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"Awww, man, Sploinks. These bitches be zoomin.. It looks like Delfino Square at-- fucking, Mariomas, or, whatever holiday they have."
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Zip, zip, zip, went the Cyclizar. This way and that. Sometimes they careened into each other. She even saw one of them run over a jogger, leaving her plastered on the ground with tiremarks up her back. "Ope."
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Avery reached into her pocket and grabbed a Pokeball.
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"If I catch one and name them Yoshi is that too on the nose? That's the only cart I ever drove, until I unlocked Boo. Love me some Boo. King Boo the GOAT."
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Yoinky Sploinky had no thoughts on the matter, it seemed, and soon enough the two of them went charging down the hill into the fray, Avery loudly singing the main horn refrain from Delfino Square's Mario Kart 8 theme in doot-doots as she went.

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The world worked in funny ways.
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Ways that meant psuedoroyalty and the dregs of society would end up bumping elbows out in the wild, blue fucking yonder.
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Avery didn’t know that, of course. All she knew was damn, this is one fancy looking broad.
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“So, uh. Diana. Di-di. Dia--,” she stopped herself from saying diarrhea, babbling to soothe her nerves, like a baby sucking its thumb to quell anxiety, “--na. Where, uh. Where ya from?”
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The far reaches of Meteor Falls began to rise up around them, dusty yellow bunkers of a long-ago war.
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At least in Hoenn your Rocket patrols didn’t get you shot at with makeshift nervegas by Kanto freedom fighters.

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Parker doesn’t freak out at the presence of the tiny, pink gremlin. Parker doesn’t freak out about much-- externally, at least. Avery knows, a bit, that all the punching and tough-girl exterior covers some pretty big wounds.
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But at least she has a coping mechanism.
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Sploinks toddles off again. Avery leans one elbow on the table and listens to Parker soliloquy about her girlfriend, smile alternating between bemused and slightly freaked out.
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Speaking of monsters.
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“....wow,” she says, eventually, leaning back. “She sounds, um. I don’t know if ‘hot’ is the word I would use, but. She definitely sounds interesting.”
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Sploinky tugs at her shirt hem and when Avery looks down, there she is standing next to a a Pikachu. It raises it’s arms up and asks, pika pi?
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“Was there a point to all the white-eyeballness or was that just a fun perk?” she asks, zapping the little yellow Pokemon with a Pokeball.

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Unfortunately for Avery something that goes well in tea is not the first herb that comes to mind when she thinks of it.
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“Why anyone would want to eat flowers is beyond me,” she says to Yoinky Sploinky as she sets about trying to come up with something that will be more than just barely edible but maybe actually kind of good, okay.
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Luckily, the obsession with her favorite color gets to come into play here. Once upon a time she’d been looking for a natural way to dye her hair. It had been a short-lived phase, but she’d discovered butterfly pea flowers and all the good stuff you could do with them.
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“So you can actually use these flowers for, like, natural dyes, and stuff. It’s pretty neat.”
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She set her boba up to cook and grabbed a strainer for when she eventually finished brewing her butterfly pea tea. As that sat, she poured coconut milk and sweetened condensed milk into a measuring glass and plopped it in the stand mixer to whip up nice.
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With a big spoon, she dropped boba pearls into glasses; on top of that went the sweet coconut mixture.
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“You gotta really-- squish it-- to get all the color and flavor out,” she explained as she mashed her steeped butterfly pea flowers down over a strainer, wishing she had parker jones’s muscles for this part.
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When that was done, she poured the beautiful, stellar blue mixture over the coconut mix and watched it diffuse through, turning the glasses into a texture that looked almost like a starry night sky.
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She sprinkled some butterfly pea petals on top for good measure.
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“And voila.”

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It’s reassuring to know that some things never change, like the fact that she and her sister have always had the same taste in coffee (or, rather, lack of coffee, excess of sugar and milk with just the barest hint of coffee flavoring. Like a La Croix coffee).
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“She’s my monster,” Avery says, ruffling the fur on the bear’s head. “Two cinnamon muffins, coming right up.”
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Another thing that will never, ever change: her sister being catastrophically lesbian. All comfortable patterns, like well worn-tire tracks, like knowing the way home on instinct so you can sleep through your drive.
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Two frou-frou mochaccino things and cinnamon muffins later, Avery tips the barista well and brings her haul back to their table. She pulls out her chair to sit down and talk to her sister again when a pink head pops up over the other side of the thing, startling her. “Fuckinghellwhatisthatagremlin?” she snaps, recoiling.
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The Tinkatuff frowns, an amalgamation of steel dragging long behind her.
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“Oh, it’s a Pokemon. Sheesh. Never seen one like it before.”
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She zaps it, sitting down for real this time.
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“I heard Hoenn was overrun with weird shit again but. It’s really true, huh?”

