[attr="class","franntag"]

Xenon Antheil

[attr="class","frannmain"]

Things were getting serious, this was a really real mission that Yuina had been assigned to that was more than just rescuing a Pokemon in the woods or trying to make sure a migration pattern wasn't skewed. Sure... She'd also done some of the more dangerous things already like dive deep into the depths of an interdimensional creature to gather poisonous crystals, but this felt... More real? More tangible even? There was another person involved, one of these 'Team Rocket' that she kept hearing about, and that person was their target... It felt different, knowing that there was a person at the end of their goal, someone who could be responsible for something happening to the city they were in, and even though Yuina was here and she was going to do the job, she wasn't quite sure how she felt about it.[break][break]
Within Lilycove City where it was said they could find this person, the small ranger squad that was sent in closed in quickly on the given location, a non descript, small warehouse building on the outskirts of town that had no reason to draw any attention were it not for it being their target. Within moments the squadron was filing into the warehouse, looking for their target and ready to put an end to whatever work was being done within its walls, but the rocket that they were after had fled just as quickly as they had found the safehouse. They were just behind on time, and that was of the essence, and as Yuina had been charged with keeping a perimeter, the woman and her Aegislash were then bid to find their target.[break][break]
Charging through the trees and woods, following her Aegislash who was trying to keep tabs on the anomaly running through the trees that they might be able to assume was the target in question, Yuina couldn't have been prepared as running deeper into the trees just felt wrong and everything started to change... She couldn't have known what was happening, she had no way of knowing what was changing and why everything felt like there was a disconnect, but as she stopped herself hanging onto the trunk of a tree at a sudden shift, almost a sudden break of the environment around her, the trembling would have thrown her to the ground were she not grasping onto the trunk of the tree. Everything was breaking, the very foundation of the forest was shifting... And there was nothing that could prepare her for what she'd just stumbled into.

[attr="class","frannpoke"]

[attr="class","blboxbl"]

Up is down, left is right, the river water is flowing along the forest wall, the ground has broken up under her feet into little islands floating in a vast sea of empty darkness. Any normal person would be pissing themselves right now, it looks like the Ranger that followed her was doing just that as she hung from the trunk of a tree. But Xenon herself? She seemed oddly calm about the whole thing, maybe she just didn't recognize the danger she was in as she steps forwards onto a drifting rock, floating by Yuina and appraising her calmly before turning her attention back to the strange Distortion they seem to have caught themselves in. It wasn't all too dissimilar from the space time distortion she had found herself in not too long ago, though unlike that one there didn't seem to be much in the way of life.
[break][break]
No, no, they were different in a lot of ways. The time space distortion was much more connected and put together than this was, even if the seconds seemed to blend into hours and feet became miles without any kind of sense behind it. There was at least life there, Alpha Pokemon reminiscent of the... something to do with the past, who even cares?
[break][break]
"You know, you're facing the wrong way." At least from her perspective. It didn't take a genius scientist and ultramodernist to note that the Ranger was standing on a wall that had disconnected from the rest of the world, though to Yuina it would probably seem like Xenon was the one standing sideways as she floated around on her little floating isle without a concern in the world. What was even more insane was how calmly Xenon stepped off of her island and onto "solid ground" as it were, righting herself to Yuina's plane of gravity and taking a look around the area of the distorted forest they found themselves in.
"Man I gotta say, you must be the unluckiest bitch in the whole world right now. Getting caught in a never before seen spacial phenomenon with a known active terrorist with no backup, no way out, and as far as I can tell..." The woman looks around for another few seconds before continuing. "No edible food or resources to sustain yourself with. This has gotta be rough for you, how are you feeling right now?"
[break][break]
Suddenly she's in Yuina's face, grabbing her cheeks and opening her mouth to look inside, turning her head left and right looking for something. "I don't mean emotionally by the way, I really couldn't care less about that. I just wanted to see if this dimension is having any kind of adverse effects on you. You know, shortness of breath, tightness in your chest, a pounding headache. I'm feeling fine personally, but a sample size of one isn't really a good litmus test of if this dimension is going to kill me or not."
[break][break]

