At places along the boardwalk, the weathered wood dipped, bowed, or slanted at angles into the sand, such that the two were blurred together; or, really, like the beach was a trillion tiny granular mouths, slowly consuming the places where humanity tried to array some order.

The strange woman’s face was still somewhat pained as they traveled up and down. She balked a little, struggling with the question-- like anyone would when a weird stranger came up to you and asked why you were being so weird-- and her gaze jumped away to look at the pale sand.

“...sure,” she said, not really believing, but also, she was a weird stranger asking weird people weird questions. Obviously no one was going to be totally honest with her. The woman wasn’t dying, and that was, like, the most important part, right? “Ohh, yeah, I’m toasty under here. But I’m, uh. Sensitive to-- to the sun, so.” She cleared her throat and leaned back against boardwalk railing.

Look at both of them, badly keeping secrets. It was heartening to know she wasn’t the only trainwreck out here trying to vibe in the real world.

She spotted a little lavender cap sprouting out of some beach grass and knelt to investigate.

“But I needed some fresh air,” she said, voice wry, letting this other woman know she knew. Which, she did and she didn’t. She could tell when people were weird and hiding things because she was weird and hiding things, but obviously, she didn’t know specifics.

“You can call me Ana. What’s your name?” she asked, tapping a Pokeball to the Morelull before it could jump up and run away.

The Roselia was small, still undersized this early in the spring. It looked up from its little green patch, blinking sleepily, as Lisbet shoves her nose into it.

“Good eye, babes,” she cheers, flashing a thumbs up as she reaches for a Pokeball to zap the the thing with, her Gengar sneezing clouds of pink and blue pollen. “Another one for the ol’ dex.”

Although if she knew anything about the Budew line there was a possibility her Roserade might eviscerate the poor thing.

She hadn’t wanted to say that bit. Hadn’t wanted to admit to Freya that she imagined Lyune knew the saddle, the brace, were necessary. Because… because then that would be like pointing out that he had to rely on Freya for the simplest of (dragon) things. Which would mean she was a crutch. Which would mean he could resent her.

“You don’t tell me about a lot of stuff,” she pointed out, sitting across from Freya and hoisting a little Applin into her lap.

She listens as Freya talked, stilling.

“That was how it started, you know,” she admits, looking out across the expanse of land, stretching as far as memory, “I remember that much. I kept that. An intense feeling of… being hollow. Like dreaming about my childhood home, a happier time, a place I couldn’t go back to. I couldn’t escape it. No matter where I turned, nothing was right. And I’d had this idea… before, I think. I’d had to of, because it seemed remarkably simple at the time. Just go in and--,” she waves her fingers, “--clear it out. But once that was gone, it felt so much better, so I did a little more, and a little more.”

She leans back on her palms, sighing.

“I don’t regret it, at all. I like what I am now. I don’t feel so much like such a strange shape from trying to fit in. And I know you’re going to say no, but I can help with it. If it ever… gets to be too much.” She holds up a hand. “And before you say something like 'it’s already too much' I think you need to know that your too much and a normal person’s too much are astronomically different because of how strong you are.”

The beach, as a rule, was not her favorite place.

For someone born and raised (allegedly) in a tropical environment, she hated the heat, which meant that, 50% of the time, the beach was literal hell. She couldn’t wear shorts or t-shirts with her metal pieces and surgery scars-- too many questions. And sand, ugh, sand was the worst. It always got into the little seams in her equipment, gumming up the servos, making things catch.

She couldn’t really feel pain in her left arm but she definitely could feel where it snagged and ground.

Unlike the majority of the beach-goers, she was wrapped in multiple layers: hiking boots and tall socks that came up to her knees, long-sleeve underarmor, regular shirt, sweatshirt, and gloves, and neck bandana. The only skin showing was the pale swath from mid-thigh to knee. The scars there were fairly minimal, and could probably be written off as just generalized Hoenn-related bullshit.

She was happy to pass through on her way to meet her dark-alley parts guy when she bumped into someone, hard, interrupting their gossip. She exchanged glares with them and followed the line of sight of their party to the poor soul they were talking about.

