[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“Oh, shit, I forgot about these little guys.”
[break][break]
He trusts Lulu to deal with whatever bullshit this place might throw at them, so he ducks behind her and hunches to fiddle around with the audio settings on his phone. He manages to save and invert the file.
[break][break]

[break][break]
“Well, that’s rude.”
[break][break]
Talon aides the mega-evolved Alakazam by summoning an inferno the Kartana have to pass through.
[break][break]
“What do you think it means?”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
He arrives in a muttered storm of expletives, his Charizard’s neck craning neatly as she exhaled smoke.
[break][break]
“Sorry I’m late, I had-- a lab incident.”
[break][break]
He’s still in his lab coat. It’s singed in places.
[break][break]
He has to bite back I didn’t want to come. Because he did, he did. Really. He glares up at the sky, falling silent as Lulu talks, trying to focus on the sound she’s identifying, wondering why he feels so fucking... pissy
[break][break]
“Sounds like…” he fished for his phone, to grab a recording, “...like playing a record backwards? Like, um... redrum. From The Shining.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

jayden cross

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“Right. We’d get a lot of nonsensical data that creates more questions than answers. Which is good, from a research standpoint, but not so much from a position of progress.”
[break][break]
Kepler’s mind goes way back. To the big fuckoff Rocket meeting before the world really started to implode.
[break][break]
“Mossdeep has resources that would be beneficial to the organization, yes. Technology, mostly.” It would certainly help his and Lulu Flint’s various projects move along a little bit faster. “I’m not a-- a fucking project planner, though. I don’t think grabbing another little island next to our other little island would do much, speaking from a strategically positioning standpoint. We need a mainland presence. At some point, I mean.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
He turns around in Ash’s arms, the back of his wooly autumn coat pressing against the warmth of Ash’s chest.
[break][break]
Kepler has the unique ability to pick at an issue until it abscesses and explodes. He has to let this lie, for now. If he doesn’t, he’ll never know peace. So he settles in, accepting that he’ll live-- they’ll live--
[break][break]
--and they had a job to do.
[break][break]
“Yeah. We only have 730 more hours of footage to look through, anyway,” Kepler says, with a sniff, scrubbing a hand over his raw, reddened face, and sighing.
[break][break]
“Let’s find this fucking bird. He’s part of our family. Our family, Ash. Don’t forget that.”
[break][break]
Us. We. Together. Words that only mattered if Ash was whole and hale enough to experience them.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Ash kisses his face, his hands-- Kepler brings fingers to Ash’s jaw to redirect him, lips coming together, and they stay half-kissing, half-crying, for a little bit.
[break][break]
“What, cold and sad on the fucking-- forest floor?” he asks, sobs turning into giggles and back again. “With you? Forever. Forever and ever, Ashley Shepard. You-- jerk. God damn it. I love you.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
It doesn’t matter that he’s right (he is). It doesn’t matter that this needed to happen (it did). It doesn’t matter that he’s venting.
[break][break]
Ash pulls them together and he goes easily. As he always had, and always will.
[break][break]
“I love you, you dipshit,” he says, his voice breaking and the real sobbing tears threatening to burst through, “I would like that to mean something to you.”
[break][break]
They’re forehead to forehead, Kepler running his hands through Ash’s hair, crumbling together in a pile on the ground.
[break][break]
He inhales a shaking breath, voice gone blocky with emotion and congestion, raw from use. “I’m not buying the UWU I’m so sad and I’m going to work on myself shit. Not anymore. You need to fucking figure it out, Ash. This--,” he ghosts a hand over still healing injures, not touching, but feeling all the same, “--this shit stops. Now. Or I will kill you myself, and it will not matter how many gods your friends know.”
[break][break]
Hands together, all ruddy faces and snotty noses and sore throats. He doesn’t begrudge Ash’s so-called selfishness, because that’s all he’s ever wanted, really, is for the goddamn love of his life to have some goddamn self worth, and care about himself, and put himself first, and not volunteer his own head for the guillotine.
[break][break]