+ Yuina Higashi

[attr="class","franntag"]

Xenon Antheil

[attr="class","frannmain"]

Clutching the tree that had now been separated from the remainder of the forest, it was like she was floating on a small, single island in the midst of the broken distorted space around them. Yuina turned this way and that, looking around, trying to... well, just trying to understand? What had happened all of a sudden that the area around them had become so unmistakably broken and warped. She stood hanging onto the tree with Swann the Aegislash, nearly concerned that if she let go she would fall into another direction that could be up, down, sideways, or anything else, but she did move to stand up straighter, adjusting.[break]
She'd already been in places like the deep sea in the caverns of that beast, and she'd traveled to the other dimensions beyond, even sifted through that distortion to find Daikenki, but this... this was another environment of wrong and incorrect, how many different kinds of breaks in space time were there?[break][break]
At this point, the person she was chasing was of no matter, how could they be when she was lost in some broken plane with no way of knowing how she was going to get back, or if she could at all? And then, from around her, she heard a voice, and the woman she was chasing was there, in this place with her...[break]
"You're here too, it's not like you put us here. We're trapped, together," Yuina returned, she couldn't understand the woman's insistence on separating herself from the situation they were both in, like she wasn't affected by this circumstance in the slightest. Then she was in Yuina's space, grabbing her face, poking her, and she just wouldn't shut up![break][break]
"Back Off," Yuina pushed, and Swann drew her shield back, the Aegislash was on the offensive.[break]
"Don't touch me, I'm getting out of here and you can figure out if this place is going to kill you or not," Yuina returned, burning and furious, clearly she was insane. She wasn't even going to bother, why would she? The woman would probably be bent on the destruction of them both before any reason about trying to find a way out of here came to the surface, that was pointless, like arguing with a one way street. Keeping Swann now between herself and the maniac, Yuina glanced around and found another island to hop onto, finding her center of gravity changing in that instant, and the motion made her stomach lurch. How was she supposed to get out of here...

[attr="class","frannpoke"]

[attr="class","blboxbl"]

Xenon nods at the astute observation made by the little miss who was chasing after her, trapped together would be the most honest way of putting this scenario in the end. But still. "Yep! Which is why I need you to answer my questions obviously, since my survival is pretty dependent on whatever you can offer me at this given moment." Xenon continues, completely brushing off Yuina's rejection as she continues to follow along behind her. When the Aegislash readies for battle she gives her just a little personal space (9 meters exactly), but she presses on with her questioning even so as she forms a little square with her fingers and observes the ranger trainee with a squinted eye of concentration.
[break][break]
"Ooh that's a tough jump, I wouldn't make that." Xenon remarks as she picks up a rock from the ground and tests its weight in her palm, seemed to be standard from what she would expect from Dimension A (home dimension), but she did need to run some more tests still. She rears her arm back and lightly tosses the rock towards one of the strange sideways islands that was close by, what should be a wall by all standards, yet was not. The rock should have plummeted down into the abyss as it passed by that wall, but what actually occurred next was beyond strange by any standards as it instead began to fall sideways. Her eye tracks the rock as it hits the "ground" and rolls to a stop, calculating the momentum the rock retained and how it changed as it switched between fields of gravity. She tests it out one more time for good measure with an eraser she had in her coat, before nodding to herself and deciding on a course of action.
[break][break]
Meanwhile Yuina seemed to come to much the same conclusion with much less testing and hypothesizing, instead just jumping right to the island that Xenon was observing without a care in the world. And hey, it works! So following in her wake the Ultramodernist jumps right to the island, stomach doing a slight flip as her directional gravity shifts, and hits the ground with both feet, arms held wide and a great grin on her face. "Alright cool! Looks like we've got a way to go from island to island, isn't that neat?" Xenon exclaims as she turns to Yuina and moves to pat her on the back, only to get blocked by that Aegislash once more. "You know, considering we could end up trapped her forever and all, you could stand to be a little more friendly. I feel like you're getting very caught up on what our relationship 'was' when you should really be focusing now on what it is."
[break][break]

+ Yuina Higashi

[attr="class","franntag"]

