[attr="class","sidebar"]

[attr="class","postbox"]
Dreaming was her only solace.[break][break]
Each day was more insufferable than the last, but Nomi lived for the moment her head touched down upon the mildew-ridden prison cot, gifted to her by Greyson Connors's chivalry. For as soon as she closed her eyes - the toils of hard work and constant humiliation putting her instantly to sleep - she was transported back into the vibrant cityscape of Ultra Megalopolis, where she actually felt alive.[break][break]
Her mind was clearer in the dream, and it allowed her time to do what she normally did best: think.[break][break]
On the first night - the night after she'd found Lulu Flint, who'd helped her better understand the nature of the dream - she sat outside a quiet little cafe and contemplated every detail of the prison, from the Tera crystals embedded in the ceiling to the masks hanging in the hallway outside of the Chamber of Desires. Slowly but surely, she began to piece together the puzzle of their predicament.[break][break]
On the second night, she looked for Lulu again, but could not find her. What she did find, however, was Kallistatus. She'd started to feel her beloved Unown, sense it within the dream...following that thread of connection eventually lead her to a Pokemon daycare on the outskirts of the city. It was there that Kallistatus floated, suspended within a strange clear fluid, behind a thick pane of glass. The entire thing was akin to a test tube, especially to her scientific mind. She tried everything she could to break it, but it would not budge, not even a single hairline fracture.[break][break]
She wept in frustration. Are they right about me? Am I really so weak?[break][break]
On the third night, she tried asking questions of the Megalopolian guards - free of their chains and seemingly happier within the dream. How did you arrive at the prison? She asked them. What is the Never-Rot? And who is that Pokemon trapped in the prison with us? Their answers were vague and wholly insufficient. She did learn that they had been captured for far longer than she and the other Hoenn citizens had, which did not bode well...[break][break]
This won't be our fate, she vowed, her defiance a flickering candle flame.[break][break]
On the fourth night, she tested her powers. She practiced teleporting from one end of the city to the other in an instant. She altered the cityscape in subtle ways, bending reality and willing it to change. Excited, she returned to Kallistatus, tried to see through its singular eye. Looking out from inside of the glass test tube where they were keeping the shiny Unown-K, she was startled to see her own haggard face staring back. Is that really me?[break][break]
Though she could feel the resonance of her power, its presence within the dream as real as she could hope for, nothing she did could free Kallistatus.[break][break]
Anti-Avatar material? She wondered, of the glass prison within the larger prison.[break][break]
On the fifth night, she wandered the streets of Ultra Megalopolis, until her feet carried her to the central tower in the middle of the great city. Here, a small Pokemon - encased in the same thick glass as Kallistatus - floated within the liquid, seemingly asleep. Nomi recognized the Pokemon from the RKS Machine.[break][break]
"Azelf?" she invoked, as if the name were a softly spoken magic spell. The incantation did nothing, for Azelf did not stir. "How did you get here?" she found herself asking the same question over and over until it grew meaningless in her futility.[break][break]
On the sixth night, Nomi almost gave up completely. She forced herself to continue traversing the city, searching every nook and cranny for anything that could help her escape the prison. The despair threatened to overcome her, until she finally cracked.[break][break]
"Holo!" She screamed up at the skyscrapers in desperation. "How CONVENIENT for a sizable chunk of Hoenn's Avatars to be indisposed! Was that your plan all along?"[break][break]
No answer came.[break][break]
And then, on the seventh night, to her utter astonishment, hope returned. Immediately upon entering the dream, Nomi spotted someone familiar, someone she would recognize just about anywhere.[break][break]
"Isaac?"[break][break]
There was no doubt about it, it was Isaac Merlo - standing right in front of her. Without thinking twice, she threw herself at him in a tight embrace.[break][break]
"Oh Isaac," she realized with genuine sorrow. "They got you too?"[break][break]
But...if there was anyone capable of breaking out of a prison, it was the Liberator. If there was anyone capable of breaking out all those captured within a prison, it was Isaac Merlo.[break][break]
Which gave Nomi an idea. An idea she couldn't believe she hadn't considered yet.[break][break]
"Isaac," she held on tight to him. "I'm going to try something. This is a dream, right? But so was Galar. And that was real - it changed us, even if all of the details are still hazy. Which means this could be an alternate dimension, just like that was. So - "[break][break]
She shut her eyes tight, and focused on the transfer.[break][break]
"Please," the Visionary whispered.[break][break]
And then she attempted to take them both into the Unown Dimension, and away from hell.[break][break][break][break]
8hdyGuHn[break][break]
[break][break]
[break][break]