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Avery did not know the first thing about cooking, or tea, let alone cooking bubble tea. Was that what you did for tea? Did you cook it? You applied heat to it… but it wasn’t necessarily baking, was it? Surely you didn’t bake bubble tea? No, no, you definitely cooked it. You cooked the leaves to make the hot leaf juice.
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“Oh, I have to like, talk about myself? Yikes.”
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The first round was freestyle, so Avery was going to (attempt) to make her favorite kind of bubble tea, which was a peach mango monstrosity of whipped sugarfoam in a glass with the barest dappings of tea and loaded with tapioca pearls.
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“My name’s Avery and this is Yoinks. We are making… something, for sure.”
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She put mango juice, peach green tea, coconut milk, and ice in a blender and blitzed that bad boy till it turned white and fluffy. Cooked tapioca pearls went into a glass, topped with a little bit more peach green tea. Then, she spooned the fluffy icey mix in until it towered over the rim of the glass.
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“Now for the rimjo--, oh, someone’s making neck-cutty signals at me. Can I not say that?”
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She topped it with peach and mango flavored sugar crystals and mango pieces.
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The idea of eggs makes her pull a face and she sticks her tongue out. “Careful, you sneeze and those things’ll explode.”
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She’s used to being the weaker sibling, all noodle-armed and sallow.
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“You punch, I hide behind you and make insulting comments. Vicious mockery.” She waggles her fingers as though casting the cantrip.
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When Parker jumps up, Avery jumps up. Half of it is following her sister’s lead, always. Being on the same wavelength. The other half of it is a bonedeep gunshyness, beaten into her marrow.
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“Y-yeah,” she says, taking the money and exhaling at the same time, trying to cool the adrenaline in her veins. “Same old same old?”
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There comes a squabbling of nails on concrete and Yoinkifur K. Sploinkifur herself comes wheeling around an alley corner, holding a Bronzor out in front of her like a shield. She skids to a stop at Avery’s feet and hoists the thing into the air proudly.
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“Oh, gee, that’s nice,” Avery says, fishing a Pokeball out of her pocket (another beaten-in instinct) and opening the cafe door at the same time. “Want a muffin, Yoinks?”

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“‘Course you did. And of course you are.” It is refreshing to know that some things will never change.
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A snort escapes her. “Yeah, right. You’re a lot of things but you have never been small or little. You came out fully formed. Built different.” She flexes a (puny, tiny) bicep for the meme.
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“’m surprised too. I wasn’t gonna come back, but…” At least here, her demons know her name. “...well, plans change. So. Me and the Sploinkster decided to make a change, too. Did you want a coffee or some shit?”
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It’s all very shallow funny ha-ha don’t look under the surface, Parker, don’t look, don’t look.

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The flaw in your thinking, dear Parker, is that no one simply stays in Kanto. Hold on, let me get the meme.
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Kanto holds on to you. Like a skeleton cage, ribs slowly cranking down in some version of a piercing garrotte, sinking ever deeper until bone hits bone and you become some wicked amalgam of calcified, putrid flesh. Then you simply stride back out unto the battlefield and do it all over again, to someone else.
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Is Hoenn any better?
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Can it be any worse?
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She half-crushes her drink in one hand, startling hard enough to scrape the chair loudly on the concrete. “Augh, holy shit,” but she’s smiling as she tips her head back and smiles up at her sister.
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“It’s hot. Has it always been this hot?” she asks, knowing full well it absolutely has. “Like the whole world has swamp ass.” Despite all the… everything, seeing Parker really is like coming home. A whole bunch of weight, not lifted, but definitely shifted. Repurposed. “Good to see you. You’re looking… alive. Which is apparently more than I can say for a lot of the region? From the news stories, at least."

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Even in mid-October, the humidity is thick enough to drown a Meowth. Avery feels like a fucking sponge in her baggy sweatshirt and ballcap, fading blue hair curling errantly around her ears.
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How quickly we forget simple things like the weather of the regions we grow up in. Blame it on her small brain. Core memories and shit keep getting shunted to the side to make up for newer, war crimier things.
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She’ll be assed if she’s changing into something else because that would mean, like, effort.
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Her knuckles crack with quick depresses of her thumb, and she stares listlessly into the middle ground. Her vanilla chai oat milk lattespresso languishes in watered down sugary doom. Speckled sunlight bounces off of skyscrapers and peppers the gray ground, early afternoon crowd scattering like flies on crap. Flies on dead bodies. Flies on sundered, reddened ground.
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Her sister has pink goddamn hair. She should not be so hard to pick out in a crowd.

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