Xenon Antheil

[attr="class","frannmain"]

Truly, this woman was insane, the way she just kept talking, as if everything about the situation was just right and cherry, in spite of her words bearing grim meanings. Yuina stopped on the next island chunk she had hopped on, she had to adjust to a new center of gravity and her stomach lurched and did not like it one bit, but she was being followed. Followed, but not pursued.[break]
"What? What are you talking about? You were running from me because you were a danger, and now you want to watch me die in this place that's... not how 'we' works," Yuina returned, she just couldn't understand how the thought processes were working here. She was settled on the island she'd hopped onto, Swann too was able to make it to follow her trainer, but then the woman followed and hopped along with them after having tossed a rock for good measure. She talked about being more friendly? Being trapped in here forever with her was definitely not what Yuina was planning...[break][break]
"Okay, if we're being friendly here, then why don't we think about how we're getting out of here instead of we're going to die here and wondering how it's going to happen? That's not helping the situation either," she wondered, turning to face her then, though she did well to keep as much distance as she could on the given island space, and Swann kept close.[break]
"It's not like we walked through a portal or anything... We were running through the forest and everything just... broke."

[attr="class","frannpoke"]

[attr="class","blboxbl"]

"Ok ok, let's slow down there. I was not running from you, I was..." Xenon hums thoughtfully and places a finger on her lower lip, what had she been doing again? "I don't know, that was like a whole ten minutes ago, who even cares. Probably wasn't running though. Anyways!" She shoots an arm up cheerfully and moves a bit closer to Yuina, but not too close. Just the right distance to impose upon her, but not so close as to be easily punchable if the girl decided to go for it at any given moment.
[break][break]
Thinking about how to get out was pretty important. But it was made a tad more difficult by the fact that they hadn't entered here on purpose, in fact they had no idea how the fuck they had gotten in here, aside from randomly running through a forest. Good place to start. "Well we were moving a lot when we came in, so it goes to follow that we should probably keep moving if we want to get out right?" Xenon plucks a Pokeball from her belt as she speaks, rolling it back and forth along her palm casually. It rolls close to her fingertips, just on the verge of sliding out of her hand and into the abyss, only to be drawn back into the crook of her hand for the process to repeat. "Using a flying Pokemon probably isn't the best idea, we don't really have a solid handle on how gravity works in this space and flight is pretty reliant on that. Soooooooo, we should probably just keep hopping along."
[break][break]
And as she says this she spots another island moving close, this one a fair bit larger. "Alright no more time to talk, time to move!" It's as she says this that Xenon's arm suddenly shoots out and grabs the other girl's wrist tugging her along as she races towards the edge of the little isle they were standing on, obviously readying herself to jump as the bigger island draws nearer and nearer. "Good news by the way, I can feel this little island's gravity is totally destabilizing!" She shouts as strands of her hair start to float upwards, the pull of gravity weakening by the second as the bigger islands gets closer and closer with every passing moment. "So we're gonna have a lot of wiggle room on this jump if we time it right! Just follow my lead and we probably won't launch ourselves into the abyss! Probably! Ready!?"
[break][break]

+ Yuina Higashi

[attr="class","franntag"]

Xenon Antheil

[attr="class","frannmain"]

Trying to keep up with this woman and her rambling was like trying to keep up with Shalin's energy, but different in a way that Yuina truly had no idea if the woman was going to try to kill her for science or continue to act like they were best friends... It was a little unnerving, if she were being honest... At the present moment she was all cheery and smile as she pandered on about how the right now was what was important and ten minutes ago didn't matter... That was... Kind of not true, since tryin to apprehend her was why Yuina was here at all... But Yuina could see the value in trying to maintain the status quo, for now...[break]
"If we keep moving it sounds like we would have better odds than stayig in once place... I wonder if continuing to move in a forward direction will... Put things back together," Yuina agreed, and while she had had the thought herself of trying to fly forward, or in any which way really, there was no point in it, not with how much gravity was changing at every turn.[break][break]
"Okay, right, let's keep moving islands," she nodded, getting ready to jump herself, but the woman grabbed onto her without much more notice and took the jump for them, leading them up and off of the island they were standing on and towards a much larger one. The jumped seemed so effortless, it was like their own weights didn't matter much here either, Yuina felt as if she had just been tugged along like she was floating in water, without hardly any resistance.[break]
They made their jump, a very upward and over movement with the way gravity was situated, and Yuina felt like they could have floated along forever with how slow the movement felt, but the larger island was coming up on them, just as the smaller one they had been on was pushed away by their forward momentum, the physics of the area truly showing in the movement of everything.

