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God, this sucked.
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Rhys rested his chin on his fist, staring out the window as the SUV trundled away from Petalburg, jostling over the dirt road. His positioning resulted in him inadvertently punching himself in the chin as the vehicle shook and juddered, and he grumbled, lowering his arm and instead crossing them in front of his chest petulantly as he watched the trees slide by.
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He didn't understand the obsession with secrecy - the car had valid plates, so the odds of them getting pulled over on the main roads en route to Lilycove would be as negligible as any other vehicle, provided the driver could...drive. Then again, if he was going to complain, he didn't understand why he was here in the first place.
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Well, he did, he supposed, because when Naomi Sato told him to do something, he did it, no matter the time it took away from his own research. Still, this mission hadn't even remotely been in his wheelhouse - a pair of grunts, currently occupying the front seats of the vehicle, were part of a smuggling chain funneling illicit pokemon across Hoenn, and his boss needed them for her experiments. His job had been to validate the health and condition of the subjects, and having done that, he was left to twiddle his thumbs in the back seat like a kid, by himself, on the interminably circuitous drive to their destination.
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He debated starting a rousing round of 'Are We There Yet', but reasoned that irritating the ones responsible for commuting them to the checkpoint would only delay their progress, so he settled for a sigh and resumed staring out the window.
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The SUV made a turn in the dirt road, juddering once more, and Rhys had a split second to hear the tires trundling over not dirt but metal before the world erupted around him.
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The mine was enough to devastate the front half of the SUV entirely, shards of glass and metal, licks of flame, and a powerful concussive force ripping through the point of impact. The vehicle flipped off the road, tumbling over and over to come to rest at the bottom of the embankment off the side of the path.
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Rhys's eardrums immediately burst, and a pervasive ringing was all he could hear as he tumbled, his seat belt the only thing keeping him from slamming into the roof or doors of his position at the back. Something lacerated him, he couldn't tell what, but when the vehicle came to a final stop in the matter of a few seconds, he couldn't orient himself.
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Fighting to loosen his seatbelt, he finally unbuckled the thing and clambered toward the front of the vehicle, reaching blindly for his partners. Both the driver and the front passenger lay still, unmoving, with far too much blood and black ash painting their surroundings. The floorboard of the SUV was gone, and the mechanics mangled beyond that - they'd taken the brunt of the explosion directly over the IED.
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What the fuck was he supposed to do? He tried to gather his wits. If this was an attack and he got out of the vehicle, he'd be a sitting duck for anyone observing. If he didn't get out, and there was a fire - which he couldn't even verify yet - he'd be no better off than the other two. Fumbling for his phone, he fired off a distress signal and sank low. He turned his head, looking through the shattered windows of the vehicle to determine whether anyone was, in fact, watching the attack.

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Rhys ducked as soon as he saw the eyepatch, and couldn't say one way or the other whether the sudden, inexorable wash of exhaustion that hit him was the result of a potential concussion or the fact he'd run into this asshole yet again. He was a doctor, not a fighter, and he'd thought a knife and a couple of canny pokemon on the other's repertoire were quite difficult enough to deal with. Now he had bombs?
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As Tavish and his Farfetch'd approached, Rhys gave a mental curse, his hand instinctively going to his hip for a satchel that...wasn't there. White-hot fear darted through him as he glanced to the backseat and saw the bundle lying on the floorboard. Great. Die now or die later, he thought bitterly.
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One was as good as the other, so he stretched his arm around the front passenger seat slowly and quietly, grasping and flexing his fingers until he caught the strap of his satchel. Seizing it, he jerked it back and tore open the flap, digging until he produced a miniaturized Ultra Ball.
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By the time Sir waddled to the window and made his way through it, he'd encounter a faint flash of pink energy and the whiff of displaced air, barely disturbed in the nick of time. Rhys and his Alakazam reappeared from the TELEPORT at the road proper, overlooking the wreckage of the car and Tavish himself, next to the open trunk.
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"Get him, Perry," Rhys growled, haggard and wounded from the encounter yet managing - so far - to hold himself up on his own two feet. He held out his Tera Orb, and a wave of shimmering energy engulfed the Alakazam, who emerged from it dotted in brightly-glowing pink crystalline growths.
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The pokemon hovered forward onto the embankment, and with a raise of his spoons, unleashed a PSYCHIC assault on the vehicle itself, waves of force distorting the air around it with no thought of man or bird being caught in its radius.

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