“Yes I can!” Kepler yelled over his shoulder, heart racing in his chest, “I’m doing it right now!” Distantly, he heard the thunder of Rico’s feet behind him and the rabbit-quick steps of Mercury, who was… also running. Oh, god. That was bad, wasn’t it?

The strange creature jumped out in front of them again and Kepler yelped, stumbling backwards into Rico who’d slid to stop behind him. He flailed his limbs to try and get balance, sort of bouncing off the other grunt, then the wall, and falling to his ass on the hard, metal floor. Years of inactivity and poor health decisions were catching up to him-- the panic was welling in his chest, his limbs were trembling, and he was taking big, gulping breaths, trying to suck air into his lungs.

Rico, much more in control of his facilities, ordered his Pokemon to attack; when the hit landed and the other grunt celebrated, Kepler sat up a bit, but then the creature hopped right back up and drew its angry eyebrows on and--

Think, Kepler, think, he squeezed his eyes shut, backpedaling on his hands and knees. He wasn’t used to this kind of action. There was a reason he locked himself in his lab, dammit! Dark Pulse hit the thing. He didn’t have any Pokemon with Dark-type moves. He was hyperventilating now. Think, Kepler. Double kick didn’t have any effect.

“It’s a ghost!” He yelled, scrabbling for purchase on the wall of the sub with sweaty palms. “I mean, fuck. It’s a Ghost-type.” See how things worked better when he was thinking instead of screaming?

Mercury picked up what Kepler was laying down and bounded forward, bouncing off his trainer’s head (“Owch! Fuck you!”) into a tight somersault and coming down fast and hard at the strange thing with the drawn-on face.

Rico Bassanello

☉

The sub creaked and groaned around him as it settled in for the night. When he’d first taken up residence on, what he affectionately called the submerged metal deathtrap, it had been unnerving to be constantly surrounded by the groans of the unquiet dead. But after a month or two of hermitage, locked in his lab working on Plans(™), it turned into less of a terror and more of a constant companion. Now he couldn’t barely sleep at night on dry land.

Not that he slept much at all.

Kep bundled his hair up into a messy knot as Mercury shot around the lab, sweeping paper coffee cups and old sandwich wrappers into a bin. Venus toddled around collecting cans in a garbage bag, whilst Mars elutriated dust with her big, fluffy tail.

They were expecting guests, and the lab was not in a fit state for viewing, though it was gradually getting cleaner by the minute. Kepler had even taken it upon himself to wear some decent clothing.

---

wearing

jayden cross

☉

“Oh, a scary noise,” Kep said, rolling his eyes so hard he got a little dizzy. “Yep, that’ll do it.” The sarcasm was thick in his tone but his head really was starting to hurt. Sometimes he theorized it was because he spent so much time on the sub that the pressure got to him-- like in the movie The Abyss.

Other times he theorized that he was just allergic to idiots.

His eyebrows knitted as the Pikachu’s head sloughed to the side, limp. That… that did not compute. There was no noise, for one. Breaking bones tend to be rather audible. His brain was still running through the numbers when the thing moved.

A blink later and the strange grunt’s Meowth was being raked by claws from behind them. Kepler spun, actually dizzy this time, and backpedaled. “Holy fuck!” He yelled, feeling the swift sting of karma as bile in his throat. “M-Merc! Get it!”

His Scorbunny, fearless in the face of danger, nobly jumped forward to deal a one-two double kick to the thing, pivoting and switching feet as he went--

--only to have both attacks pass through it, harmlessly.

Mercury paused up on one foot, head at a tilt, staring curiously at the creature. It was clad in a pale yellow-sheet, with a poorly drawn Pikachu face underneath crooked ears.

“Fuck!” Kepler yelled, turning to run for real.

Rico Bassanello

☉

In a blink the person was back. Kepler shook his head and stepped back a bit, thinking maybe he was seeing things-- but then he looked, again, in the direction Rico had run in from and saw a mysterious shape that did, for Rico’s credit, look remarkably like a Pikachu.

Kepler had more or less stepped out into the hallway, and incidentally had turned to face away from Rico. So, yes, the other Grunt was using him as a shield. Hurray.

Now, Kepler was a man of science and science reasoned that if it walked like a Pikachu, and talked like a Pikachu, then it was a Pikachu. So when Rico tossed out his Meowth, and the Meowth, in turn, tossed out its dark pulse, he had no reason to doubt the success of either of these things. Cool, grand, problem solved.

“That’s what you were running from?” Kep said, voice a tired snort. Mercury stood nearby at the ready in case he was needed to engage.

Rico Bassanello

☉

Kepler had been banging his head against the same theories for hours, locked up in his lab, working them to the bone. It got to the point where he was literally tempted to bash his forehead on his desktop when Mercury leapt forward, spun his chair back, and pushed him, wheels and all, out into the sub hallway, where the Scorbunny tipped the chair over and dropped Kep to the floor with a clang.

“Owch. Fuck. Fuck you.” Kep muttered, miserably staring into his reddening palms as Merc dropped a handful of Pokeballs on Kepler’s lap and pointed violently down the hallway. He may not have been capable of human speech but the meaning was clear. Take a break, nerd.

Shakily, Kepler pushed himself to his feet, slipping the Pokeballs into his belt under his oversized sweater and setting off. Maybe one lap would do him some good.

He had just come to a T-Junction hallway when what he’d thought was the distant sound of the submarine settling actually turned out to be the approaching scream of someone running very, very fast. In a blink the person had sprinted past him, screaming the entire way. Kepler leaned forward to look down the hallway, watching the figure bounce in and out of the circular pot-lights in the ceiling; then, he looked the other way, expecting, at the very least, a very angry higher up hot on the poor grunt’s tail.

Finding nothing but open space, Kepler frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers.

“Why are people so fucking weird?” the scientist who’d just spent a week in the same room with no outside human contact groaned.

Rico Bassanello

☉