Robin's eyes were saucers as she looked over all of the pokemon Josh had collected. Holy magikarp, he was not kidding.

She looked at Raikiri with some hesitation -- she didn't want to jump in at the deep end when it came to ride pokemon, given she was still a novice. She lucked out with Hydreigon being mellow enough to ride, and Drakloak wasn't a hard egg to crack once she knew he liked to go 110% all the time. "Raikiri is all yours," she said with a smile, turning to look at his other pokemon. She held out a hand for Sylveon's feelers, laughing at the pokemon's curiosity.

Mastema came close, bumping his nose against her hand when Sylveon pulled back. "I didn't realize Togekiss were so large. What a gentle guy." She rubbed at his head, pleased with his chirruping. Behind him was the Espathra Expresso, a pokemon she had never seen before. "I'm surprised you find the time to gather so many pokemon with how busy you are." She had no idea where to start, though she liked the gentleness of the Togekiss.

Robin nodded as Shalin assured her it would only be a few hundred feet down. She reminded herself that things were okay, especially because she had an experienced explorer with her who knew the caves. Still... Robin couldn't shake the bout of paranoia.

It reared its head before long with two Beartic blocking them. The one closest to Robin used slash at her, but Dragapult was fast enough to push himself backwards away from the strike. Meanwhile, Vulpix used disable to keep the Beartic from trying it again. Dragapult readied a dragon-type move, but remembered Robin at the last minute and paused -- the two of them had not practiced combat while riding, only movement.

Robin patted his head comfortingly as she slid off his back quickly, giving him the maneuverability to charge forward with dragon rush, tackling the Beartic to the wall behind him. It made the ground shake briefly, causing Robin to emit a small "Eeep!" as Vulpix stood defensively in front of her, creating a mist to prevent either Beartic from turning on Robin again easily.

With Shalin occupying the snow cat, Robin brought out Decidueye and Dragapult to assist with the soulmarchers. Dragapult led the assault with leaf blade, cutting at the marchers that held their defensive position, while Dragapult began to pick unlucky souls to bite. Robin turned to Snorlax to see if the two of them could assist Shalin with the cat, but something small and dark darted out at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it pace.

Subconsciously, she recognized its zigzag movement, but on the surface, she was only frightened because it was an unknown element of the wilds that moved faster than any of her team. The Marshadow darted past them and used force palm on Decidueye to stop her assault on the soulmarchers; while Decidueye cried out, all Robin heard was the pained cry of Seadra.

Months ago, she had fought at sea to protect Hoenn, leaving with a broken nose and KO'd team sans Phione who helped her flee when she kicked herself loose of the masked Rocket's grip. Robin was frozen in place as the mythical pokemon assaulted her team, dodging any attacks from her Dragapult while he focused on punching Decidueye. Snorlax, worried, tugged at her sleeve, but Robin was unmoving. Snorlax growled. Dragapult successfully hit the Marshadow with infestation, but it barely did a thing. Decidueye pecked at the shadow pokemon and received another force palm for her trouble, crying out as she fainted.

Snorlax tugged at Robin again, but she was only partially there at the border; a part of her was stuck on her seadra's back as the water type bucked, too new to her team to be loyal and too instinctual to sit tight as her other pokemon fell at the hands of an enemy Marshadow and Draglage. Robin was barely breathing as she remembered the way it felt, remembered how the Rocket's punch broke her nose and --

Snorlax pushed her to the ground. Robin caught herself on instinct, looking to him incredulously. She'd known Munchlax before she'd been a trainer, and he'd --?

Reality set in quickly as the Marshadow used pursuit against her Dragapult, pushing the dragon away with the force of his attack. Decidueye was a limp pile on the ground, and Snorlax was staring at her intently, waiting for her to get her head in the game. Mun had missed the initial assault, KO'd from a previous Rocket encounter; he wasn't going to fail her a second time. He picked her up from the ground by the waist, so she had to right herself to get her feet back on the ground. As she did, a pokeball fell from her belt, releasing Honchkrow.

"Honch-" she tried to explain, but the bird immediately spotted the Marshadow and understood. The pokemon had not seen battle since a Marshadow brutalized her with a thunder punch, but she was ready for a rematch, even if it wasn't the exact same Marshadow. Honchkrow made a battle cry as she used pursuit to get in close to where Dragapult and Marshadow were trading blows. Snorlax leaned in to poke at Robin's cheek, expectant.

