It was Gwen's usual biweekly visit to the Dragon Sanctuary, run by the most dragon friendly person she could meet, freya morningstar! The ranger was looking like her usual self, minus the large glasses that had been broken off due to being attacked by birds not but a week ago. It was her first time wearing contacts, and it was a process to get used to...

She made her way to the entrance and opened the door to see the backside of another woman with blonde hair, and who was busy cutting the steaks for some of the dragon-types here. The exact ones, mainly the aggressive types. A few of the Salamance were one of the more ravenous eaters around here, followed by the Garchomp.

Even the Gabite by her side was staring at the cut meat in front of them.

"I figured." Gwendolyn said while standing behind Ana. She walked to her side while her eyes went to the work at hand. "need a hand? I was just about to get to work on my duties here."

She had leaned back over into the large industrial freezer to continue sorting meat when a small figure popped up next to her. She craned her neck and blinked owlishly, brow still smeared with blood.

“Huh?” Her voice echoed around the insulated chamber. “You work here too?” No underlying suspicion in her words, just a general, genuine confusion.

”Uh, yeah?” Gwendolyn sat behind Ana, her expression raised into a questionable glance. ”I don't think it's too unusual for somebody like me to work here.”

The Gabite by the ginger haired woman followed Ana as she moved into the freezer. His snout inched closer and closer to some of the slices of meat, pushing to see how close he could get before he was caught.

”Gishath!”

He let out a frustrated hiss, growling at Gwen before falling back in line with her. She gave him a critical eye before turning back with the blonde in front of her.

”I met Freya when I came to her office on how to catch a Garchomp. I have a friend in the rangers and she had just gotten hurt by Rocket. Of course, she knew I was out of my League and showed me out, but I begged her and she took me here. Gave me a chance to learn the ropes with dragon-types. So every couple of days, I come by and help out.”

She stuck her hand out to the other woman.

”I'm Gwen, by the way.”

“No, I--,” she went to stand up and cracked her head on the freezer top, “bitches and gravy, that hurt!”

She picked a frozen package of poultry cuts and held it to her now-aching head, tossing an icy piece towards the Gabite.

“I just meant, like, I didn’t know she had other employees. But it makes sense.”

She wipes frozen viscera and ice crystals off on her shirt and shakes Gwen's hand with her cold, reddened fingers.

“You can call me Ana. There’s a couple more crates out back with smaller things if you wanna lug some bags in?” They went through a country’s worth of Rattata, it seemed.

”Hey, watch your-”

The loud thump was what interrupted Gwendolyn's warning, as the Ranger cadet winced to herself. The poor worker had suffered a pretty nasty bump, but the little self censorship had elicited a smirk from the ginger.

”Bitches and gravy? You sound like my Mom when she's trying to avoid cursing in front of me.”

Gishath accepted the icy piece of chicken from Ana with open claws. Although when he opened his mouth, the lack of teeth was noticeable in full. He gnawed on the frozen pieces as best he could before spitting it out and then looking to Gwen.

Always the fussy one, that was her partner.

”You could have waited for me to cut it for you.”

She teased him and walked over to the frozen cutlet with her pocket knife and began to cut it up into smaller morsels. The other woman introduced herself as their hands met with one another into a firm shake.

”Nice to meet you, Ana. And I'd love to.”

Gwen stood up and walked back outside while her Gabite stayed to feast on the pieces of chicken. Even without teeth, every bit slid down his throat in quick succession. Once finished, he began to look up at Ana in the hopes of getting more.

Gwen came back a minute later with stacked boxes of Ratata, hopefully all dead. The containers were marked in red marker about their contexts, alongside a few other precautions.

”So employee, huh? You must love work every day to work in a place with dragons.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, icing the Swanna egg now popping up on her scalp, “you know how these things go. Sometimes you just roll a swear along the ground and then follow behind it.”

She turned, leaning back against the now closed freezer to look out over the back room proper, raising one eyebrow at the rejected offering. “Why’s your Gabite got no teeth?”

Gwen wasted no time getting to work. With a booted toe, she stretched out her leg and tapped it against another industrial freezer marked rodents.

“I don’t work here every day. I got my own junk shop building motorcycles and stuff. But, yeah, the dragons are pretty neat.” She exhaled, and turned to open her freezer and drop the frozen cutlet back in. “What about you? This your 9 to 5?”

The topic of Gishath's missing teeth had caused Gwendolyn to pause, her elated expression faltering for a moment. The reminder of one of the worst days of her life. That day when that mysterious crystalized demon (known as Zev Harcourt ) had given her the hardest reality check she had ever had. The hand clutching the box tightened in response while the ranger exhaled. She tried to keep herself calm, but emotions that had been in a period of unrest were bubbling up once more.

"We were investigating a noise disturbance one day, in Lilycove. Somebody had heard something going on and we broke inside to see what was happening. Nothing happened at first, but then we saw a man made out of black crystal who attacked us. He was ready to kill me, but Gishath launched to bite him and..."

Silence. Gwen didn't want to think about it any. She turned away to look at the many interesting boxes of dead rodents. They wouldn't judge her for that moment of helplessness. The long run back to the sanctuary and begging freya morningstar freya morningstar in tears was a time in her life she'd never want to revisit.