“I would stay with you forever, Ashley. But you have to be alive for that to happen.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Ash is not-- well, unbothered would be giving him too little credit. But the way he turns his cheek like he expects the hit is just disastrous, like Kepler’s whole world is shaking down to his core. Because it means he knows and it means he knows and it means he KNOWS and he isn’t doing anything about it!
[break][break]
It makes him want to scream and tear his hair out. He manages a warped, hiccupy little half-sob, half-croak, squeezes his forehead, his face, imagines the quadrillion stars out in the expanding universe, imagines he’s out there, somewhere, feeling small, instead of feeling small right here next to the man he loves.
[break][break]
“You fucking died,” he squeaks, and he hates himself for how weak he sounds, but volume and pitch control is beyond his capability right now. “You fucking died, you fucking asshole!”
[break][break]
All at once his hands fall away from his face and he sheds his meek skin. He has surpassed the delimitation of biology. He is not weak, he is not constrained by the lesser science of mortal men. His wrath is great and all-encompassing, cleansing and blue-hot.
[break][break]
“How fucking dare you!” he screams, and he’s shaking so hard he might break through the bounds of matter and into something new, something unholy. “Every time! Every time this happens you sit there and you bow your head and you say I’m sorry, Kepler. I’ll change, Kepler. I’m so sad and pathetic, Kepler. And then Isaac or Jayden or Declan or Zev or whomever the fuck else waltzes in and asks you to sit down on the tracks in front of the fucking train and you do! You fucking do!”
[break][break]
He’s shrieking, at this point. He doesn’t care.
[break][break]
“You fucking died, Ashley Shepard. Oh, cool, you have a friend with fucking life controlly powers. Lucky for fucking you. Do you know how-- the chances-- the microcosmic SPECK of a chance-- you had-- to come back from that? Does anyone? Because no one seems to fucking care. Everyone acts like life-- yours, in particular-- is a fucking afterthought. Oh, we need someone to fucking jump on the grenade? Throw Ashley in there, Isaac can bring him back.”
[break][break]
His rage has transferred to kinetic energy. He paces back and forth.
[break][break]
“But last time I fucking checked, you weren’t married to Isaac, you were going to marry me. Till death do us part. Remember? Remember that?!”
[break][break]
And then he does scream. He’s worked himself to a fever pitch and when Ash says I don’t know how Kepler throws his head back and roars, something old and primal and long and loud and so much it makes his vocal chords snap and his voice is raspy afterwards.
[break][break]
His speaking voice is loud in the deafening silence.
[break][break]
“I don’t give a shit, frankly, what you do and don’t know,” he says, tears streaming down his face. “Do like I fucking did, and learn.”
[break][break]
And he jabs Ash once, with one finger, in the center of his forehead, on the word learn, and then grabs his face and kisses him.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“I.”
[break][break]
He doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t, honestly, think he can do this. His stomach is beyond tying itself into knots, it is inventing new degrees of dimension and is operating on several different realities right now.
[break][break]
“I can’t.”
[break][break]
His hands are sweaty and his voice is thin and reedy and he feels like he does on the edge of a heart episode but it isn’t cardiac events gathering in his chest but dread, dread, dread.
[break][break]
“I can’t keep doing this, Ash, I can’t.”
[break][break]
He gestures vaguely at all of Ash, but what he really means is the damage. The pain. The suffering.
[break][break]
“You just keep-- ugh.” He digs the pads of his fingers into his eyes to burn away the need to cry. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But it is-- I know this is farcical given that you keep almost dying but it is literally killing me seeing you like this. Every time. Every time something happens. You keep doing shit. Shit for Isaac. Shit for Jayden. Getting chewed up for these fucking people. But you never do anything for you. To take care of you.”
[break][break]
He can't look at him, right now, so he draws tessellations in the silver lights in his eyes and presses, presses, presses. If he presses hard enough maybe he can shove his fingers right through into his brain and kill himself.
[break][break]
"I love you so much but it is like watching your favorite Meowth walk into traffic a thousand times and not being able to stop it."

