MARCH UPDATE

POSTED ON Nov 22, 2023 6:21:01 GMT

Lulu Flint likes this

Much had happened within the last while. That run-in with the Megalopolans on that search party, the island that sprouted from the sea. All those that went there, including someone that should’ve never gone. The aftermath of the train wreck Grigori saw coming a mile away. Headaches and anger and frustrations and–

Grigori drank his sweet drink. A concoction from Galar. At least, that’s what the Crownshead Stag claimed it to be. He imagined this would be the type of thing he’d find there. Non-alcoholic, of course. Bad memories. Mistakes. The whole nine yards. Yet it felt awkward as many wondered why he even came if not to drink. That’s what Galar specialized in!

He didn’t care. He simply sat at his table, minded his business, and attempted to unwind. Yet… he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something missing from this outing. The rare occasion that he didn’t trek to Mauville, or get pulled back to Rocket Headquarters, and yet his mind still drifted towards them. Damn Rocket. Couldn’t let him have this one night in peace?

Or maybe it was the simple fact that the chair across from him, at this two-person table, sat empty. Alone.

That was likely it, as he took another swig. Maybe he should invest more in Root Beer. A delicious soda, fit for anyone of any age. Not that it’d take away the loneliness, but it was a very good start. Shred wanted no part, and he didn’t want to talk with Howard right now. June was still recovering. That left…

No one.

Yet there was this one lady, sitting elsewhere inside the establishment who kept catching his eye. Not out of beauty, but familiarity. He knew this person, from somewhere. Obviously from Rocket– after all, they were in Sootopolis– but even more so than normal. A niggle in the back of his head associated her presence with that strange night in the bog. Griogori tried his best to keep his eyes to himself, for fear of drawing attention. He didn't succeed. It wasn't subtle.

But he definitely knew her from somewhere.

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POSTED ON Nov 28, 2023 5:21:17 GMT

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the food reminded her of dark, early days racketeering in motostoke. in contrast, she found the dining room far too bright. crownshead stag was not her first choice of dining establishment by any means, but it served its purpose.[break][break]

she claimed the bill as her company prepared to leave. “thanks for meeting me.”[break][break]

“of course. let us know if you see her again. erasmus is very excited.”[break][break]

her smile was warmer than usual. “i’ll be in touch.”[break][break]

the other woman walked out, and lulu remained at the table, gaze falling onto a man she’d caught staring a minute before, who was… yes, still staring; and with a clearer view of him from a now-empty table, she realized he looked familiar.[break][break]

her smile faded. she stared back. who was he? why was he there? he was alone. was he waiting on someone? was he there to arrest her? he could go ahead and try.[break][break]

a sip of wine obscured much of the uncertainty on her face, save for bright amber eyes that continued to stare over the glass's edge, intense and unyielding. it would hit her eventually.[break][break]

[attr="class","ooc"] Grigori Sokolov [break]
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POSTED ON Nov 28, 2023 20:06:54 GMT

This awful feeling ate at Grigori for another whole minute. It built up and up and up until he couldn’t take it any longer: he would go over there and just ask her if they knew each other from somewhere. After all, she had started to stare back. Best to get it over with, in case it was just a sense of déjà vu.

He looked around the restaurant. No one gave them much attention, so he took his mug of root beer and stood up from his chair. Cautious yet determined steps took him to her table, where she watched behind a lone glass of wine. Up close, the feeling of familiarity only doubled. There was no doubt: he’d seen her before, and recently.

“Terribly sorry for bothering you,” he cut through the awkwardness with Lulu, “but… I can’t help but think I know you from somewhere. Very familiar.”

That… didn’t inspire confidence. Or even get the gears to turn. Not that they didn’t– but their activity produced no fruits of labor. A shot in the dark stood better chance than this. “Perhaps… this might be odd, but were you a part of that strange search party a while back? In the bog, during the blood moon?"

