Blue screens illuminate the blue of her eyes—flat in their intensity, focused on the task at hand—until a certain agent causes her to glance up.[break][break]

She laughs, and shakes his hand. “Mr. Graves. Seeing as I’m back, does this mean round two? Arceus knows I’ve not met anyone else dorky enough to train their pokemon with chess terms.”[break][break]

But like any good pair of professionals, they slide between work and play with chilling ease.[break][break]

“Half a year ago, I left some survey equipment at an outpost. I have the coordinates.”[break][break]

She flashes him some numbers on her PDA, not overly concerned if he could read it in time or not. “I just need to go back down there and make sure they didn't pick up on anything world-ending. And you are to be my most handsome escort, naturally.”[break][break]

By her side is a simple klefki: looped around it are a series of color-coded microchips, and it emits a crisp, metallic shudder at regular intervals in the deep sea dark.

[attr="class","bottom"]Gunner Graves [break]
[attr="class","pkspr pkmn-ditto"]

“They’ll be there,” she insists with all the certainty of a soccer mom picking up her littles from practice.[break][break]

With a low-gravity hop she nears next to Gunner and the two are encased in the psychic field. In that pink glass elevator do they descend, passing by phosphorescent plants that only bloom when unseen and sediment that forms fingers wherever they draw near. All the while her klefki continues to chime, and her abstractors continue to read the return data.[break][break]

A cold, rotten wind weeps out of the dark eye they arrive at. Yujin checks the coordinates against the cave with a frown. “It’s correct, but this smell is…”[break][break]

“Ah-Yu.” The voice cracks because at the time, the boy who called her that had only just reached puberty.[break][break]

The marine snow begins falling around them soon after.[break][break]

Yujin exhales with a forlorn smile, letting a little bit of her life leave her in exchange for peace. Off the edge of the precipice and far below she sees them: modest little houses with smoking chimneys, as if a peaceful village lay half-buried in the flurries of a snowy pass.[break][break]

“I always did wonder. Do we see the same things?”[break][break]

---

[break]

{29 hear the deep calling your name, attempting to bring you deeper into an endless abyss.}

[attr="class","bottom"]Gunner Graves [break]
[attr="class","pkspr pkmn-ditto"]

With a song of fire and ice haunting their footsteps, they proceed further into the damp and downhearted gloom. [break][break]

Yujin couldn’t fail to notice her companion’s unease—all the hairs on his body standing at attention like soldiers preparing for review. Not the sleepy snows, then. He usually seemed so put together, or at least like he was holding his pieces together, but really he was just a man after all.[break][break]

And with his outburst she nearly cracks her neck as she turns towards him.[break][break]

“...Ai, don’t scare me! I thought you were about to die or something.”[break][break]

The mucous membranes, the rhythmic slosh of some contained lake surging and receding, the translucent barriers that barely conceal a sanguine slipstream: yes, many things were the body horror she remembered here.[break][break]

The only thing left was for someone to become an ultra beast’s marionette.[break][break]

At that moment, her foot thuds against something tough and causes her to stumble. Shining a flashlight towards the ground, she finds the black poles of the theodolite she left behind; and around it, an enormous bed of slick, putrid-smelling eggs.[break][break]

---

[break]

{21 stumble upon a thick, sloppy clutch of eggs in realm or The Quaestor Lucis, but do not take them.}

[attr="class","bottom"]Gunner Graves [break]
[attr="class","pkspr pkmn-ditto"]

No sooner did the warning come do the nearby eggs titter and faintly crack.[break][break]

"..."[break][break]

A peal of light follows Tom's PROTECT. Suddenly the cave fills with the massive figure of GD-0623, which can only kneel and hunch before the craggy ceiling. [break][break]

Quickly and deliberately, Yujin retrieves the nearby sensitive equipment regardless of how Gunner is faring up ahead. When she is done she gives the golurk a nod.[break][break]

Not having space to do much else, the creature slams one hand down upon the ground in a resplendent EARTHQUAKE. The eggs splatter and pop, and the embryos within die instantly in their many stages of development.[break][break]

The passage shudders with the warble of enraged and pained Nihilego. They appear from the dim, brandishing their tentacles with a VENOSHOCK.[break][break]

---

[break]

{26 experience a clutch of ultra beast eggs hatching and the horrific newborn forms of nihilego or poipole emerging. protective parent ultra beasts will mercilessly protect them.}

[attr="class","bottom"]Gunner Graves [break]
[attr="class","pkspr pkmn-ditto"]

The passageway rumbles with detritus and technicolor. Like a little appendix, it threatens to swell and burst from all the shit being thrown around in it.[break][break]

“Almost.”[break][break]

Everything she needs is deftly condensed and thrown into her bizarrely spacious briefcase—and anything that doesn’t fit is slung over her back in the vein of a doomsday prepper.[break][break]

Pinned under one of her golurk’s fingers is a nihilego with a small shard of metal lodged into it: the mark of their old battle. It, and then her golurk, vanish in a flash as the rest of the cave collapses and leaves the duo outside.[break][break]

Yujin inhales the resulting dust with a smile. “Ahhh~ Well, I think we did a tremendous job here. [break][break]

Great work as always, Mr. Graves.”
[break][break]

---

[break]
special hunt