'Death at Ten Paces'.[break][break]

She remembers that legend from her silent, anachronistic village. She remembers re-enacting the scene with her brother, tip-toeing in the snow with the geom they stole from their father.[break][break]

So she counts down. Ten paces. Eight. Five…![break][break]

But just as she gets within swiping distance of the intruder, she’s lifted off her feet—only to crash against her glalie, the two of them folding behind another set of desks. [break][break]

After a few dazed moments, Yujin slams her arm onto a nearby workstation and heaves herself to her feet. She hurts in a dozen places and her mind whirls in confusion. The unknown is daunting. It changes all her strategies. She's read enough about Rocket's hidden weapons to feel deep trepidation now.[break][break]

“...Niola, who the hell is this? An Avatar? That a classified species?”[break][break]

She has access to most, but not all, of League intel; but she’s also not spent much time in the region. And though the creature has a distinct appearance, she’s only seen it in fuzzy photographs.[break][break]

And that's how she ends up all but shoving the nearby employees out the nearest exit as her worn-down glalie careens forward to take another CRUNCH, dog-piling the target alongside the frigibax.

[attr="class","bottom"]Niola Winchester Makoto Kurumi [break]
[break][break]
tl;dr glalie crunch. porygon rest. yujin is trying to get ppl to evacuate.[break]

SPOILER: Click to show

70 MP Post x7[break]
50 MP Recall Past Thread[break]
50 MP confidence grows[break]
50 MP strength[break]
50 MP antagonistic exchange[break]
10 MP mega[break]
25 MP KO a mon[break]
50 MP experience fear[break]
50 MP injury[break]
50 MP spotlight strength

Three-time Alolan Surf's Up champion, Yujin Ha![break][break]

Finally, a dedicated place to be babe and have fun.[break][break]

PRIMARINA TWIST, dattebayo.[break][break]

Dtd2GxIs

A year later, same coast, same wetsuit. Different goal.[break][break]

Trash and detritus bob in the water, endangering hapless squirtles and other testudines. Damn those irresponsible crowds brought on by the highly awaited Hoenn event, 'Clamperl Diving'![break][break]

"Ugh. The things I do for my community service hours."[break][break]
3ACYIa62

“Yujin.”[break][break]

No need to bother with her usual Bond-esque introduction. Even super secret special agents, of which she was not, yearned to cast off their masks and dip their toes in some soothingly-scalding water.[break][break]

He might be avoiding the divider, but she has no shame. She swims right up next to it to study his figure in the steam. “You know, I’m quite good with voices. And names.”[break][break]

And faces. And tics. And gaits. And all the other minute details that come with the observational requirements of her job.
“Have you been on T.V. before? You seem familiar.”[break][break]

She slinks away from the divider again.

[attr="class","bottom"]Samuel Boothe [break]

“Eh. You want to be a gym leader? I suppose there are benefits.”[break][break]

Much like the conductor that counts the seconds between trains, so too does she squint at the sun in the sky to calculate when the appropriate amount of descent has passed before she can appropriately boot this kid out of a clandestine mission zone.[break][break]

Fine, fine. He’s just having some summer fun.[break][break]

Yujin’s glalie goes floats off into the water and eventually comes across the barbarnacle, trying to freeze it solid for specimen. Meanwhile she watches the joltik fiasco with a frown.[break][break]

“Catching pokemon with the power of friendship seems very cost-effective. What’s your tip?”[break][break]

catch attempt barbaracle

[attr="class","bottom"]zachary stellar [break]

The inside of the chamber looks green but smells purple. Yujin pauses slightly, feeling like the ivy that grows on a gilded fence.[break][break]

The surroundings are serene, composed; they give the impression that everything will be alright in the end.[break][break]

She hates that.[break][break]

With a bitter smile, the agent walks purposely to the center of the room where the patterns on the floor retain the wear and tear of previous battles. She drags her heeled toe slightly as she turns in a half circle back to him, spreading her hands wide.[break][break]

“A trainer’s gym says a lot about them, no?”

She watches those birds fly by, wondering what sound they would make if they caught in the plane’s engines.[break][break]

“Your service, hmm?”[break][break]

One doesn’t need to meet the mischief in his eyes to guess at the kinds of services he likes to provide. But she faces them head-on, anyway.[break][break]

“I need the structure in my life,” she says honestly. “Being told where to go, what to do, having a goal and a cause. I was military before this, and the things I was working on—it was in demand by the International Police.”[break][break]

Without said oversight in her life, she felt small and frail. Like she was twelve again, wandering through the snowstorms of Mt. Silver. A hand had guided her out of that life once. She’s been chasing that hand ever since.[break][break]

“Besides, it has many benefits.” The somber moment is kicked to the side with an award-winning smile. “Like being here.”

