[attr="class","leytag"]freya morningstar

[attr="class","leymain"]Thalia has the gun pointed down, thumb trailing repetetively along the stock, a habit she’s long grown so used to she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.

She hums a thoughtful note and lets her gaze drift away, keeping the woman in her peripherals. A number of frozen statues-- corpses, apparently-- stand between them. The Salamance moves and the ground seems to heave, and all at once Thalia is snapped to attention, stepping back so there’s a wall of frozen stranger between her and the woman and her dragon.

Dropping to one knee, she checks the bolt on her gun and peers out across the frozen tundra.

“Certainly not,” she says, a thrum of excitement in her voice. Then, raising her volume, she calls, “Voss?”

A burst of light has the Glalie apparating from the Pokeballs stationed at her hip. She comes out raring for battle, but her expression cants confusedly as she peers around and sees nothing.

“Huh. Not you either, I suppose?”

There’s a deafening crack and the sound of something roaring, far away in the distance.

[attr="class","leypoke"]

[attr="class","leytag"]open - boxing bouncers

[attr="class","leymain"]Thalia may not be a member of Team Rocket, but she certainly was not allied with the Hoenn League. Whatever degree of compliance she had worked out with Callan Young was significantly less than a blood pact. Nothing bound her to the law.

So she strolled in through the sweaty crowds of underground fighters and those that flocked to watch them, boots clicking on the damp cement of the basement bar. Two pugilists punched it out in the ring, their hits landing with the rise and swell of the voices of spectators.

She paused before the signup desk, one half dedicated to bookkeeping and bet-taking, and the other a long list of entrants. Cold eyes scanned over her and dismissed her.

“Ah-ah,” she said, pressing one blood-red shellacked nail to her pseudonym on the page, “I’m next on the list, sweetheart.”

The bookie frowned, then tossed their head with a grunt, directing her to a corner to stand in to wait for the current bout to end.

[attr="class","leypoke"]

[attr="class","leytag"]freya morningstar

[attr="class","leymain"]Thalia hasn’t slept, really slept, in a long time. She’d adapted to light slumbers on the road in Paldea, where snoozing through the approach of a predator could mean injury, or worse.

Then there’d been the Dawnhunters, and nights filled with drunken revelry, preparation, and the chase.

Nothing made her feel alive and more well-rested than the hunt.

Her boots crunch on the harsh snow, ever frozen, even as spring crawls back to Hoenn. This place is like necrosis in a limb. She’s dressed in layers, mask pulled up over her face. Her breath is still a cloud in the air.

A figure moves, stepping clear of a frozen statue. Thalia lowers her rifle, more intrigued than anything that someone else has come so far.

“Do you think they’re alive or dead under there?” she asks, brushing a stray scattering of snow off the shoulder of some poor fool, her voice muffled by the mask.

[attr="class","leypoke"]

[attr="class","francie-tab2"]

[attr="class","wownewtag"] Aubre McKenna-Settentrione Galayne Valois Aurelie Lefevre parker jones

[attr="class","wownewmain"]The song is the pulse in her ears; it is the blood in her veins and the adrenaline surging like an electrical current along the map of her skin. The song is the breath in her lungs and the notes unfurl within her, chest expanding, out, out, out, until she holds it, entire body falling still in a pin-pointed extended crescendo of music as she took aim and her finger steadied on the trigger--

--a half-second twitch, the minutest movement. The pin snapped out of place, cord twanging like a whip. Their jury-rigged bolt flew through the air with a half-scream, half-whistle; it flew threw sparks thrown up by Aurelie Lefevre ’s fight and through the warping of air caused by Aubre McKenna-Settentrione ’s parabolic charge. It flew, it flew, it flew, it flew.

It missed its intended target. But it hit the bird.

The bolt struck up through the Corvknight’s gaping beak as it cawed angrily at the myriad pestilences plaguing it, hindering its ability to destroy its target. Up through the roof of the mouth, punching through throat and would-be brain with an explosion of sparks and a horrible wrenching of metal. It lodged out the back of the bird’s head, the automaton seizing in a cacophonous grinding of gears and belching of flame.

Thalia stood, the song a roar throughout her entire body; it fueled the fire of her anger, her ire, her wrath, that this damnable thing didn’t fall, didn’t die, didn’t get on its knees and beg for supplication.

“Son of a bitch,” she hissed, the earlier bravado and cheek dissipated into a pilot light of hatred, and she strides forward, Pokeball expanding in her hand.

The automaton is still wigging out, just less so. Thalia cocks back her arm and chucks the Pokeball at the jerking bird, her Glalie exploding forward in a burst of light. Light a cannonball, the projectile-shaped Pokemon launches forward, head couched, horns forward--

--and with a fierce headbutt aimed right at the spot the bolt hit, it blows through the back of the bird’s throat, sending fragments of mechanisms flying and causing the metal to wrench up around the puncture. The Corviknight’s head falls forward, halves of its beak crashing together with a spray of sparks, one garbled, jangled caw escaping, sounding like a wind-up toy that’s run out of juice.

It’s still standing, though it staggers, metallic wings careening off of clockwork walls to try and get its balance. Whatever Thalia’s Glalie did, it no longer has control over its beak or head, and its eyes have dulled, like there’s something interfering with its vision.

But they’re not dealing with a beast with a brain.


+ the bolt misses the bird's eye and goes through its throat.
+ thalia is being driven slightly mad by the song (prompt: experience your emotions being overridden by the song sung periodically throughout the kingdom) and its telling her to do dumb stupid things
+ she throws her glalie at it and punches it in the throat.

[attr="class","wownewpoke"]

[attr="class","samjermain"]His boots crunch on broken glass and Thalia looks away, stifling a giggle in her palm. It’s a trace maddened, like she cannot believe someone can live like this. But she once spent six weeks stranded miles from the Zero Gate with snowblindness and dehydration making her hallucinate.

Things like that would give you a new appreciation for being alive, no matter the form of it.

The image that pops into her head at the words binge-fueled jerkoff session would have killed her dad, probably. Well, maybe not. Maybe if she had a normal dad who, you know, cared.

“You,” she says, and her voice is genuinely affectionate, this time, in awe of what this single man can do all by himself, “have a power of unrivaled chaos inside you.”

She sips her whiskey, the grin still on her lips. Then the conversation turns towards her.

“I didn’t run,” she says, and there’s a shred of sardonic joy in her voice, mimicking his from earlier, “I was sent away. Like an unwanted gift.” She drinks, looks down the bar.

“I just didn’t come back in the shape they intended of me.”

[attr="class","samjerpoke"]

[attr="class","thadmain"]“I’m from here,” she says, gesturing at the early night darkness around them, the way the water fades it, turns it purple. “Hoenn, born and raised.” Her voice is bored, suggesting this is not something she is proud of.

The Lanturn pokes its head out of the sea, angling orb glowing brightly. Breakers drops a hypnosis over it and Thalia throws a Pokeball at it before it sinks.

“Oh, that it does,” she says, leaning back, arms going long in a stretch. “For better it worse, that it does.”

Her mouth quirks up at his admission that maybe their defense hadn’t gone so spectacularly.

“You’re all still here to tell the tale, right?” she says, cocking her head. “That counts for something. But then again, pests are often hard to kill. Their survival is hard-fought and not to be underestimated.”

She doesn’t really believe that an entire region’s worth of people deserved to die. But she’s so used to hating Hoenn that it just comes as second nature to her, by now. Like a Pavlovian instinct, a bully rising to taunts.

[attr="class","thadpoke"]