"We ran out and I came straight here after, holding him and wondering how I would ever explain it to Freya. She entrusted him to me to train and grow, and I let her down like that."

A beat.

"That's why I work here, to thank her for everything she's done to me. I'm just some nobody to the Rangers, but I can give back to the woman who gave me the first steps to finding myself."

Another beat. It took her a moment before Gwen spun back around with a pained but playful look.

"That's what I hope people think, anyway. It sounds cooler that way. I'm just some fuck up trying to make the world a better place."

She cocked her head to the side and raised one eyebrow incrementally. Gwen was warring with something, she could tell. She’d been nothing but smooth vibes and bouncing movement but then she snagged, like a snare in a beach ball. She’d messed around in her own head enough to know what that looked like.

“Sokay, sorry. I didn’t know it was, like, deep.”

But as Gwen continued, she saw some of herself in the girl. Her last sentence had her snorting with quiet laughter. “Girl, ain’t we all?”

In many ways Gwen was stronger than she ever would be. She'd gone in and smoothed out those snares, trimmed the edges, dumped 29 whole years' worth of memories down the garbage disposal. Her past was a vacant black hole, a void so empty it was incapable of staring back.

“Besides. You ever been bitten by a toothless animal? Shit still hurts like hell.”

Gwen didn't really think of herself as a survivor. Usually that was given to people who had managed to live through some of the worst things a human being could go through. To her, it was just a day, like any other. Though maybe some people would have thought of it. She grinned wider at Ana's poke and found some humor in her little admission.

"I guess so, heh. Sometimes if I need to force Gishath into the bath, he'll get snappy. For somebody missing teeth, it's like getting a bear trap locked down on your hand."

The Gabite in question nodded his tiny head, as if to rub it more into Gwen's face about his antics when at home. The ginger rolled her eyes and continued to scratch his dry, scaley head.

"Before the Ranger stuff, I was horrible with Pokemon. Most of my first catches were because I caught them by accident. That and birds. They, uh, aren't my biggest fans since I had to move their nests when they were blocking my wired connection to the satellite back home."

She also recognized the next expression on Gwen’s face, the bit where you don’t think of yourself as anything special. Because people out there have it worse than you? Or you’re, like, supposed to be stronger than average? She scrubbed a hand across her face. freya morningstar sure does attract these types, huh.

“Look, Hoenn’s a cesspit for cosmic destruction and otherworldly violence. We’re all survivors, all of us. Every single fucking carbon based lifeform still breathing on this shitstain of a region.”

She recognized it because she’d coached Freya through these moments a couple of times.

“If it helps any, I found my first Pokemon asleep in a claw machine at a grocery store,” she said, then paused. The light went out of her eyes for a beat, frozen like a toy with a dead battery. Slowly, she reached her hand up to press against her forehead, closing her eyes.

She seemed to reboot.

“Huh. Did I… did I mean to leave that part in?”

"Yeah, I guess that's true." Gwendolyn pursed her lips together and leaned back on the stack of boxes. Ana had a way with words, and she wasn't entirely sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. She didn't know whether or not to really believe it in her heart, but maybe things could change. "For some reason, it's like every couple of months, there's a new world ruining thing that's about to kill us all. What a weird world."

One funny story later and then suddenly, Ana just sort of...froze up? Gwen remained quiet for a minute, assuming that she was thinking in her head or something. But the pause became a little bit too awkward for her tastes and she intervened.

"Uh, Ana? You okay? Hello?"

Gwen moved to try and shake her a bit until she came back to a while later, in genuine confusion. Did she have amnesia or something? It was pretty personal, and she didn't want to intrude any more than she already had, so she decided not to ask.

"Funny, my first pokemon was a Goomy that snuck into my house while I was in my NEET phase and got stuck in an old soda cup."

She blinked rapidly, refocusing in on the here, and now. She gave Gwen a small smile and flashed her a thumbs up. “Yeah, I’m good. Just zoning out, sorry.”

Heading back into the main lobby she reached for a clipboard and began searching down the paper pinned to it, marking off the items she’d already unpacked and making sure they’d received the proper quantities.

“Not the Goomy in the soda cup,” she said, with a quiet laugh. “You’ve always been a scale-head, then, huh?” A beat. “Although I guess Goomy don’t have scales.”

Gwen and Gishath tailed Ana as they moved onto the Main Lobby area. That zone out was pretty worrying. Was she trying to hide that fact that she just had a blue screen of death moment for an alarming amount of time? She continued to shadow her just in case this would evolve into a worse problem than they had already seen.

She did find some humor in how Gwen came to find her Goomy, and she couldn't blame her. It was as funny as it was kind of pathetic. If it hadn't been for Robin moving to join the Rangers, she probably would have been in that same little NEET hole that was her parents' house. Gwen had always wondered what her life would have been like if she didn't go with her best friend away from their home region.

"Kinda. I was lost and didn't know what I should do Pokemon wise before this bad boy came out."

Gwen smiled as she reached into her bag and pulled the book that gave her guidance in every regard: Dragonology: A Compendium of Dragon-Type Pokémon She flashed it to Ana with a smirk.

"I'm a huge dragon-type buff now. I've wanted to learn about dragons all the time and here I am. It's been a pretty wild ride so far. What drew you to working here? Was it better than a 9-to-5 or was it something else?"