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POSTED ON Nov 30, 2023 7:18:45 GMT

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a minute was a long time to hold someone’s gaze from across a room. each second that passed, the imagination became more unhinged. by the time he rose from his table and began his approach, she was already mentally prepared to fight back.[break][break]

she watched him cross the floor, and sat her glass down. up close, there was little more recognition.[break][break]

who is he…[break][break]

and then, at the reveal, much of the tension in her shoulders faded. the frantic instincts quieted. she realized he was probably just someone as confused about that night as she’d been.[break][break]

”i was, yes.” her gaze softened a little. ”you were too. i didn't recognize you at first.”[break][break]

after another brief moment, she gestured to the seat across from her invitingly. ”would you like to join me?” so they could talk about what had, or perhaps hadn’t happened that night at the swamp.[break][break]

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POSTED ON Dec 1, 2023 5:30:15 GMT

Thank goodness, Grigori wasn’t alone on the ‘frustrating forgetfulness’ ride, as he thought he’d been. Lulu had definitely been there, alright. If he wasn’t mistaken she had done things like… uh… maybe it was just the face that seemed familiar. Rather than what she actually did, it was the appearance at all.

“If you insist,” Grigori nodded respectfully and pulled out the chair. He took a careful seat in it, as if he might leave at even the slightest notice. It felt awkward; someone had just left, and he now sat in their spot. What if she wanted to leave as well?

Silly thoughts. She had a glass still partially full of wine. The grunt relaxed, if only slightly, into the chair. “I appreciate it. Within all the other… events, that happened recently, I almost… no, It’s impossible to forget. Forgive me, for I nearly lied to your face.”

As if one could ‘forget’ it. Like one forgets manners, or basic decency– yet again, Team Rocket did strange things to one's conscious. “But, the people we saw down there– they try to make us forget. Hard to think, seeing all those things down there, the people, the horrors. And then, poof,” Grigori made an implosion-motion with his free hand, “Gone. Like they never existed to begin with.”

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POSTED ON Dec 2, 2023 21:04:44 GMT

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she took no offense. he seemed slightly uncomfortable, which made her more comfortable. she didn’t reach for her glass again yet, relaxing into her seat as he did so it might be clearer she was in no hurry.[break][break]

”hard to think? a few years ago, maybe, but now, who knows? any number of things could’ve happened. they could’ve been whisked away to another timeline, or fallen into the distortion world…”[break][break]

”or,” she offered alternatively, her tone evident that to her, this was the most likely of possibilities: ”maybe you’re onto something. maybe they never existed in the first place.”[break][break]

she took her wine in-hand again. ”maybe it was all a dream.” she sipped, wishing it was tequila.[break][break]
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POSTED ON Dec 3, 2023 3:22:06 GMT

howard slayte likes this

“While I would like to think of them as such,” Grigori started carefully, “I think they were very, very real.”

She… wasn’t serious, right? There’s no way someone held the belief that their time in that strange cave was little more than the product of a bad-night’s rest. What state of mind did you need to be in to suggest something among the lines of this? The grunt pushed that idea from his mind almost immediately-- that was a dangerous assumption. One that would kill any possibility of conversation if it rared its ugly head.

“I am friends with the man who still has the Bloodmoon-Ursaluna with the original ball,” Grigori’s mind flashed to howard slayte. “Furthermore, back at my apartment, I have several of the wanted posters that hung in the first room of that cave system, as well as a hammer that belonged to a corpse.”

His mind flashed to the dead Megalopolan, slumped in the chair with a bowl of mochi in hand. Immediately after, his mind flashed a grizzly image: that same hammer, collapsing into the skull of another Megalopolan. Awful times. He took a drink from his mug, as if that would wash the image from his mind.

“As much as I’d like to think of them as apparitions, they were very real. And they are in hiding somewhere,” he concluded. “Waiting for a time to strike. Like rats.”

Grigori wondered if they considered themselves rats within the walls, ready to come out at a moment's notice, or as cornered animals ready to kill anything and anyone that dared step one foot closer to where they clung for life.