[attr="class","frannpoke"]

[attr="class","blboxbl"]

"Of course it will! Don't you know, the most important thing in life is to always run forwards and never look back!" Xenon cheers as the two leap from the island and into the seemingly endless abyss. If anything about the laws of this world differed from what Xenon believed, it was very likely they would simply plummet into nothingness forever, in this inhospitable void without life or love. The still air rushes by the two explorers as they hit the peak of their jump, floating in place for just the briefest second, yet lingering for a seeming eternity and taking in the view of all the nothing that lay before them.
[break][break]
And then back down they go, the slight tug of gravity pulling them down as feathers in the wind falling towards that island. The jump was perfect in every manner, Xenon's feet touch down on solid ground and she doesn't even break her stride as she keeps moving forwards to the next island, and the next. Every jump is perfectly calculated based on nothing more than the feel of the air drifting around her and raw gut instinct, she can feel the path to the future with every passing second and knows just where to put her feet to forge this new road.
[break][break]
Half an hour passes like this, Xenon whooping and cheering as she defies death and leads Yuina through the vast empty, only once stumbling and just barely catching herself by a hanging tree branch. But eventually they find what they're searching for, something resembling an exit as shards of broken reality form a picture of the "real" world. "Woo! Damn that was fun, we should totally do this again sometime huh?" Xenon remarks as she turns to the League trainee, hands on hips and a light sheen of sweat dripping from her forehead as she lets out a huff of exertion. She hadn't had to work her body like that since... well, the details aren't that important are they?
[break][break]
"Anyways uh, you can just go on ahead! I'll probably go find a different exit, since you're gonna try and kill me or capture me the moment you we both get out of there. I'm not normally one for honoring my own word, but you seem cool enough that I might as well let ya live!"
[break][break]

+ Yuina Higashi

[attr="class","franntag"]

Xenon Antheil

[attr="class","frannmain"]

The journey through this broken place was... Exhausting, to say the least, like swimming through the ocean trying to get to a shore that wasn't there... It was a full body workout, a whole being experience, wading through the gravity changes, jumping from island to island, Yuina felt like she had been running or pushing through some sort of metaphysical goop. Every muscle was sore, she ached at the exertion of it all, and she was nearly out of breath as they finally came to a particular set of land that... Seemed to be putting itself back together, like they'd reached the end, the frame of some twisted abstract painting.[break][break]
They came to a stop, and Yuina couldn't help needing to huff and catch her breath, leaning down with her hands on her knees as her hair hung down around her. She glanced though, to the side, it looked like they'd found the end of this place, or the beginning of their reality again? The concept was contrived, there was probably no correct direction. She stood up straighter, looking to the woman that she had ended up in this place with, do this again sometime...?[break][break]
"Uhm, how about no...? I'm good on accidentally breaking into a distorted reality and fighting gravity for a while," she returned slowly... this... Was not something that she was going to seek out again. Though... She didn't seek it out the first time.[break]
They had spent all of this time working together and trying to get out of this place, Yuina did almost truly forget that she had been chasing her from the start, and that she was still supposed to apprehend this terrorist that was working with chemicals in the city... But...[break][break]
"Our relationship now isn't what it was then, that's what you said right? We'll... part ways here, and leave it at that for now," Yuina returned. Her report on the situation would be easy enough to work on, she got lost in a broken dimension and just... Couldn't keep up with her pursuit. Would she regret this? She... Wasn't sure... But for the moment, Yuina couldn't find a good reason to break their unlikely ally-ship. Who knows what their relationship would be the next time they met?

[attr="class","frannpoke"]