Right. She needed to control the terms of this battle. She needed to have some kind of autonomy this time around to fix things. But what was the best strategy...?

Robin whistled a tune as Sinistea floated beside her. The duo had spent the morning in Mauville getting a harness for Dragapult and people-watching. The shopping was fun, and so was Robin grabbing a cup of coffee, but now it was time for the real purpose for coming to Mauville: visiting Josh.

She entered his gym with a giant grin. "Alright, I'm ready for some introductions to your coolest ride pokemon!" She was excited to see Josh handle Zeraora without getting thrown off -- something she would not accomplish in her lifetime, she was sure. She also urged the shy Sinistea to float in front of her, beaming with pride at her hatched pokemon. She wanted Josh to see she was bonding well with her newest member of the team. She teased, "Just don't break the sound barrier; my ears are sensitive."

Robin nodded at Shalin's idea. "Yeah, let's go check them out." She followed cautiously, wondering if the Type: Null was going to react violently like last time, but things seemed copacetic. The soulmarchers weren't too different from the ones she'd encountered her two other visits to the Border, but every time, something did seem different, and it took too long to put her finger on it. She liked the Border for its ghostly connections, but something about the area messed with her head, made things fuzzier than it should be.

She opened her mouth to say as much, to express her concerns about how much progress they made as explorers if things were hard to remember, but a blur of ice cut her vision and forced to her jump backwards. Among the soulmarchers was a white feline, a pokemon that hit her with icicle clash. Robin tossed out Snorlax. He tanked half of the icicles that came their way, shaking under its impact but not yielding. He was her toughest pokemon, and his recent evolution was indicative of his resilience under Robin's recent tough-love approach.

He struck back with a hammer arm, but the cat leapt backwards, far too quick. His attack hit some soulmarchers instead, disrupting their ranks. "I've never seen that pokemon before," Robin shared with Shalin as Snorlax reconsidered his strategy against the assailants. "It's faster than anything I've got," she confessed. Thankfully, Shalin had showed up with fast and versatile pokemon, so Robin was prepared to tank hits while she hit harder.

The frozen waterfall was awe-inspiring, but Robin was conflicted when Shalin explained how deep they would be spelunking. She thought the ice stones wouldn't be too far from the surface because of pokemon movement and maybe even the work of earlier excavations. She didn't think she was claustrophobic, but...

"Okay," she said before she had even made peace with the idea, "let's do it." She followed Shalin after getting onto Dragapult's back. He traversed the icy terrain far better than her, and it'd be harder to change her mind and bail while on Dragapult, who liked Shalin and her Ninetails.

"Um. There's nothing else in these few levels besides the usual suspects, right? Just some ice pokemon, maybe some ground types and all that?" She looked around every corner, wondering if there was something darker waiting for them. "And we won't be, like, a million feet below the surface?" Dragapult was fast, but if there was a cave-in... She laughed nervously and tried to play it off. "This is going to be my deepest expedition. Just curious."

The festival meant Robin had an opportunity to bond with her pokemon. She had to repair their trust in her after putting them through such a punishing regiment after she lost to a Rocket in the water routes. They had been severely dehydrated and fatigued when Gwendolyn Conway had pulled her back and checked her. Now, Robin intentionally spent time with her pokemon 1 on 1 to fix things. The celebration left her and Gengar sharing a shaved ice that had syrup poured on to mimic the appearance of a delibird.

And 'share' meant she had an opportunity for a few licks before Gengar devoured the thing at once. She often had to distract him to ensure she could try some, as his trickster nature left him with a strong desire to mess with her even when she was genuinely trying to show him kindness. If they could bond over pranking a third party, it might help repair the bridge, but she didn't have the heart to do it.

She was so involved in keeping Gengar from finishing the treat that she didn't notice anything was amiss until -- "Some assistance would be nice!

She sprung to action at the tone of voice, dropping the shaved ice (which Gengar caught on his large tongue and devoured) to hurry over to him. "I gotcha!" She barely got a few steps on the ice before she fell, hard. Gengar, however, entertained himself by getting closer to the violence, abandoning his fallen trainer without a second thought.

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The mist suddenly stopped being suffocating, but Robin's ability to take a deep breath was met with an impending sense of doom. She fell to her knees and looked around with wild, open eyes and saw nothing. The lack of stimulation, the lack of sound and the unchanging blinding-white scenery functioned like a sensory deprivation tank. Her mind quickly played tricks on her, catching glimpses of pokemon and people in the mist, but if she tried to move towards them, they disappeared instantaneously.

