It’s October, so if the ridiculous are to be believed, there are many ghosts about. Kepler doesn’t not believe in the supernatural, given that it would be boring not to, and also, there are literally ghosts everywhere. Phobos and Deimos were ghosts-- or, at least, Pokemon assigned the identity of ghosts.

“Nostalgia is a delusion. It’s just a memory.”

He doesn’t remember what he’d said, back then. In many ways, and as cheesy as it sounds, he’d been a different person.

Phobos and Deimos have found a Slowking to torment, spinning wildly around him and laughing in their eerie, Pokemon voices. Phobos constricts around it while Deimos strikes it with hex. Kepler hands Mercury a Pokeball and the Raboot speeds over, powerspikes it onto the Slowking, and then races back with the contained Pokemon in hand.

“I read your report. About changing into a digital champion to save the digital world.” His voice is mirthless when he says it but it is, for all intents and purposes, a joke.

Martín del Mar
ghost/psychic
catch attempt slowking

☉

Mars laughs at his horrible joke and Kepler realizes for the umpteenth time he is never going to understand this man. Mars had stood by while his vicious shadow Inkay tentacle-fucked Kepler’s face and then tutted like it was Kepler’s fault.

“I did,” he said, looking out over the collection of headstones, some ornate and grandiose, others simple plaques in the ground. Some had been decorated for Halloween, in the spirit of things; some bore the remains of summer’s flowers, mums and dahlias and peonies beginning to brown and droop at the edges.

“I was right. Again.”

There’s a wry sort of humor embedded in the statement, enough that it, too, could be taken as a joke. It is Schrodinger’s Meowth: it is both a jest and the truth. Kepler is becoming increasingly talented at maneuvering thus.

Phobos and Deimos spook up a Duskull that they quickly draw into their self-anointed hilarious game of Freak Things Out in the Graveyard. Kepler considers changing their names to the Three Stooges as he watched them flit and frolic, being stupid, dead, idiots.

Martín del Mar
ghost/psychic
catch attempt duskull

☉

Honestly, reading the reports of what had happened in the digital world had left Kepler dazed and confused. He’d accuse them all of lying, or being on drugs, if there hadn’t been so fucking many people. A sample size that large left little room for denial.

“The origin of the end,” he says, voice half-skeptical, half-dreamy. It was a dark and romantic thought. Believing it gave them some power simply by existing in this damned timeline, this guillotine of a universe.

Phobos and Deimos spook up a Starmie from a little, decorative pond, dazing it with a psybeam. Phobos constricts around it and drags the dizzy star over to Kepler, who catches it; the two little troublemakers go back about their mischief.

“Was it everything you hoped it’d be?” he asks, still not sure how much of all of this he was willing to believe. That wasn’t a discredit to Mars, but to-- look. This was all… incredibly ridiculous on an astronomical scale. What the actual fuck, you know?

Martín del Mar
ghost/psychic
catch attempt starmie

☉

Kepler made a face at Mars’ admission of biblical confirmation like a cat getting into spoiled cream. “Ugh. How boring.”

Never once did he feel bad for Mars, for any of the things he’d gone through. Not for his suffering, not for the pain Kepler was reasonably assured he’d felt. Nobody gets… changed like that and doesn’t feel anything.

“If you haven’t published that bit already I’m going to need you to keep it quiet,” he says, watching Phobos and Deimos find and terrorize a Ralts for a bit, “because it’ll prove a lot of people I can’t handle being right, right.”

The Ralts runs around like one of those stupid egg-stealing monsters in the first Spyro game until it falls on its face. Kepler lobs a Pokeball.

“I’m a scientist,” he says as an acceptable explanation, and accepts the cigarette with a nod, proffering his other hand for the light. “Though I’m really not supposed to. I know no one is supposed to, but. My body is fucked up enough as it is.”

He inhales the scent of freshly lit nicotine on the wind.

“Maybe not as much as yours, though, now.”

Martín del Mar
ghost/psychic
catch attempt ralts
sorry 4 tha delay

☉