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

[attr="class","mitmain"]
He was fond of Meteor Falls. This was where he’d caught his first wild Pokemon, after arriving in Hoenn. The once suffocating rushing of the water and the way it echoed had become a balm to his worried mind, and he now walked through the glow of the tidal pools with ease and confidence, his Munna floating along silently beside him.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

jayden cross

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Kepler was a scientist, first and foremost, and knew that a lot of research endeavors turned up dick butkis, with a lot of wasted effort and resources and nothing to show for it. But this one was personally important to him, for a number of reasons.
[break][break]
He had to find Chocobo. He had to.
[break][break]
Luckily enough, he’d run through his Pro-Rocket-Anti-League covers so often that they were becoming second nature. So when Jayden joked about dropping Leaguers in volcano, he reacted with a knee-jerk “Preach, sister,” that was flatline emotionally and just tired enough to sound sarcastic.
[break][break]
Meanwhile, he imagined Jayden taking a nice little hot lava bath.
[break][break]
Which wasn’t unique to just Jayden, mind. There were a lot of people-- faction notwithstanding-- that he’d like to dunk in a volcano, at the moment.
[break][break]
Riding the middle line of the Rocket-League railcar was beginning to chafe.
[break][break]
“There’s a spot north of Slateport and West of Oldale, around Route 110,” and far away from any pseudo-confirmed sightings of the Galarian birds that Kepler knew of, “that I think would be perfect. Topographically it’s ideal because it’s essentially raised flatland between the mountains and the coast. It’s forested but not so much as to be a hindrance, and it doesn’t garner a lot of foot traffic.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

mint frost

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“Because I’m not a mother, his-- theirs-- or otherwise.” There's more anger in his words than he really knows what to do with; it was not something he could explain to anyone, really. Except maybe Ash. Definitely not Mint.
[break][break]
Mint’s speciality was intel. He, like Kepler, was small, fragile in appearance, and decidedly more dangerous than he let on.
[break][break]
At least, Kepler liked to think he was capable of great danger, though all he’d done so far was prove to be a danger to himself.
[break][break]
“Sure. Exactly. Game recognizes game.” He didn’t get to finish the lecture spooling on his tongue because the stupid whale picked then to make an appearance. “Ah, fuck, Olympus--,”
[break][break]
The Metagross summoned a whirlpool, twisting the massive waves of water into a spiral around them, offering some protection from the onslaught. The aqua tail, however, crests over their protective helical, slicing through it like a knife through hot butter.
[break][break]
Kepler gets dunked, Metagross and all, and it’s all he can do to inhale before he goes under. The sea is cold, and he’s a mass of flailing limbs in rising, foaming bubbles.
[break][break]
Until the bubbles clear, and he’s staring at the mass of Kyogre, huge and unyielding, a dark shadow in the deep abyss, and in that moment Kepler feels very, very small.
[break][break]
Then his Metagross is back beneath him and they’re rocketing skyward. His inhale turns into a scream, chest burning, skin stinging and plastered with salt.
[break][break]
“FUCK!”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
He really shouldn’t be here unloading all of his bullshit onto his boss. She had asked, of course, but Kepler knew-- he knew a great many things-- but he knew, perhaps most of all, that people didn’t really care.
[break][break]
“It was just-- so--,” he grips the edge of the table, watching his already pale fingertips go paler as the blood is squeezed out of them. “--it seemed so miserable. And forced to just… indiscriminately attack. Destroy. Offer itself. And I don’t know, of course, that Dialga wouldn’t be like that, just, in general. But. I don’t want that to happen to Ch-- to the Galarian birds.”

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Everything was hell. It always felt like hell. It would have been better if Ash could… stop. Stop running into the fire. Stop going where Kepler couldn’t follow. Kepler would feel better if he wasn’t always two steps behind the love of his life, getting the full IMAX 1080p picture of Ash’s pain played out like Kepler’s own version of snuff torture films.
[break][break]
Three months or so was never long enough. Would never be long enough.
[break][break]
He turns to look back at Ash because he’s exhausted from staring out at nothing.
[break][break]
“I. Oh, god. We need to talk.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]