Kepler paused. It had been so long since anyone had asked him if he was okay. Least of all immediately after being kidnapped and roughed up and almost sacrificed and roughed up some more and almost deveined.

He was touched. That was a weird feeling.

But was he okay?

“I’m still alive,” he said, as the roar of the unnmarked Rocket ‘copter hovered overhead.

He blinked.

“Same hat,” he said, by means of explanation, as the vehicle lowered down to scoop both of them up.

Isaac Merlo

☉

Kepler’s eyes flit back and forth between the gash in his wrist and the dead body of the cultist, pale face growing, somehow, paler.

Isaac was over his shoulder and saying something about calling in an evac team and Kepler heard but he didn’t really hear. He hadn’t been this jacked up in a while-- ever since probably seventh grade when the class bullies jumped him on the way home from school and put him in the hospital. Since then, he’d had rules of engagement-- mostly being, do not engage.

But then his rational mind began to take shape and he lifted the arm up and held it parallel to the ground and above his heart. He slipped out of one sleeve and began to wrap it tight around the slice. Apply pressure, and elevate. His face had turned into the stony mask of flippant intelligence he usually wore, an expression of boredom, cultivated in order to form distance.

He jumped-- literally jumped, startled-- when Isaac took his arm and began his own ministrations. Kepler’s heart did a funny thing and he had to look away.

“Thanks.”

At least he wasn’t going to die from blood loss-- and his radial and ulnar artery seemed okay, given that he wasn’t spurting blood like a fountain.

“You saved mine first,” he pointed out, finding the courage to look back at Isaac. “I’m Kepler.”

He watched with a stony silence as the Dhelmise lifted the proffered corpse aloft and tossed it at the cultist’s feet. He watched with stony silence as Gaia and Deimos returned to his side.

Oort, of course, had fainted, given that Destiny Bond was a river that flowed in two directions. Kepler took his arm gently back from Isaac and sloshed through the mud to pull the Wobbuffet back into its Pokeball. “That’ll do, pig.”

A beat of silence.

“Guess we go home, now.”

Isaac Merlo

☉

Kepler stood on the precipice of the coast, boots on stone, shaking slightly in the sea wind. He was dressed all in black, with a hood pulled up over his head, his teal-dipped hair bundled back in a tight knot.

Below, the cliff face dropped away precipitously, jagged crests of lime and granite plunging downward to a mildly irate sea. Above, the stars were glittering lights, but a blanket of clouds was quickly being pulled to mask their glow.

Like a scythe, the land continued upward, narrowing along the curve out to the sharpest point. A short hop from there was a lighthouse, the Ampharos-powered beam spinning round and round to warn passing ships in the night of the closeness of the treacherous landmass. Back a bit from the shore, a well-trod path of crushed gravel, white-gray against the dark, natural landscape, wandered down to a League outpost near the coast. A team of Infiltrators would be waiting in the wings to break into it and strip it of supplies and information.

It was Kepler’s job to snuff the light. He was just one part of a very important mission, having drawn the short lot, like Hades.

Nervousness boiled his gut enough to match the churning nighttime ocean, pushed and pulled by an incoming storm front; it was an easy enough job, provided nothing went wrong. But the last time he’d been out on fieldwork he’d been captured and almost sacrified and then killed a guy.

Kepler was no bastion of mortal fortitude but murder was definitely not high on his list of desirous repeatable experiences.

@ OPEN
MISSION

☉

Oort had a bruise beginning to sluice down the front of his teal, tear-drop shaped form-- but he didn’t let that stop him, firing off a crisp salute and a cheerful “WAAAAA-BUFFET!” Kepler and Isaac couldn’t understand him but what he was saying was get good, scrub.

“Yes!” Kepler cheered, punching both fists skyward, as Isaac pushed away from him, releasing the tension in his grip and in the air. Kep wanted to run forward and hug his Wobbuffet. But then all of Isaac’s team began attacking the downed Swampert, and doing so would have put him right in the line of fire.

Isaac’s team went to work handling the Mega Swampert. The Dhelmise dragged it, stunned, out of the water-- just in time for it to jump up and start fighting back. Kepler was so focused on this aspect of the altercation that he didn’t notice the Cultist leader tackling Isaac to the ground until it was too late, Isaac going down in a rush of air and fabric behind his back.

“No!” Kepler yelled, throwing himself forward, not thinking-- for once in his life, he wasn’t thinking. He was wet and bedraggled and tired and done, and he all but launched himself at the cultist’s wrist, hitting it with enough force to divert the downward stroke of the knife. Instead of stabbing Isaac, the Corsola shard raked a stinging line down the inside of Kepler’s wrist and forearm, opening a slice in the underside of the limb as he grappled for the weapon. The force of the thrust coupled with Kepler’s weight drove the shard down into the wet ground, Kepler coming face-to-face with the fractured Sharpedo mask and the anger of the eye behind it.

Then there was a sickening thud sound as Gaia Bounced off the back of the cultist leader’s head, sending him forward with enough force to crash his eye socket against the shard buried in the ground. It went straight through with a sound like a cracking egg, puncturing-- cornea, iris, pupil, lens, vitreous body, Kepler heard his anatomy and physiology teacher rattle off in his head-- and the cult leader spasmed once, twice, and fell still.

Kepler froze, hands up, blood streaming out of the long slice on his forearm, from wrist almost to elbow. He was suddenly very cold.

Meanwhile, back in Crazy Mega Swampert Land, Oort glowed faintly teal, little spirals of energy, like DNA, flying through the air and linking him to the Mega Swampert in a Destiny Bond. He then hobble-hopped closer to the thing, aiming to get in close, within the reach of its flailing body, in the hopes that, now that they were intrinsically linked, if Oort fainted, so too would the mega-evolved Pokemon.

Isaac Merlo
kepler does something!
gaia uses bounce
oort uses destiny bond

☉