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POSTED ON Dec 5, 2023 7:27:28 GMT

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the man with the bloodmoon ursaluna. ”howard slayte.” she realized then that she hadn’t seen him since the swamp. the ursaluna had not been her greatest interest.[break][break]

”i see… you think it couldn’t have been a dream because you kept souvenirs.” her eyes narrowed a little with a turn of her chin, indicating she doubted his logic.[break][break]

”i bet you someone in this room has a paradox pokémon on their belt from the interdream zone. something they shouldn’t have, but they do, because everyone does now.” except for her, of course. the ones she studied stayed in rocket’s laboratories, handled with extreme caution and isolation.[break][break]

”it’s a problem that dreams can simply become part of our reality. we’re in a time when we can’t know what is alien and what is of our own imagination, and that is extremely dangerous.”[break][break]

she paused, watching and trying to gauge if she’d lost him completely yet or not.[break][break]

”the spaceship wasn’t real. didn’t some of the tentacles disappear, too, in the same way?”[break][break]
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POSTED ON Dec 7, 2023 4:00:49 GMT

“Unfortunately, yes,” Grigori said with a sigh. “The spaceship did, in fact, disappear into nothingness. Alongside the tentacles that inhibited a select few of the people there.”

There wasn’t any clever rebuttal for this: those were lost to space, time, or a mix of them. As to how, or why, he couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Yet everyone else there had experienced the same trip and voyage aboard it.

And the tentacles… surely those afflicted wanted to forget it just as much as their attacked victims.

“But,” he raised a finger, “what you call ‘souvenirs’, many others would call hard evidence. Furthermore, there were many people there alongside us—witnesses to the events that unfurled. Even the strangers, as odd as they disappeared, had a physical presence before we even ventured into the cave system. Remember their ambush?”

Evidence upon evidence. Much like the theory of gravity, they could not physically prove it to be undeniably, one-hundred-percent true. Such is the nature of the science behind it. But there was simply too much evidence of its effects to deny it as a truth. Anyone who did such might be labeled as misguided at best.

“And the Three Day War as well… they’re a well-known quantity,” Grigori finished. “For all of this to be categorized underneath the label of a dream seems… what’s the word for it…”

“Dismissive?”

Grigori shook his head and took a quick sip of root beer. “I apologize if any of my words offend. It is not my intention. Maybe I’m… misunderstanding your argument here. Could you elaborate on your argument about dreams and reality? And how the events in the caves fall into that?”

Being kind felt harder and harder these days. It was hard to tell where one was being assertive and one was being unnecessarily aggressive. Maybe he needed to read that book on his shelf again...

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POSTED ON Dec 9, 2023 4:04:30 GMT

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”no offense taken,” she assured. ”and i certainly don’t mean to come off as dismissive about what occurred that night. actually, i find it very concerning.”[break][break]

the server waiting on her stole a glance at the serious look on her face before disappearing into the kitchen for several minutes longer.[break][break]

”with all that we have seen come out of the interdream zone; all that we understand about it, and the limitlessness of the collective imagination, who is to say there could not also come from it strange versions of our enemies, or parasitic monstrocities like we witnessed?” the strange, fleshy chains. she’d had one growing out of her head, though it had disappeared like the spaceship.[break][break]

”real megalopolans are hiding somewhere in hoenn, indeed, but that cave was full of tera crystals. the interdream zone was involved in our experience in some way. though i can’t say for sure to what extent, i do believe it is possible that those megalopolans and their pokemon simply disappeared, because, perhaps, they were not fully of our reality to begin with.”[break][break]

she shrugged. maybe they were still around, maybe they weren’t. if they had disappeared, it was still bad, because it meant that such terrible and outlandish scenarios could and would befall them at random.[break][break]

”as far as your witnesses go, i’m not sure what that proves. things from the interdream zone can be witnessed and experienced by multiple people at once.”[break][break]

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POSTED ON Dec 14, 2023 0:34:40 GMT

So she was concerned that the Megalopolans were naught more than a dream? A thing, an antagonistic force that sprung from the hearts and minds of those present? It sounded possible… but something bothered Grigori about the whole thing. Was it too convenient?

“But these aren’t some third-party eyewitnesses,” The grunt said. “It’s me. It’s you. We saw Megalopolans outside the cave system. The enraged bear was outside as well. I seriously don’t believe that those forces are separate from those found within the cave system either.”

Dreams being their reality? Who had dreamed up such a massive plot alone? No way it was one or two people alone that conjured up those forces, in such a high number, and also had a fascination with both interdimensional travel AND flying ships.