[break]

[attr="class","text"]

Avatar.[break][break]
The word had grown far heavier as of late.[break][break]
"Yes," she answered, that simple admission carrying with it the storied history of all creation: as if it were an incantation - or perhaps a softly spoken magic spell. "The Unown call me The Visionary."[break][break]
As they pulsed with white-hot cosmic power, ethereal and lovely, the Unown spelled out various words - innovator, seer, prophet, dreamer, kin - and as they did, shimmering blue crystal sprouted from the ground and morphed into a wide, flat slab: the Unown Dimension's version of a projector screen.[break][break]
Within the crystal, a scene began to play out: Nomi and Isaac Merlo, venturing into the RKS Machine. Things go well, until Nisa Holo of the DRK Triad traps them inside the simulated universe, hoping to kill them. When all seems lost, Nomi is able to summon the full set of Rocket Unown, and together, they help her and Isaac escape to their dimension - the one Jayden and Nomi are standing within at that very moment.[break][break]
As the scenes from Nomi's ascension played out over and over, on a continuous loop, she let her gaze drift back to Jayden. Hesitantly, she reached for him, taking his hand. It was so very cold.[break][break]
"Does...does Chien-Pao call you anything? Did it...give you a title too?"

[attr="class","ooc"][break]

Andrea Vaneau[break]
NOTES – Mission[break][break]

[attr="class","credit"]

[attr="class","pkmn"]

She appreciated his candor; it quirked the corners of chapped lips that had not known a real smile in days.[break][break]
"I like it too," she replied softly, absently fingering the shorn edges of the blue bob. Though it had only been a handful of weeks, she hardly recognized the pink-haired version of herself anymore: every old photograph a reminder of what she'd sacrificed for Hoenn's continued survival. So much more than hair had been violently severed; her academic career, her public identity, her civilian friendships. Worst of all, Parker could get hurt again if she wasn't especially careful.[break][break]
And was it worth it? Her doubts picked at her heart like a scab. What if it never matters, in the end...?[break][break]
Howard flipped to one such pink-haired image of Nomi in the newspaper he carried - a very familiar image, one she'd looked at so many times since its publishing that it was burned into her memory like a cognitive brand - and she nodded, resigned. She had expected this.[break][break]
"Come with me," she motioned for him to follow her into the kitchen, sitting him down at the table and shuffling over to the stove. "Tea?"[break][break]
She put the kettle on the burner without waiting for his answer.[break][break]
"What is it you would like to know?"

TAGS – howard slayte[break]
NOTES – SOCIAL

[attr="class","pkmn"]

Here comes the relief, a tidal wave crashing against the shore of imminent tragedy. Her breath hitches and she bursts into tears, the word cupcake smashing through her grief like a hammer. Alive would have been a mercy - so much more than she deserves - but alive and still hers? Why, it's a goddamn miracle.[break][break]
Tears fall like rain - stain her cheeks, soak the gauze - and she's folding in on herself, pressing her cheek into Parker's lap. It is an exorcism of emotion, selfish and cathartic, white-knuckled fists strangling the bed linens as she sobs and shudders. And when it passes, a storm out to sea, she looks up at Parker with puffy crimson eyes - and they are her eyes, without a trace of white or blue.[break][break]
Parker's next question, much easier to stomach, jolts her into action. She tugs on the threads that tie her to the Unown, communicating her will to the collective. The channels are open, as wide as they've ever been, and she feels a tingling on the back of her neck as she listens to their report.[break][break]
Gone, they sing across time and space. An empty, charred grove. The aftermath of a forest fire. They're gone.[break][break]
"I don't know," she admits. "I think I...hurt them, though."[break][break]
But I hurt you, too.

TAGS – parker jones[break]
NOTES – SOCIAL

[attr="class","pkmn"]

