[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
It takes practice to pretend. Like inoculation to an illness, Kepler’s gotten used to the shtick: focus on the here and now, on Ash’s lips and tongue and the steadiness of him beneath him, on the gentle rock of the hammock and the way their bodies call to each other.
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On this and nothing else.
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On this, and not the gnawing, hungry, looming severity of the void that subsumes their futures.
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Ash’s words break him out of his stupor, make him beat back the fire burning inside of him and shove it down somewhere to sit and simmer while rational thought makes headspace in his brain.
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“I can’t believe that stupid bird went to Hoenn,” he says, licking his reddening lips. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. The Region attracts legendaries like flies on shit.” He swallows, sitting back-- sitting back with purpose, over the junction of Ash’s hips. “I have to find him. It. them. Whatever. I don’t even care-- I just have to know. I have to know he-- it-- fuck-- I have to know Chocobo’s all right.”
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The discussion of last names puts him back on track, a bit.
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“Kepler Shepard sounds okay, right?” he asks, suddenly sheepish. “Not too… not too symmetrical?” because he’s forgotten the word for ‘rhyming’.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

jayden cross

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Kepler’s relationship with everyone in Rocket who wasn’t Lulu Flint or, really, Tempest Quinn, was a bit strained at the mo’. oscar clayton was fine but he was on thin fucking ice.
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But finding Chocobo was more important than keeping a safe distance. For only, like, the second time in his entire existence, he was forcing his little autistic ass to socialize outside of his comfort zone for the sake of another person. It had only happened once before and that was for Ashley Shepard .
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He’d been out in the woods for goddamn days. He hadn’t showered. He’d been eating fucking powdered meals and trailmix (he’d picked the M&Ms out on the first day) and for a hot second when he looked at his reflection in his phone he’d thought he’d started growing a beard, but it had just been dirt.
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jayden cross had been the first human being he’d socialized with in a little under a week. He’d have to wrap it up soon. Maybe he’d see Chocobo from space.
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“So I’m using my weather balloons as GPS beepers and skybound trailcams at the same time,” he explained, clutching a thirty pound binder of topographical maps in one arm, pointing with his other. The maps were stabbed with pushpins and string ran between them in different colors for potential sightings by civilians, League, Rocket, and what fragments of data Kepler’s weather balloons had brought in.
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He was, in reality, trying to triangulate a location where Chocobo-- er, the Galarian Zapdos-- might be making its home, but he didn’t want to give that away. He’d be elated at the barest blink of a sign, even seeing him at a thousand yards through binoculars, but what he didn’t want to happen was to find the bird and then hand him over immediately to grubby Rocket or League paws… so all of his notes and data were written in code, gibberish that only made sense to him, a mix of Kaonic Cybertronian and Klingon interspersed with Na’vi, and all his numbers were ciphered with a pattern that he changed on specific days that only he knew the pattern of.
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His research, in turn, had a cover.
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“The aim is to nail down appropriate landing sites for any future space endeavors, or dump points for jettisoned propulsion systems, or even, maybe, a new base.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Kepler rubbed at the bridge of his nose, fingers rising and falling over the permanent ridge he’d given himself from peering through the binoculars.
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“He’s a six-foot-tall macaroni-colored bird,” he muttered under his breath, peering once more through the oculars at the expanse of Hoenn before him. “How fucking hard could he be to find?”
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Evidently, real fucking hard. He’d had to jerry-rig some of his weather balloons with crappy trailcams to try and catch sight of the Galarian Zapdos that may-or-may-not-have-been-his-Chocobo and its exploits around the region-- while also trying not to get arrested for generalized perversion. Reports of it scrapping with League operatives always reached him too late (he was a sciency type, not a boots-on-the-ground actiony type) and left him scrambling and pulling his hair out by the fucking root.
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“Anything on the video?” he called over his shoulder where his definitely-not-fiance-because-his-fiance-was-a-traitor fiance was supposed to be combing through hours of trailcam footage.
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A lump formed in Kepler’s throat. Why did everything have to suck so bad all the time, but also be so good at the same time? Lulu Flint was back. He was going to space. But he’d had to publicly rescind his connections to Ashley Shepard because of the whole being-a-traitor thing.
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Kepler didn’t so much care about Rocket as far as he could throw it, but he needed their resources and science team if he was going to help Lulu save the multiverses. And that meant he had to pretend like Ash was as dead to him as he was to the rest of the org.
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“Anything at all?”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

