[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.
[break][break]
He was getting a lot better at this ‘internalizing his monologue’ thing. He should tell Ashley Shepard.
[break][break]
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.
[break][break]
“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.”
[break][break]
His parents were rolling over in their Teslas, which are basically just motorized graves, really.
[break][break]
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.
[break][break]
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.
[break][break]
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.
[break][break]
“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.
[break][break]
“No, he’s right!” Kepler said to Oscar, voice sounding tinny in the pressurized space. “The terminology is technically the same!”
[break][break]
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.
[break][break]
“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."
[break][break]
He sweeps his thumb back and forth over the surface of the cup.
[break][break]
“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…”
[break][break]
He trails off, laughing slightly.
[break][break]
“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."
[break][break]
The Hoenn region whirls around them, the hologram rapidly churning through her famous locations and landmarks. All of them are smoking and crumbling.
[break][break]
They zoom out. The ground beneath their feet is run through with magmatic rock.
[break][break]
Kepler looks up at the handsome man standing before them.
[break][break]
“Yeah, absolutely,” he says immediately in the wake of Lulu’s idea to aid the Kindler.
[break][break]
If I wasn’t engaged to be married I’d be down for some violation of a type, that’s for sure.
[break][break]
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.
[break][break]
He leaned forward on the Steelix as the Steel-type snaked along the ground, scrambling down after Lulu when she dismounted.
[break][break]
“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.”
[break][break]
He looked around them at the slight rise of the crater lip.
[break][break]
“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.”
[break][break]
He reached for the chair, and tried to fall into it with as much grace as possible.
[break][break]
“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.”
[break][break]
He takes a break to sip his coffee and check to see she’s still listening.
[break][break]
"And we all think we're gonna be there for a couple hours... but it ended up being years."
[break][break]
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.”
[break][break]
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.
[break][break]
“Yeah. Oh, get ready, this is I think when they--,”
[break][break]
The hidden power warbled around them, making his stomach lurch.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Part of being in the good ol’ Rocket Science Brigade is you so rarely felt like the ground was firmly underneath you. Instead, you were in a constant marathon of trying to catch up on a rat-race treadmill with the cheese dangling just out of your wheelhouse.
[break][break]
“Blastoise, Starmie, Dragonair, two Clamperl in case we need to sacrifice one… I guess…” he added this last bit in haste because he literally just realized he’d brought two. Why’d he brought two? They had the same moveset and everything. Good god.
[break][break]
“Oh, yeah. Plenty of those.” With a flick of his wrist his Blastoise and Starmie appeared, quickly wetting down the environment directly around them with hydro pump so as to protect Lulu and him from the flames and fumes. “You get attacked by Moltres’ vengeful ghost once, shame on you…”
[break][break]
He jumped up on the segmented Steel-type with a little hup, recalling Callirrhoe. Cryosthesia hovered in the air nearby, fractal spines rotating as they floated.
[break][break]
“To the moon, Alice!”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
It was the kind of perfect that heralded an ominous portent, an event horizon of horrible that lurked with grasping fingers and inescapable pull just beyond the shadows of his vision.
[break][break]
Kepler is not the most social of autists but he zeroes in on Ash’s face when it falls.
[break][break]
“What’s wrong?” he asks, fighting to keep the waver out of his voice.
[break][break]
Ash kisses him and spins some rift about not deserving it.
[break][break]
“Hush. Of course you deserve all the good things that happen to you. You deserve me and sometimes even I deserve you.”
[break][break]
He flattens his palms on Ash’s chest and pushes himself up, rising above him.
[break][break]
“You make me happy.”
[break][break]
And he kisses him, soft.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Ashley Shepard

[attr="class","mitmain"]
It’s like gravity, the way they come together. There’s no subverting it, no fighting it. Kepler wouldn’t want to even if he could.
[break][break]
“Uh, yeah, I do.” Kepler flails an arm at the picture-postcard visage next to them-- the golden sun, the balmy air, the gentle, distant rush of the sea. “All of this? This is all you. I never would have left my lab if you hadn’t invited me out.”
[break][break]
Kepler drapes himself over the entire front of Ash like a blanket, hipbone pressing into his boyfriend’s palm.
[break][break]
“We’ve already faced down… two apocalypses? Three?” He said, counting off on his fingers. “We might be going fast for a normal scale but I think ours is a little skewed, you know?”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
He’d only been in this weird holo-chamber once before and it hadn’t been very enlightening. If anything, it’d left him with more questions.
[break][break]
Redoing it with different people was proving to bear more fruit.
[break][break]
“Oh, right. I’d forgotten about her. I guess I never realized she escaped.”
[break][break]
He followed Lulu’s lead, not at all bothered about becoming one of the gray-haired octogenarian’s dinner club.
[break][break]
He did wonder about the makeup of the world they currently stood in. How fragile it was, if it was truly made up of pixels and binary.
[break][break]
“Thunder.”
[break][break]
Yellow sparks rippled through the air.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
The Ultra Crater was new. But after all the horrors of the Borderlands, Kepler felt reasonably assured that there was nothing this place could throw at him that would be any worse.
[break][break]
A gauzy, yellow haze stretched above them, and put Kepler in mind of the piss filter overlayed across Metal Gear Solid games.
[break][break]
He hummed in response to her question through his own rebreathing mask, eyes covered by goggles to protect from the potentially caustic environment. Despite the danger, he was relatively comforted by how… comparatively normal this place looked, when put up against the Border. No vengeful Moltres ghosts or giant Golurk reapers.
[break][break]
“Of course. I brought along some Pokemon that I thought may also fit the criteria. Though I haven’t the foggiest fucking clue about what a robe of fire rats is,” he added, high-stepping through viney undergrowth towards the side of the crater.

[attr="class","mitpoke"]

[attr="class","mittag"]

Lulu Flint

[attr="class","mitmain"]
Lulu shows an interest in his cacophony of research that really just plays into the strange veneer of politeness that Kepler is finding extremely off-putting. It’s so… different.
[break][break]
“Yeah, of course,” he said, trying and failing to find something interesting to say. He’d really just wanted to show her that he hadn’t been idle while she was gone. That he’d taken the chance she’d given him and run with it, for better or worse. That he was someone to be proud of, maybe. Just maybe.
[break][break]
“It’s, um. New. We’re understanding that they’re recently arrived in Hoenn.” When asked about his interest in it, his mouth goes dry. He splays a palm over his abdomen without realizing it.
[break][break]
“It’s a long story.”

[attr="class","mitpoke"]