[attr="class","rubyw"]

"Yeah, no kidding," Ruby grumbled. She still wanted to know whose bright idea this mission was in the first place.

[break][break]"You got it, Science Boy," she said with some snark.

[break][break]Unfortunately, Ruby wasn't able to stick to her word before the Dusknoir caught itself in one of her Dusk Balls. And then something zipped across the ceiling, making Kepler freak out even worse. At first, it was comforting to know that she wasn't the only one freaked out by all this, but she did not want to be responsible for him if he had a heart attack out here.

[break][break]"Come on," she said, just as sick of this shit as he was. "If it's another Pokémon, we'll just kick its ass and get out of here." She grabbed his wrist in one hand and her bat in the other and power-walked after Cerberus and Deimos. Cerberus, realizing his trainer wasn't following as closely as he'd thought, stopped and waited for her to catch up before continuing his pursuit. Though it wasn't like he needed to track his new target too hard; it left behind a trail of blown-out bulbs, sparks, and buzzing laughter that eventually led them back to the security room.

[break][break]The monitors on the wall all lit up at once, but instead of security feeds, the whole setup was taken up by solid blue eyes and a toothy grin. One monitor blinked out for a second, then another, then few more, and then when more of them went off, they came back on with a different part of the face on it until the whole thing was jumbled like a grinning tile puzzle.

[break][break]"All right, cut the crap!" Ruby shouted at it. "Come out here and fight!"

[break][break]The face blinked its scrambled eyes, and its scattered mouth fell in confusion. For a tense moment, nothing happened. Then, its grin returned with a vengeance a split second before the monitors shut off. An orange-and-blue bolt darted out of the monitors and into one of the computers. Then, it jumped to another one. It hopped chaotically between machines so fast that Ruby could barely keep up; she'd since let go of Kepler's wrist and now held her bat with both hands. She had no idea if it would even work against this thing, but it made her feel better.

[break][break]From behind her came a buzzing battlecry. She spun around to see a Rotom launching itself at her from one of the monitors. Cerberus let out a Roar that knocked it back into the wall, but it quickly righted itself and ducked back into a computer.