The psalm is caught by her very own palm as she shut the briefcase, as if trapping his prayer for her own entertainment later.

And she parted her lips as if to say something, but appeared to think the better of it.

Instead she said: “Yes, there’s a lot to do. It’ll take me at least two days to fix up what I can, and then another two to draft the rest of the changes for your superintendent. I’ll have to leave after that for my next assignment.”

Bombings, gods descending from the sky, and whole cities getting taken over.

In the aftermath of those words, Navy gave the impression of being a decanter; life’s liquid poured into him, and he did his best to strain out the sediment. But with time it grows deeper, and more resolute, and maybe even more sweet. If she was lucky, she’d be able to taste the wine from the bottle once it washed up on the beach by her feet.

“...But my evenings are free, and you volunteered to be my guide. We should celebrate! Difficult as things are, you’re still becoming a gym leader.”

---

Navy

One could say she felt the kick more from intuition than the actual tower. It wasn’t the largest structure, but it was solid steel.

Yujin squinted as she looked down, the pale shock of Derek’s hair bobbing erratically as he cursed and gesticulated. “Uh oh,” she chuckled, checking the antennae one last time before descending.

...

“...Ah, did it misfire? My apologies. The targeting on that thing needs adjusting now and then…”

Yujin detached her climbing gear and loaded it into her bag. She’d gotten the gist of the situation—mostly. Byzantine stood there impassively with no shame whatsoever, watching the aggron.

“No one got hurt? You especially?"

Yujin would circle and pat at Derek's clothes, as if he was hiding blood underneath dirt, embers, and sweat.

---

DEREK HOFFMAN

”Nice to meet you, Ms. Garcia. I’m Yujin Ha.”

Though blind, Opal would still be able to recognize the lower, confident timbre of Yujin’s voice that marked her as an older adult. But age has never really stopped the honorifics, it just gave them different degrees of playfulness.

“Ah… the store appears to be going out of business. That’s the reason for the big sale right now.”

She ignored the two pokemon eyeballing her, and instead watched the chaos of the masses. Half the shelves had been appropriated into people’s overflowing baskets, and the other half was in imminent danger.

“Here, let’s try and find what you need quickly.”

She’d motion for the girl and her machamp, at least, to propel themselves forward.

“I hope you don’t mind, but are you truly unable to see? You must hear this a lot, yet how do you... do art?”

---

opal garcia

Irony immediately set in.

Yujin was close enough to the monitoring devices to duck behind them, hearing the metal rattle and groan from the impact of spikes. She then had a front row seat to Derek’s transformation.

"KILL. THE. GIRL."

It was an old reflex that prompted the ‘engineer’ to reach into her jacket. But she hadn’t made up her mind on what exactly she was grabbing for until her eyes glanced over to Callan, making a minute decision.

She pointed the little device straight at the ranger: a sliver of light shot across the cave like a silken thread. It would be followed by a high, but not lethal, current of electricity meant to incapacitate.

Right after the taser, she reached for a pokeball—but a tentacle would snap around her ankle in all of the commotion and pull, causing Yujin to likewise hit the dirt, being flung across the floor and right into the path of a likely angry, likely agitated steelix.

---

DEREK HOFFMAN Callan Young

On the balcony of a hotel, overlooking the sea...

She was a silhouette against the golden rectangle of the bedroom’s light.

Bare foot, bare a few other things, she leaned over the railing and watched the swarm sputter by with a… less-than-enthused expression.

So this is just one of the many strange quirks of Hoenn.

She’d never actually had to catch a pokemon before. The others had been assigned.

So she straightened up, reared back her arm, and tossed one out like it was mjolnir, raring to return.

(And there was no arm hair, so there was no drag.)

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