Or perhaps they did. There was no way for him to retroactively know such information. No one could, lest they gathered and did a collective survey to nail down the origin of each point during their time to a specific person. Maybe she was right: there was no way to know for certain.

But then… “I’m not sure what else to say.”

“Not to disrespect you, but your theory leaves a lot of uncertainties and leaves me feeling as if the point is to put a large question mark on the whole affair,” he said. At that point, what was there even to discuss? Grigori loved theory, and this theory sounded interesting. However, this instance put a foul taste in his mouth.

Like it was being used to cloud the water, rather than shine a light through the depths.

“Perhaps,” Grigori sighed, “let me ask you a question: If your theory is correct, what do you propose we do to address the problem? I am enjoying this conversation, yet I do not see how this helps the current predicament presented.”

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POSTED ON Dec 17, 2023 7:17:40 GMT

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it seemed she wasn’t getting through. the paradox pokemon weren’t evidence enough for some people. how could they not realize the danger they were in?[break][break]

”i’d argue to question is better than to ignore the many possibilities and assume we know what happened. there were potentially multiple volatile energies at play that we still know very little about.”[break][break]

she answered, ”if my theory is correct–and i’m only saying it’s a possibility–then the only way to solve the problem is to get rid of the tera crystal,altogether. blast it far, far back into space.” which would never happen. too many people had tera orbs–herself included. they used the shards. the rks machine, the dream machine: both fitted with them, essential to their mysterious functions.[break][break]

people of the world would never relinquish their grip on such power, even if it would surely mean the end of all things, and even if they did, it still wouldn’t matter because it had already spread like a weed all on its own.[break][break]

” there only seems to be more and more of it, unfortunately, as though it’s eating away at the world beneath our feet…”[break][break]

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POSTED ON Dec 18, 2023 1:59:56 GMT

BARNABY FINCH likes this

“I wholeheartedly agree with your mentality to question,” Grigori cradled his mug with both hands, “But to do it for its own sake is where I begin to question.”

Lulu even said it herself: the powers at play that night were well beyond their grasp at the moment. By the time it wasn’t, it might already be too late. But if the interdream mist, and their own thoughts, were NOT the culprits… then they didn’t lose anything by learning about it. They had the manpower to explore both possibilities, and they should likely learn about the strange mist rather than pretend it wasn’t there.

“Perhaps... I can concede a point. Perhaps it doesn’t truly matter which is the answer, and we should simply explore both avenues as they are the one definite truth. Like the tera crystals you mention,” he said. “But… I doubt your idea alone will solve the issue.”

Did the tera crystals spawn the mist, or did the mist bring forth the crystals? A conundrum that would cause a great amount of stress for the scientists. After all, it did matter which spawned what: removing the crystals, only to find out that the mist is the culprit, would surely bring despair to those involved in the research.

"Which do you think came first: the egg? Or the Pokémon that laid it? If you remove the Pokémon, then the egg hatches and continues the cycle. Likewise: removal of the eggs do not stop the production of more. And to remove both is a monumental task..."

"A pessimist would likely call it impossible to achieve," Grigori sipped from his mug, eyes firmly on the bubbles that formed on the surface of the dark brown liquid. His thoughts wandered to a different conversation, one with BARNABY FINCH . One he wanted to forget, but stuck in the back of his mind. "Can we even hope to stop the cycle when those in power benefit from its continuation, even if not directly?"

The one thing about mutual destruction that the grunt hated the most: it was always those in the crossfire that suffered the most.

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POSTED ON Dec 26, 2023 17:19:58 GMT

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knowing what had happened would not solve the whole puzzle, surely, but it would be a piece of the truth, and it was only truth that could draw the map to their salvation in a world increasingly illusory.[break][break]

”i’d say it is likely impossible,” she shared, about the tera crystal, pessimist as she was, perhaps. then again, maybe it would simply disappear like the crystablooms had.[break][beeak]

she turned her head then a little at his intriguing choice of words near the end.[break][break]

”who do you mean exactly, by ‘those in power’?” she wondered if he meant the dark triad, but nisa holo had once tried to stop the crystal from reaching hoenn. lulu knew, as part of the lot guilty for her failure.[break][break]

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