This was all she had. This was all she knew anymore. The mist was everything, the beginning and the end of the expedition and of everything else. Worse than when she'd lost her shadow, she felt confused, but the mist was there for her. And it comforted her, offered her relief. It was time to stop fighting things and just accept her fate. She could push through the mist into the thing that came after, the afterlife.

She rose to her feet to do so, but before she could get to walking where she felt she had to go, the mist was blown away. Robin covered her ears to protect them as Shalin's Buzzwole blew the mist away, protecting her from the dark promises it offered her. Robin did her best to pull herself together by the time the Buzzwole stopped pushing the mist away.

She was shaken, but she had to be strong. "Thank you," she said instead of revealing what the mist had tried to lure her into. She would need to always travel with someone else, she knew. Her own pokemon could be susceptible to the impact of this environment. It wasn't worth the risk. "Where to next?"

Robin adjusted her posture rod-straight as the ice beam knocked the Zubat away. She flipped around but immediately settled at the sight of Shalin, giving her an opportunity to exhale through the adrenaline rush of the encounter. "Uh, well, as luck would have it..." She looked meaningfully at Shalin's Ninetales, then released her Alolan Vulpix. "I heard Shoal Cave is filled with ice stones, so I was hoping to excavate one without getting to far into the cave. I'm not even that far in, and... man, is this place making me uneasy."

Maybe it was the cold, or the stillness of the environment paired with its isolation from the outside world, or some other thing, but it was getting on her nerves. Many ice types seemed to have unnatural or environmental elements to them, more like the world around them than like a truly organic animal. She figured that was part of it, too, though she liked ghost types which were hard to justify as animalistic.

"I don't really know where I'm going, but Dragapult has been watching my back. Well, for the most part." She paid him an unamused glance as he'd failed to see and ward off the Zubat.

"Zeraora? And you don't take him everywhere?" Mythical pokemon were so rare and such a testament to a trainer's will and experience if captured. She was surprised he didn't keep Raikiri with him all the time. She made a note to herself to harass Josh about it later; she absolutely wanted to see Raikiri in action. Maybe getting a better look at his team would help her get more comfortable with the idea of challenging gyms, though she still wasn't sure it was in the cards for her.

She hadn't tried to ride most of her pokemon, but her own Hydreigon's uncharacteristically mellow demeanor had made him an easy ride despite the species' reputation. She was rather lucky her most difficult wrangling had been from Drakloak, and it was primarily caused by how awkward it was to ride him while he crawled through terrains. Larger now, Dragapult was easier to sit on, and he was more agreeable to it since she often let him go as fast as he wanted. "With all the trial and error you go through with ride pokemon, I'm surprised I don't see you in a cast more often."

She laughed good-naturedly, following him as he checked on the Litleo. She loved watching daycare pokemon play together, though she often did not leave hers here unless they clearly needed attention when she was completing a difficult chain of missions and couldn't spare the time. She opened her mouth to comment on the nature of his egg when hers jolted in her hands, creating a crack at the top. "Oh snap -" She held the egg far from her instinctively, like one might hold a pot that's boiling over suddenly. "Oh no, I didn't think this would happen so quickly." She hadn't prepared herself emotionally.

She took a breath, then brought the egg closer to her. She stared at the crack but resisted the instinct to push or prod at the pieces to speed up its process. That could damage the pokemon inside; she knew that much, at least, about egg hatching. "I guess these had really been left behind for a while. No wonder the workers didn't want to hold onto them any longer."
 

Robin followed Ollie's lead, noting his own uncertainty. The dream-mist needed more study, and it would be a great area of exploration for Rangers to undertake, but Robin had no interest in being a cautionary tale. She tucked herself into the alcove with him, turning to watch his pokemon assault the tusked beast.

As the bouffalant fought valiantly, Robin felt a presence behind her that wasn't Ollie. She turned to see the shiny Duskull there, waiting patiently as if he had not just been in danger of becoming a footprint on the ground. "Duskull?" Robin reached out and grabbed him, holding him tight to her chest as if they were long bonded allies rather than a girl and an illusion. "Are you ok?"

As she asked the question, the pink environment seemed to flicker, then wash away. A dizzy spell hit her hard and she released the Duskull, holding onto the ground to brace herself as the mist subsided. She gagged, fighting the urge to hurl. Still, she was grateful to feel the actual ground instead of an abstract pink abyss. "Oh Arceus, that exit is disorienting...."