She braces for the impact against her skull—an unexpected move to say the least. They trade blows by her slashing with the blade in return, warding off the grab attempt lest the intruder want to lose their fingers.[break][break]

Yujin dives behind a desk next to another staff member as a blossom storm bursts throughout the chamber. Electronics are wrenched into the air, stacks of papers go flying, cabinets rattle, shelves topple over, and people cry in pain for a myriad of reasons.[break][break]

It was as if the intruder’s only goal was to come in here, stall, and do as much collateral damage as possible.[break][break]

The glalie’s teeth crack and erode against the rapid spin, so it releases the forretress. It combats the springtide storm with a BLIZZARD that blows across half the room, still aided by the snow to give Niola’s pokemon some space as well.[break][break]

The porygon, meanwhile, warbles in stress in its corner, still trying to keep its computing going through the gauntlet of effects in the area. Focusing itself, it unleashes a HYPERBEAM towards the ninetales.[break][break]

Yujin keeps low with a bitter smile, stalking past a few rows and using the desks as cover as she does so. She fades in and out of the white frost, occasionally visible in the pinkish gusts, rarely leaving a fleck of blood behind, before darting in for the final stretch to thrust with the knife.

[attr="class","bottom"]Niola Winchester Makoto Kurumi [break]
[break][break]
tl;dr glalie releases crunch and uses blizzard vs springtime storm. porygon uses hyperbeam on ninetales. yujin takes cover and then goes in for knifey again.[break]

SPOILER: Click to show

60 MP Post x6[break]
50 MP Recall Past Thread[break]
50 MP confidence grows[break]
50 MP strength[break]
50 MP antagonistic exchange[break]
10 MP mega

Irritation floods through Yujin as all the nearby employees get pelted by hail and particle effects, the dragon breath sweeping through the computers. In the back of her mind—egged on by Niola’s warnings—was the reminder that the two of them had so much they needed to be doing right now.[break][break]

But they couldn’t. Because of this absurd fiasco.[break][break]

“...Hahaha.”[break][break]

In times of stress, rage, grief, anxiety, or just plain adrenaline, she has long defaulted to an insidious mania. It was her signature; her own emotional thief, and every worthwhile thief leaves a calling card. And it's been several years since someone's pulled a knife on her, perhaps not since her military days.[break][break]

Exciting![break][break]

Yujin reaches blindly behind her with her free hand; fingers fly across the nearby desk until it comes across a computer monitor, which will do just fine.[break][break]

All the while her glalie swells in size and demeanor, and seeing the forretress clam up from the previous attack, closes in on it by unhinging its massive jaws and then snapping them closed around its form. And from the porygon's end, an arc of electricity lances towards the ninetails and its shadow.[break][break]

“Why hesitate, sweetie.”[break][break]

Through the rapidly decreasing visibility, one can hear the agent’s howl of laughter as a peal of black intercepts through the veil, her hand closed around the monitor’s stand and swinging it to meet the knife like a shield.[break][break]

It shatters through the screen, becoming stuck.[break][break]

“Rockets shouldn’t pretend to care about lives.”[break][break]

Wind and hail and blurred lights haze around them, battering them, so she holsters her gun.[break]
Instead, Yujin deliberately pulls the blade out of the shards of the liquid crystal display, twirling it with casual familiarity.[break][break]

“Here. This is how you hold a knife like you mean it.”

[attr="class","bottom"]Niola Winchester Makoto Kurumi [break]
[break][break]
tl;dr glalie goes mega, uses crunch. porygon zap-cannon. yujin does some knife-fu.[break]

SPOILER: Click to show

50 MP Post x5[break]
50 MP Recall Past Thread[break]
50 MP confidence grows[break]
50 MP strength[break]
50 MP antagonistic exchange[break]
10 MP mega

"I don't know. Should my metagross be in the women's section?"[break][break]

One can hear her laugh through the mist. That metagross belongs nowhere, not as far as anyone could tell. If it purposely wandered into the men's side when Yujin got in, who was she to correct the ambiguous thing? Even scientists couldn't figure it out.[break][break]

After a few moments of readjusting on the other side of the screen, Yujin yawns. Said metagross goes back to submerging in the water, leaving only a shadow on the surface.[break][break]

"Rough week for you as well?"

[attr="class","bottom"]Samuel Boothe [break]

“A knowledge of anatomy is not necessary to debilitate someone.”[break][break]

Having reached the center of the training chamber, Yujin throws her coat to the side and squares her feet at Elise.[break][break]

“...But it certainly helps. Why don’t we focus on some non-lethal maneuvers? It’ll keep your conscience clear. We'll move onto pokemon after.” And people performed best when their actions were congruent with their morals.[break][break]

Like any self-assured practitioner of the arts, she beckons at the princess with the twitch of the fingers.[break][break]

“Come at me like you mean it.”

“Mhmm… what? No! Don’t do anything foolish.”[break][break]

Like cutting wires in an unidentified flying object. That would be the height of boomerism tech illiteracy. As her head swivels ninety degrees to check to make sure he wasn’t mid foolishness, he would see that her gaze was filled with shock and awful pity.[break][break]

But it seems something else finds insult in his words. The wires around their hallway begin to flex and contort like rubbery snakes. Pop, pop pop—such were the sounds of attachments reseeding from their receptacles like cartoonish plugs in the walls.[break][break]

Lifeforms converge down the passageways. Like the ones they saw littered across the midnight desert.[break][break]

"You have this, yes?" she says, going back to typing on her keyboard.[break][break]

29 clear the xurkitree wiring in the crashed spacecraft, though the party will find they are active, dangerous and "alive". doing so will allow the party to explore the ship and the unfortunate fate of its crew.