Later - much later, when she's cradling Parker in her arms, in their bed, in their house - it won't be her girlfriend's screams that haunt her, won't be the memory of the Councilwoman's vile contempt that shape-shifts her dreams into nightmares. It will be the whispered words of Elisabeth Fiorelli, uncharacteristically sincere, that paint the walls of her heart with guilt.[break][break]
"Trust, when given too freely and too blindly, is a temptation precious few can resist abusing."[break][break]
"I grew complacent," she tries to explain to the doctors, over and over, as if that might help them save Parker. "She was right to warn me."[break][break]
Crazed eyes, still ringed in white, beg for their understanding, plead for their judgement, but all they do is lead her down a sterile hallway and tell her to wait.[break][break]
So she waits. And waits. A nurse draws her blood, checks her pulse, hands her a bottle of water. Nomi chokes on the sorrow settling into her bones as she tries once more, feebly, to explain what happened.[break][break]
She's going to be okay, the nurse reassures her, hastily placating, the bags under her eyes nearly as dark as Nomi's. But it doesn't feel okay. It feels anything but okay.[break][break]
Hours (days?) pass, and in the bathroom, she touches shaking fingertips to hair that has been shorn off just below her ears - thinking vaguely it's never been this short - but then realizing that it's also blue. She doesn't yet realize it's the same blue. The color of her shadow.[break][break]
Parker doesn't realize it, either. Doesn't even recognize Nomi.[break][break]
Amnesia is a risk of serious injury, which some logical part of her brain knows, but the question breaks her anyway. Shatters her into a thousand pieces.[break][break]
"It's me," she entreats, as if it's obvious: a commitment to denial. She's going to be okay, they'd said, and there isn't a world where okay means forgotten.[break][break]
"I'm Nomi. Your Nomi."

TAGS – parker jones[break]
NOTES – SOCIAL

[attr="class","pkmn"]

She had seen him coming.[break][break]
She watched the city of Sootopolis with more scrutiny, now; more paranoia tracing the lines of her vision. A cloak of Unown hovered around her own home, invisible to the naked eye, vigilant in their adherence to their Avatars orders. Parker was still on bedrest, and she would not abide even her allies - save perhaps avery jones - showing up within a mile of her girlfriend without her explicit permission.[break][break]
Howard had been allowed to pass: the first of the Rockets to seek her out since PENELOPE LIVY had publicly ruined her, and one Nomi trusted more than most.[break][break]
There was a newspaper under his arm. Very few details escaped the Visionary's notice.[break][break]
"I told you to call me Nomi."[break][break]
The lock clicked. The door cracked open, crimson eyes - back to normal, now that she'd temporarily severed her connection to the Unown - peering out. She opened it a fraction wider, enough to let him in.[break][break]
What stood behind the door was a haggard version of Rocket's brilliant innovator. Dark circles under eyes that seemed to echo a recent anger, a sickly cast to her already pale skin marred with cuts, burns and bruises, and, perhaps strangest of all, short-cropped blue hair the same shimmering shade as Kallistatus, who hovered beside her.[break][break]
"Come in."

TAGS – howard slayte[break]
NOTES – SOCIAL

[attr="class","pkmn"]

"Calyrex?"[break][break]
Ah, right. That kingly Pokemon from Galar...the one that had spoken to them in their shared dream at the Ancient Tomb. She shivered - though the air around the tree was quite warm - remembering the cryptic prophecy it had bestowed upon them, more curse than blessing.[break][break]
Priam, who was putting on quite the show of courage, approached the bush. She might have giggled at his overdramatic bravado, if not for the very real possibility of a threat - after all, their region was in turmoil, and the tree they were visiting all but screamed "anomaly." This was a point of interest, and there was no telling what else might be interested in the fruit.[break][break]
"It was probably nothing, we can - "[break][break]
The sudden flapping of wings caused Nomi to reel around; a flock of crazed-looking, hungry Crobat had burst from the underbrush on the other side of the tree, and were rushing straight for the tree.

TAGS – priam conrad[break]
NOTES – Mission | Outfit

[attr="class","pkmn"]

Stakataka fascinated Nomi: the way they were made up of individual parts that joined together to form a sentient whole. It was not unlike the way the Unown collective functioned: each letter an intrinsic piece of the larger puzzle that was their divine language.[break][break]
Her primary purpose in coming to the Ultra Plan was to acquire a Stakataka, as THEO BECKETT had. But there was another reason she had wanted to speak with him.[break][break]
She needed advice.[break][break]
All in good time, however. As he pointed out the spacecraft, Nomi approached it with a practiced caution. Kallistatus floated beside her, singular eye unblinking in its scrutiny of their surroundings. She reached up, pulling back a cracked panel to reveal a web of sparking black wires. They hummed softly, as if still connected to a power source.[break][break]
"Perhaps," she answered Theo, thoughtful. "Let's go inside."[break][break]
Without waiting for an answer - confident he would follow - she stepped inside the downed spacecraft, curiosity taking charge.

TAGS – THEO BECKETT[break]
NOTES – ULTRA PLANT #1[break]

[attr="class","pkmn"]