mint frost

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Kepler’s collegiate thesis in deep-space and deep-ocean transportation kept coming back to bite him in the ass, in a way. For a guy who really did not like being put in harms way, it kept fucking happening.
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The sea was not happy today. Foam licked at his boots and he curled his legs up pretzel-style on his Metagross, glaring out at stormclouds and waves. His Beheeyem floated behind him, occasionally popping a protect bubble when a surge got too close.
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He kept the coastline in view at all times. He didn’t really give a fuck about Kyogre. He was looking for Galarian Zapdos. But with skyler dross absconding the Region and Kyogre apparently pitching a shitfit, every flunky, researcher, legendary hunter, reporter, Avatar wannabe, and toddler capable of tying their shoes was out looking for the fucking whale.
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So Kepler got drafted to play Captain Ahab, using the opportunities to look for Chocobo-- or, well, whatever version of Chocobo this would be, not really Chocobo but Chocobo-adjacent-- while he was out.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Kepler hopped to the side as Lulu’s Steelix went to work unearthing whatever was buried below them. Funny shapes in Megalopolan electric blue became readable, though faded with time and the elements.
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“Why is it always those guys?” he asked, trying his best not to sound pouty. While Lulu took pictures, he released the rest of his Pokemon, directing them to various craters peppered around, trying to fill in as many of the theorized prompts as possible.
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“This is… this is a spaceship,” he said, after, gently prodding the thing with his booted toe. “You don’t use a spaceship to explore places where you live. You use airplanes. Cars. Less technical, less secure, because they're not really going to placees where just being is contradictory to life.” He pointed to the large, dented propulsion systems towards the back of the vehicle. “I don’t think the Megalopolans… lived here. I think they came here. To visit? Or... colonize?”
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The ground shook slightly as another Celesteela fired off in the far distance.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Kepler wisely kept his mouth shut after Farhan spoke, the Moltres sided with us? dying on his tongue. They had just handed the big fuckass explosive to the guy. Best not to suddenly position themselves on the opposite side. You just brought a gun to a bomb fight, officer.
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He was getting a lot better at this ‘internalizing his monologue’ thing. He should tell Ashley Shepard.
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As Lulu set about helping assemble defenses, Kepler joined in, contributing his two cents to positioning and running through some provincial math in his head, considering attack angles and strategic points where repulsion mechanisms should be placed.
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“Whole lotta hullabaloo about one volcano,” he said, frowning down the digital slope. “Wonder why it’s so important?”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint oscar clayton Tempest Quinn