And poor soul, indeed. She wasn’t good at people but she knew how to clock when someone was having a Bad Time, courtesy of all her own Bad Times.

So she stepped up to the woman and raised a gloved hand in greeting.

“Hi,” she said, “um, don’t take this the wrong way, but… are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” she says, imagining it. Imagining Freya knee-deep in dragon guts, Lyune broken in multiple pieces, the world ending around them.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember and conjured nothing but blank, cool space. Perfect.

“I don’t blame him. For hating it, I mean. Ah, that sounds bad.” She puts a hand on her hip, brushes fingertips over a curious Flapple, smiling. “What I mean is I don’t know if dragons grasp the necessity for mobility aids.”

He’s lived centuries in that body.

“I know that’s normal for them but… I can’t imagine wanting to live that long.”

She pauses to count the Flapple and the Applin clambering around on the ground, smiling warmly at the back of Freya’s head.

“I did it with my arm! It’s not that hard. Everyone is so attached to their bodies. They’re comfortable and they think they’re, like, super-permanent. But they’re not… they’re just not so good at changing. Imagine if we could, though. Swap pieces like parts of a machine.”

She clocks Freya’s hand hovering over her abdomen. She doesn’t know everything about Freya’s life, her past, but she does know the woman is complicated. Dollars to donuts there’s lingering trauma there.

She doesn’t have those same mental hangups. She doesn’t remember her trauma. She did that shit on purpose, for this exact reason.

“I…” could probably make you a new one, she wants to say, but stops, because, again, hang ups and trauma. But she had just pulled roughly two-hundred grams of beautiful (if she did say so herself) human material out of herself, and it was, at present, chilling and killing at home in deep cryo. So what she says instead is, “I’m hanging on to them. For reference.”

Freya points out there are people who do this, professionally, for a living, in sterile environments with sterile equipment.

“Yeah, but, they won’t do a hysterectomy on a 30 year old healthy woman. I’d have to jump through so many goddamn hoops. And then, you know, they start asking questions, like, why’s your arm metal, Ana? And where’s your gallbladder, Ana? Or why’s your social security number linked up to a dead girl, Ana? And it just…” she waves a hand like swishing away a bad smell. “Not worth it. Easier to do at home. I’ll heal up, don’t worry. I’m tough.”

Watching Freya rapidly switching things around on her schedule does make her frown. This is what she had been trying to avoid. She glares at Tereizi, who grins and licks her lips.

What she wouldn’t give for a body that didn’t ooze when it was poked full of holes.

“Yeah, I can. In the future. Though my leg will be significantly easier.” She waggles her right robot toes in her boot. “Clean cut and then the rest of it is just time for the mechanical nervous servos to kick in. Anyway.”

Oh. She didn’t know… she didn’t know Lyune was hurt. Incomplete. Her head starts spinning with visions of mechanical wings. It would be relatively simple-- easier than an arm, there’s no grabbing to do, just flexion. Thin metal mesh, ball-joints, one quick cut down the length of the body… maybe some cool LEDs…

She blinks furiously.

“How’d he get hurt?”

The Pyroar passes without her even noticing. Big cats will do that. It was kinda creepy, sometimes.

She does clock the way the birds and bugs go silent. “Hm. Prolly a cat, huh?”

Lisbet looks around with worried eyes.

A body has to have hobbies, especially when your latest attempt at building a functional mechanical respiratory system blows up in your face. Literally. She’s got the burn marks to prove it.

She scrolls through her ‘dex with one finger, traipsing through the tall grass like a baby trainer. It would have been nostalgic if she’d remembered anything past the last six months.

Her Gengar bounces along beside her, stopping now and then to smell the flowers.

Alopex flicks the tip of one tail in such away that alerts her trainer to approaching presence. Moments later, his voice curls up over her shoulder.

She holds in a sigh. She’s wearing shorts and a crewneck, tennis shoe on one foot, the other one bare, revealing the silver metal and echoes of circuits that replace her ankle and right foot.

“Howdy,” she parrots back, falling back on her khaki-covered rear and smiling over her shoulder at him. Before she says anything else, her poverty senses start tingling: he didn’t address any of the other people who he had passed, looking like they were doing what they were supposed to be doing at a cemetery; he carries himself with a certain surety; he talks like a cowboy in the year 2024.

