at least three. therein lies his problem. with the discovery of planes beyond ours, does that not lend credence to string theory? that there are infinite dimensions beyond theirs. how he possibly deigns to become the best is beyond her, but she will not slice that achilles heel today. 

no, she will close her eyes and tilt back her chin as his lips press upon her throat. she will sidle into him, one hand dropping to his lap, the other deftly loosening his tie, popping the first few buttons of his shirt. 

"mewtwo," she whispers. "so drab, knowing that even out there, our paths are so predictable." each syllable is pronounced poignantly, tongue lingering on her parted lips. "or perhaps it's poetic, in a way.

"our struggles are theirs. we're not so alone in this universe." blue eyes drink him in. later, she will dissect what she can from his travels, but for now she will greedily drink in his presence. she will give in to this horrible fondness she's grown for him.  

☉

her nonplussed look is a constant, but even she reacts to the theatrics gavin puts on before her. notes scribble themselves fervently in her mind, fingers pinching around the cig, wishing she could trade it for pen and paper. ah. her recent research has been all-consuming until it...hasn't. 

and with fernando gone who knows where (a space-time distortion, though she's no idea), she's had little to satisfy her scientific inclinations. her previous projects lay abandoned in their cages, starved or mauled by her lions, because what else could she do that has any significance?

she tilts her head at the question, cig rolling in her lips. smoke curls and the sandslash shifts with frustration. 

"it's all anyone wants these days," she says with a sigh, deflecting. 

"peace of mind," she answers. "immunity for my defection." she shrugs. "a small price to pay to get your little shop of horrors working."

Cillian Quinn

☉

the full force of his discovery is slowly unfurling in her mind. she'd come here with a purpose and, as per usual, has found it skewed - purposefully, no doubt. but what was once hypotheses are now theories and the practicalities of it are dizzying. hypnotically so. 

"there are always predators," she says through flashing teeth. but still, he belays many of her concerns and to hear validation that she can reach him, that she will reach him, is enough. 

so she loosens her grip and kisses the minute marks she'd left on his cheeks. 

"do they know of us now? this other world? or is this your own hubris demanding we be better?"

☉

ah, always the poet. to admit she enjoys it is foolhardy, but her lips curl, legs tightening. her smile is pressed against his own as he kisses her. tongue grazing his teeth, eyes half closed, she forgets her anger. after all, he hasn't come to her bed in quite some time. 

we did not create something new. 

her lashes flutter and there is their difference. her hands crawl up his chest, scarlet fingernails curving against his collarbone. her head tilts, scientist's mind drinking in this new information greedily. 

it is ours. 

"you seek to compare our reality to another?" she says, shamelessly laughing. "and if you'd stumbled on a plane of gods and monsters? would you demand we rise to their level?" 

she raises her hands, touches his brow, graces his cheeks. "i am yours. have me how you will." fingers curve again, but this time they bite flesh. "but promise me i will see our son again."

☉

it gives her some twisted pleasure to know that without her, the serum's been bastardized. but it also surprises her. she'd had more faith in lulu during their meeting. perhaps that's her bias talking - the women who've had to claw their way through academia typically prove more capable than their peers. 

but why? she thinks. why control something that does not desire it? she looks down, reaching again into her back pocket to grab another smoke. briefly, she offers the carton to him, and then lights up, still analyzing the beast that sits between them. 

he may be able to control them. that's a lot of power in the hands of someone who boasts his own collection. as far as she's concerned, mesmerizing an army of shadow pokemon will do little in the face of a meteor. the countdown's begun and everything else is trivial. 

her mind wanders. will my son be strong enough to escape it?

she laughs, a rattling smoker's laugh. "mm, i see my corruption took." of course, she'd broken the files before fleeing. through an artist's work, there was a chance she could be found. 

she flicks ash. "i can restore them. i kept a backup of every file." her grin is sly. "encrypted, of course, so you can't have this little one end this here and collect it yourself.

"but i ask - to what end? i'm flattered you've taken to the monsters, but surely you want more than to stick them in a proverbial gallery."

Cillian Quinn

☉

there is a tad bit of disappointment there, but not much. after all, she's never been after claiming credit for her work (and yet credit seems to follow her anyway). out of context, his cryptic information doesn't mean much to her. after all, she's been out of the loop with rocket's endeavors for quite a while now.

no longer consent to being studied. hardly. even observing her will give anya crucial information she'll - do what with exactly? her mind is turning, flitting back and forth with the wealth of knowledge presented before her. and yet there is a line in the sand she cannot cross. a man she's pledged herself to.

but she can toe the line. 

the sandslash is close when it's released, but she does not startle at its feral appearance. she tilts her head, looking slowly from trainer and pokemon. "hmm. three?" unfortunate. the process with the first had been...messy, but she'd thought she and cadis had hammered out the rest of the details before...

"they're unreliable. perhaps not under one in your specific," she waves her hands, grasping, "situation. but the project disbanded for a reason. they're too...volatile. turns out uninhibited aggression does not make for good warriors." she smirks. "but violence? terror?

"is this what you're after, merlino? because competing against the region itself in that department is a losing battle."

Cillian Quinn

☉

he follows her steps. she lounges beside the window, the occasional sound of her puffs escapes her. her lions sit beside her, claws flexing in an out, manes rippling with muted flame. he has not yet witnessed their bloodlust. the thought lilts her cherry lips. 