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Deep space theoretics and years of schooling were all well and good, but Kepler couldn’t really believe he was now going to space, for real-- for the second time. “What a fucking world we live in.”
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His parents were rolling over in their Teslas, which are basically just motorized graves, really.
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He and Lulu had worked hard on the construction and math going into the journey. This was his specialty, after all: deep space and deep ocean, both abundant in space and yet so underexplored. His anxiety had been running at ulcer-inducing levels and he’d bitten his fingernails down to the quick, but here they were.
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The SS Party Rocker was a fucking genius creation of claptrap, stuck together with 50% groundbreaking technology and 50% sheer force of will. For all he’d wanted to complain about the name, he could really respect the dedication to the joke, and also he did not want Temp to punch him. He’d worked so hard to save Kepler’s life in the Borderlands, it seemed a pity to cause him to end it now.
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Kepler had been sitting at the navbar, drawing tally lines on a piece of paper counting the different colors of Minior they’d pinged off the hull, when Lulu’s cry cut through the recycled air.
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“We are under fucking attack,” Kepler memed under his breath, pushing his chair away from the beeping sonar, and adding his own Beheeyem to the mix. They’d managed to shave time off construction while also maintaining hull stability by not adding external or hernial weaponry to the Rocker. But it also meant they had to shove their Pokemon into the vacuum chute of doom for any sort of defense or offense.
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“No, he’s right!” Kepler said to Oscar, voice sounding tinny in the pressurized space. “The terminology is technically the same!”
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Pluto, on the outside of the ship and safely protected from her trainer’s smartassery, covered the ship with a protective bubble, while the other Pokemon focused on offense.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“Yeah. Felt like a whole lifetime.” He swallows, because he can remember it clearly, still, somehow. Maybe not everything. But the important things. He’s always had a good memory. It’s why he did so well in school.
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“Chocobo--,” he says, then stops himself, shaking his head. “During the original altercation, I found a feather. It ended up belonging to a Galarian Zapdos. Later on, a baby one imprinted on me. And then I got to... watch it grow. Help it grow."
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He sweeps his thumb back and forth over the surface of the cup.
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“My fiancé was the king. I was his advisor. And Chocobo was… it seems weird to say ‘my child’ given that…” he almost slipped up here, almost said too much, “...he was a six-foot tall God Chicken. But we…”
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He trails off, laughing slightly.
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“It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been physically useless and weak your whole life, like me. But I… finally felt capable. With them.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“BBEG means Big Bad Evil Guy. Like Holo was too important to the story to go down so easy.” He explains it to her without condescension or condemnation. It’s not her fault he’s chronically online. "I know this is real life and not a fantasy but it does frequently feel like some higher power's just fucking around with us like characters in a comic book."
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The Hoenn region whirls around them, the hologram rapidly churning through her famous locations and landmarks. All of them are smoking and crumbling.
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They zoom out. The ground beneath their feet is run through with magmatic rock.
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Kepler looks up at the handsome man standing before them.
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“Yeah, absolutely,” he says immediately in the wake of Lulu’s idea to aid the Kindler.
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If I wasn’t engaged to be married I’d be down for some violation of a type, that’s for sure.
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He somehow manages to keep this to himself.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“Yeah. Fuck that place. Hate it.” This veritable wasteland, with its toxic fumes and Celesteela bottle rockets, was eons better than the Borderlands. Kepler remembered burning. He remembered the feeling of a ghost sluicing through his bones, crawling up his muscles. The sharp pain of his own heart trying to give up the-- well, you know.
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He leaned forward on the Steelix as the Steel-type snaked along the ground, scrambling down after Lulu when she dismounted.
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“Looks like… a ship. Which isn’t saying much. There are Celesteela everywhere.” But ther was something slightly different about it. He squatted to look at it. “Looks like a slightly different material, though.”
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He looked around them at the slight rise of the crater lip.
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“Do you think this is one of the craters where we put the-- the things?” he asked, releasing Themisto from her Pokeball to serve as a dragon’s jewel.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
“It’s all rather antithetical to universe theory, this whole ‘origin point’ thing,” Kepler said, sort of as an aside, sort of as diatribic defense before Lulu did what he knew she was going to do and asked him about the Story. “The fact that we’ve been confirmed the ‘origin point’ and yet somehow have to keep studying other spheres of existence… it’s, like, self-limiting.”
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He reached for the chair, and tried to fall into it with as much grace as possible.
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“Oh, gods. Okay. So, back in June, the ancient dogs from Galar appeared. Zacien and Zamazenta? Stupid ass names. Anyway, their whole shtick is, one of ‘em has a sword, and one of ‘em has a shield. Big imagination, there. We got sent to interrupt them and some weird fuckass bowl-headed deer we would eventually learn is called Ting-Lu. Well, shit happened and we ended up getting sucked into… like, a pocket ‘verse? Inside of a magic sword? It was, like, ancient Galar. Like, no cars. Dying of consumption. That sort of thing.”
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He takes a break to sip his coffee and check to see she’s still listening.
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"And we all think we're gonna be there for a couple hours... but it ended up being years."
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His voice goes a little sad.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Kepler hummed noncommittally. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but that doesn’t surprise me at all. The DRK fucks have been running circles around us for ages-- interdimensional travel, space warfare, whatever the hell else. They have BBEG energy, which means they won’t be going down easy.”
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He’s distracted from his monologue by the very same shapes Lulu is inquiring about. He squints, wondering if he’s hallucinating. A brief check of his heartrate (occasionally cardiac anaerobic fits give him oxygen deprivation demons) renders everything standard. He pinches himself just to be sure.
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“Yeah. Oh, get ready, this is I think when they--,”
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The hidden power warbled around them, making his stomach lurch.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]