragile. A key property of them they must be able to be disproven.

Fact of the matter is, he doesn’t want to die. He’s worked so hard not to die. And, sure, his first instinct when met with physical opposition is to give up, but that’s more of an extension of his existence as a slippery parasite. Things usually do work out for him, in the end.

He really, really, really liked oscar clayton ’s idea, because he would love to get his hands on real, genuine space rock. It was a treasure trove of possibility and he knew he wasn’t the only science brain drooling over it. But the technicalities that would have to come into play to make that possible were… enormous.

It always astounded Kepler that they lived in a universe where people teleported and rode dragons to work and a fucking meteor-- the thing that possibly-most-likely changed the planet 6.5x10E7 years ago-- was still a massive threat. The irony was hilarious.

Eris Halla also raised a good point about opening a door-- the facet of a door was that things could enter and exit, both ways. It wouldn’t make a very good door otherwise. Kepler hadn’t been here the last time Things From Beyond(™) had invaded Hoenn but he’d read the reports and found them exciting-- which meant they were terrifying and scary.

He didn’t really go along with the whole ‘befriend Sea!Hoenn’ plan, because Kepler didn’t tend to trust anyone as far as he could throw them. Which wasn’t far, at all. Lulu was the exception.

Kepler one-hundred-percent planned to come to this and sit in silence and, just, absorb everything through verbal osmosis. But he surprises himself by speaking after Raphael Pryde .

“I want to see one, too,” he says, of a Primal Point, and it’s not demanding per se as it is a-- a verbal tic, something that bubbles to the forefront of his mind that he can’t internalize. And it’s not so much loud as it is close-- he’s at the forefront of the group of nerds and a lot of people can definitely hear him say it. “If they work, imagine what we could do with them. Even on a smaller scale-- less interdimensional transit and more… interplanatary. Because life has more extant properties as you go up through organization levels, right?” He shook his head, like clearing an Etch-a-sketch. “Digression. I’d like to make sure their science is at least in the ballpark of correct.”

He’s rambling. It’s neither here nor there. His point, though, is that if this technology allows them to movet through dimensions, imagine what it could do for travel between places in their own dimension, assuming that cross-dimensional travel is higher up on the organization levels than interplanatary. Like, cell-tissue-yadda yadda-biosphere-stratosphere-stellar sphere-interdimensional sphere.

Though he doesn’t agree with Chu-e Choi ’s harshness, he has to admit both the ex-underboss and mint frost have a point. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

“This is making a lot of assumptions that the Sea-people won’t just lump us in with the masses,” Kepler found himself saying, shortly after Rowan Wrynn threw out the enemy of my enemy is my friend line, like a good Winston Churchill.

He squints at the sandstorm, running through the mental math. He didn’t realize the League’d used these things before. And they had a history of removing one thing and replacing it with something else?

“One-point-five times ten to the 14th cubic liters of water?” he threw out. “Do we have to worry about that, now, too? Because that’s almost not any better than just getting smashed by a space rock.”

His stomach does a little dance when Killian Decker mentions alien life and, look, there’s a million pieces of media about why it doesn’t go well, but if they could just bank off of oscar clayton ’s idea and stop and isolate the meteor… maybe they could study it?

Mars brings up a good point: there’s another factor in play, here. Another power to contend with, in the form of the Dark Triad. Which, from what Kepler’d read of all the reports, was… astounding. Mathematically incomprehensible. It made him want to cry into his notes. He hated things that the numbers couldn’t attend for and the presence of a malevolent higher power was one of those things.

He looks over at Ceri Glynn , who did the verbal version of his gastrointestinal happy dance. "The meteor is massive. Like, larger than anything we can think of on a physical scale. We couldn't do enough damage to it fast enough to mitigate the opposing damage of its collision. We could try, alternatively, producing enough energy to move it so it misses us, but that's just more shooting in the dark. Any kinetic repulsion systems would require in-depth knowledge of the surface of the meteor."

Basically, they're running out of time. And options. And they really should've started working on this, like, six years ago.

TL ; DR
>> oh my this was a lot. kepler hides with the nerds.
>> he wants to join the ppl that examine the primal points
>> doesn't want to befriend sea!hoenn.
>> worries about what will come through the doorway w the league plan.
>> talks to ceri about space stuff
>> wearing