"i'm an artist," she says in response to his chastising. how can she not be melodramatic? with the world in the shape that its in, with her past resurfacing, with that little girl's laughter invading her most reclusive thoughts. 

she laughs and throws a look over her shoulder. "have you thought of retirement?" 

when its drawn down to the filter, she ashes it against her heel and flicks it into his waste bin. smoke still curls around her, wavering about her silhouette as she stalks towards him. her lions tense, lips curling, but they settle back down when she slides her legs around him. 

"what could you possibly want now, my love? we made life. we made something new." she leans in, eyes narrowing, lips brushing his upper lip. "what else can i give you?"

☉

liar. he'd been working in the background. she knew this. knows this. she was always a side piece in this story, a tool for a project that is his own. but still, part of her is with that creature. will it remember the way she sung to it? watched it with a mother's tenderness as it threw itself against its glass confines again and again and again, hungry for more? 

she brings a hand to her forehead, suddenly feeling lightheaded. loss is a troublesome thing. she hasn't felt it before. hasn't felt much of anything before. 

and being so close to him reminds her that he hasn't crawled to her bed in some time. 

"don't lie to me, darling. keep your truths quiet and to yourself, but don't lie." she stalks forward. 

she is a loose end now. with his research and his project complete, what use is she to him? she reaches a hand into her pocket and withdraws a pack, lights up a smoke and walks past him, toward his window. 

"will you kill me now, fernando?" she asks. 

☉

she's a smart woman, but her achilles' heel is her tunnel vision. when she fled from this region, tail tucked between her legs, hiding away in snowpoint and making a living off of her paintings, well, she cared little for the news. the constant reminders of her cowardice, but more than that - what waited for her for her defection - left her leaving hoenn shut in a lockbox at the back of her mind. 

and upon her return, she sought to pick up where she left off. she'd dusted off her old research, but never bothered to scour that something new. 

and just as quickly was her world rocked yet again. there's more out there. 

so why does this keep haunting her? 

she's clever enough to put together the implications. she raises a brow. "i've taken to a quiet life, so excuse me if i'm not up to speed, but are you suggesting that you are an avatar of a shadow?" curiosity finally sparks in those otherwise placid blue eyes of hers. 

"synthetic or naturally occurring?" are you another of mine?

Cillian Quinn

☉

or, perhaps, they haven't. she regards the man with a new kind of apprehension. she would never go insofar to say that the project was a waste of time. after all, it paved the way for the creation of project parasite. without those building blocks, the code for rewiring & rewriting, it wouldn't be here. 

she flicks the stunted bud from her fingers and tilts her head at him. oh? 

his attempt at assuaging her concerns is unnecessary. when she'd defected, she'd still been under cadis' jurisdiction. the rise of walsh had come soon after. no time like political instability to slink into the shadows and never resurface. 

mm, evidently she hasn't done a very good job of doing the latter.

she slouches to the side and sighs. "your point, darling? your point? so what if the world is burning? the world's always been burning. we're a species running on borrowed time." 

Cillian Quinn

☉

this could very well be a trap. it could be the end of her, but she found, when mulling the offer over, that she hadn't quite minded that. her legacy would continue; that amorphous creature would see to it. and she thinks of this, of creation and death, as she takes a long drag and plumes smoke from her nose. 

the nicotine hits as the smoke runs its course. she and merlino's careers had been passing ships. back when she had a rocket-funded lab, she made it a point to know just about everyone of significance in the organization. he was on her radar - an up and comer with a keen mind. but like with most men, she ignored him. or at the very least, worked quite hard to avoid him. 

he steps from the trees now. she ashes her cig and raises it back to her lips, calms cupped under her chin. her lions analyze him just as she does - though their gazes are hungrier. 

"anya," she says in return, voice a purr. no sense tying molly to the rocket boss, but again, she has a feeling the days on her alias are numbered. 

"i can't say the same," she says as she stubs out her cig on the bark of her tree. she crosses her arms. "tell me - why is it that my research has taken the interest of not one, but two of your organization's most important people?"

surely, by now, they've moved on to bigger, better things. 

she certainly has. 

Cillian Quinn

☉

that night in the baths was its conception. out of order, with seed planted long after its creation, but something maternal had awoken in her. a little girl's voice and her laughter and the careless sound of childhood. and she, then standing before the creature that might despise it most. 

where is it? her anger does not settle, but she's a clever woman - clever enough to keep her wits about her and put a cover over the fire. her lions still walk at her heels, claws outstretched and clacking against the floors. 

they hiss lowly as they pass the threshold. anya's muscles are taut with anger, lips twisted. very unlike her. 

"what did you do with him?" their son. her son. 

☉

the last she heard from him was after their experiments. after running test after test and concluding that the thing inside his arm was at war with the rest of him - no surprise, given his erraticism. and she never quite minded when he went missing. it gave her a chance to work, to not be distracted by the pleasures of the body. 

she's away from the lab for a few days, actually. it pains her to be away from the creature, as she could quite likely spend all hours of the day watching it. studying it. marveling at it. wishing she could hold it against her chest, nurse it like the child of hers it is. 

theirs. 

so for the betterment of her work, she relaxes with her paintings. she has a lilac print, spattered with yellow and silver, tucked under her arm when she approaches the lab. 

and finds it in disarray, her child gone, equipment crumpled. 

the canvas clatters to the floor. 

the story waits for her, rolling on a plasma screen. her fingers touch the unfamiliar shape, the purple body that shouldn't exist. their speech, his directive. 

it's not long after that she's on her bike. bobbing through traffic, nearly crashing the thing into the side of his flat. her lions are behind her, manes sparking brilliantly in the night. 

"fernando! fernando! where is it? where is it?"

FERNANDO SILPH

☉