This man is a cop.

Or, at least, he thinks he is. Some version of one, anyway.

Alopex helpfully alerts them to the Honchkrow’s presence with a quiet chirp. She spins a confuse ray around the bird before it can fly further afield. A Pokeball is tossed shortly after, before it crashes into the ground and breaks its neck.

“Birdwatching,” she says, curt. “What about yourself?"

She makes a face and slaps her palm into one eye, dragging it down her cheek with a squeaky noise. “Of course. Gods, that’s so-- they can’t just make it easy, can they?”

She walks a circle around the living metal.

“Time would be, theoretically, easy. Other universes? Easy. But they gotta throw something intangible like dreams into the mix and all my ideas just go up in smoke.” She pauses, sighing. “Maybe… but dreams aren’t really like memories. Memories exist. There’s a place in the brain where they exist. That’s how you find them. Dreams are just… blah-la-la.” She spins her hands like a tornado exploding, then realizes she’s monologuing. “Oops, went full supervillain there, sorry.”

Her Porygon2 pops out of… wherever PYLONS likes to spend their time, warbles something at the mechanical Pokemon, and then begins to scan it, pink and blue beams passing over its surface. Banana Phone slips into a nearby system of computers and powers it up.

“Sima 2.0 might be a bad example. Or maybe a good one.” She shakes her head, like clearing an etch-a-sketch, then explains: “She’s a good argument for them simply being programs. She was created to destroy, and that’s what she does best. I think sometimes I just fall within the correct parameters of ‘do not destroy’.” She leans back against the wall of the basement, thinking. “Even Rose-- the Valiant-- I think is more along the lines of program. You saw what they did to Lyune. They don’t know how to do anything gently. But… they’re learning. So, if anything, I think wherever these things come from, they have a purpose, for then and there. But now they’re here. So they adapt. And I think little features of sentience, like gentleness, or familial connections, or camaraderie, slip through the gaps as their programming shifts, and changes. Otherwise, Sima 2 would have eaten me immediately, and Rose would have killed us all in our sleep. Or something.”

She offers Freya a small smile for putting up with all of her nerd shit.

“But I’m not a programmer. I’m just an old grease monkey. I can build you a computer but the code and stuff is beyond me.”

Freya gets the value of the benefit of the doubt because she is, after all, correct. It is frowned upon to give yourself bathroom procedures removing major organ systems. It should not be done.

She’s gonna do it anyway.

“Yeah, you’re telling me,” she says, swiping a drop of blood off on her finger, before ascertaining the damage is mostly cosmetic and rolling down her shirt. “Figured it wasn’t doing anything and it’s all, mostly, self contained, so I’d just scoop ‘em out, but. It’s trickier than it looks.”

Another complex system she would not waste time in replicating. Anything she could remove, the better.

"The first time I went in I tried to be delicate and left pieces of uterine stump so that’s what the big cut is. Me fixing it.”

She reaches out a hand to place it on Freya’s arm then remembers it’s bloody and thinks better of it, but her smile is placating.

“Kanaya is doing the bare minimum to keep me alive, don’t worry.” She rubs absently at her neck. “She wants me to… feel things, I think, which is why she doesn’t do more.”

Her Gardevoir had been through so much shit with her. It made her feel bad that Kanaya was her chosen whipping boy, bearing the brunt of memories she, herself, had long since forgotten.

"Speaking of babies... what's this about Lyune being a dad, again? What happened to his kids from before? Does he sire on multiple females, or is there, like, a Chosen One, or...?"

The Heliolisk was curled up in an old, dead tree. It was still and pale with cold. Lisbet poked it, to no avail, and then began to hop nervously from side to side, as Henry, Rodimus, and Astrotrain cried out for their trainer’s attention.

“Poor thing,” she said, kneeling by it and reaching for a Pokeball, “it’s cold snapped. We’ll take it home and warm it up.”

She touched the sphere to the lizard’s head, calling it to safety within.

“A warm bath and a heat lamp aughta do it.”