Oscar had resolved to pull himself further and further from working with people outside of Rocket. He used to be very open to collaboration with civilians--but eventually walking on eggshells to hide his true allegiance had become too tiresome. howard slayte had approached Oscar to work with someone named june sleigh; if the request had not come from Howard, Oscar would have said no.

Oscar was at the very least glad that June was unlikely to blow his cover. Even so, he was wary of this outsider. Howard may trust her, but Oscar had been burned too many times. He could not help but be cautious.

Still, he remained affable as to not insult their guest. The two were scavenging through a makeshift junkyard that had formed just outside of Petalburg. They had to put all of the dead Genesect somewhere. You can not just bury them, these shells had plenty of useful parts that could be recycled. And that was what they were doing, robbing the graves of these poor hapless robots. If they had had souls, they would be weeping.

Oscar used his arm to push sweat off of his brow, looking up as June opened a dialogue. He chuckled as he slammed a hammer of his own against a carapace.

"I think we stopped counting after three hundred. The ones the Kanto branch had brought over were--designed to be disposable." Oscar smashed open another Genesect shell, amused by how comparatively harder it would be to break the shell of a 'true Genesect'.

"Mass-produced and made to die--so there's a lot is what I'm saying."

Three hundred?! Here? That was…

“Yea sounds about right,” June sighed. Did this get her into triple overtime? It better. Howard better not get in the way of her fat as fuck paycheck. She needed at least one elusive six-digit paper slip before she bailed ship.

“Make cars the same way nowadays,” she said. “Granted, that’s cause the physics of it works better for the people inside. But still, kinda sucks when you bump into a light pole and your front bumper falls off.”

The metal death traps of the past might’ve looked ‘cooler’ yea, but they also increased your odds of death from a car crash by a few hundred percents. And yet people still insisted the good ol’ days were better. Easier to replace a bumper than a person.

“Kinda seems… bad for these things though,” her throbbing feet carried her over to the next corpse. This one looked to have a little life left; its eyes flickered like a dim light at a country-side gas station. “Don’t you think you’d want something a little more hardy? Not like you carry a family of four on these bad boys.”

"They don't actually make those, right?” She whipped her head around and gave him the most curious of looks. All her time in life taught her was that anything was possible if people desired it enough. And some idiot had to desire the fastest ride to the local Burger Kingler imaginable.

---

oscar clayton

Oscar tilted his head, chuckling with restrained amusement at the topic of cars. He recalled his effort to build electric cars with the Silph company, and the whole enterprise falling through due to Hoenn's very restrictive safety standards. "With all of the hoops you need to get through to manufacture cars, you would think they would last a little longer when--misused."

Oscar smashed another Genesect, ripping out some of the parts that could be reused later on. As June expressed sympathy for these cannon fodder drones, Oscar would express the opposite. "They're lifeless machines, produced in a factory to meet a quota. Their only purpose is to cause as much destruction as possible before they're inevitably blown to bits."

His words were almost spiteful, making Oscar's opinion of Kanto's drones very clear. Oscar abruptly came up behind June, smashing his hammer into the barely living drone. "They have no mind beyond their programming. As lifeless as the metal that encapsulates them." Oscar walked away to allow June the 'honor' of gutting the no deceased robot. As Oscar looked for more scrap, he would go into fuller detail about the differences between the drones and 'true' Genesect.

"In contrast, the Hoenn branch has taken great care to forge our Genesect with intelligence. The Hoenn genesect can think, adapt, and even develop personalities under the right conditions. Their armor is much harder to break, and their combat capabilities far surpass that of the drones." Oscar paused to slam his hammer into yet another drone. "Yet they are much more difficult to make. And there is the main contrast for you: quality over quantity. You can make an army with the drones, but they will have half of the effectiveness of the more laborious Genesect units."

Oscar looked back toward June, "What's your take on that? Which seems like a better investment?"

june sleigh