dominic watches the miniature pokemon dance, swinging their leaves and flowers around as they twirled in an aggressive, noxious dance. dominic regards the motions with something akin to confusion and then turns to his manectric. the pokemon's limbs crackle with expectant energy and after a moment, dominic jerks his chin forward in order to give it permission to attack.

MANECTRIC with THUNDER

boots crunch against shattered glass, but they’re not his.

dominic arrives like a ghost, the afterimage of another. he hangs back for a step to place distance between them as the man saunters down the downtown street. his posture is casual despite the violence around them, something carefree in his jaunting movement as though he’s listening to music dominic cannot hear.

black hair shorn short, the glint of sun against studded ears - dominic scoffs in recognition when he sees the reflection of his younger self in a building’s window. he can pinpoint this day and this place; though the events lived on in his memory ostensibly out of sync. is the blood flecking his gloves that of the lavaridge gym leader? is it his girlfriend’s, the blond with the rock type pokemon that his team had ground down to a fine dust?

dominic peels away to a side-alley to move on ahead and parallel to the main road. it’s empty here, he remembers. civilians had been mostly evacuated, and everyone else had been called up to protect the league headquarters - but he forgot about caspian fucking ellery.

he turns a corner when the backstreet he had been following comes to an end. he sees the ranger immediately - the blood orange of his uniform like a target in the gloom - as he positions himself on the landing of an exposed bit of stair landing overhead, the barrel of his rifle trained on the street below. dominic furrows his brow and draws closer; he had never known ellery to be alive.

this time, the sound of broken glass underfoot is his.

dominic’s footsteps falter as caspian looks up to face him, the ranger’s expression twisting in confusion and horror at the realisation that the person he had been following is both below him and beside him. dominic lunges for ellery and snatches him by the throat to stifle the airflow, cutting off a cry before it can form.

he realises, two years later, that he knows how ellery dies. dominic inhales sharply as ellery fights to rasp for breath under his fingers. using all his weight, dominic pushes the man back toward the ledge even as caspian first tries to cling to the railing, and then failing that, digs his nails into the skin of dominic's hands.

dominic throws him off the ledge before he can be overpowered.

@hoennhistoria

LEVEL UP MOVE
redeeming from anniversary pack
volcarona, double edge -> fiery dance

parasect were always sick or infected with some form of ailment; after all, their bodies are nothing but decaying flesh moved and jerked around by something that shouldn't be there.

dominic turns to his volcarona and gestures to the squirming parasect, echoing the order they had been given earlier. they call it a coup de gras but dominic can't identify any mercy in the volcarona's cerulean compound eyes when it swirls its flame-licked wings and sets the dying pokemon alight.

VOLCARONA with FIERY DANCE

he's pretty sure the girafarig once belonged to a ranger before rocket had seized it into their arsenal. the memory of that particular venture is hazy in his mind; the slateport invasion saw them commandeer a large number of trained, valuable pokemon very quickly.

his hunch is supported by the fact that this girafarig would alternate between either stubbornly insisting he stop to help every person and pokemon in need or, alternatively, affixing a pleading doe-eyed stare on him until he would relent.

today, it is going to be the latter of the two.

dominic heaves a sigh. "go on, do your thing."

GIRAFARIG with POWER SWAP

like kyle's kommo-o, dominic's was placed in the back row, reduced to being just a head awkwardly bobbing above the others. unlike kyle's kommo-o, dominic's maintained a look of obvious confusion and displeasure throughout the entire routine.

it claps its scales down whenever he feels them rise in agitation and follows the moves as instructed, but only because it fears that screwing around would only prolong this already humiliating process.

@pokejob

TYPE 3 EVO
redeeming from poison patrol
hakamo-o -> kommo-o

he’s still getting used to the sensation of displacement. where a pokemon’s teleport is immediate and clean in its precision, darkrai’s boon confers something that makes it feel as though the world itself resists dominic’s movement through its shadows - cold, robbing him of breath.

this jolt feels like neither of those things because when he lurches forward, it has the violence of a push between the shoulderblades. dominic’s vertigo is short-lived (he’s familiar with this sensation, too). he steps, stumbles, into the gloom of the cavern as the incoming group unseal the door and dominic watches as a kid moves inside.

the structure behind him shifts, its stone-limbs grinding as its eyes flicker alight like spotlights. snapping his head to follow the movement, dominic doesn’t need a name to recognise the titan by its reputation. the search party, the regirock, the losses suffered are recorded in numerous reports; black on white, filed away in the recesses of league and rocket archives alike.

and there he is; a dead boy, a forgotten footnote, @joey. dominic remembers what was left of his face, caked in mud, decaying and darkened flesh clinging onto bone. the boy is close enough to touch when he moves past him, and dominic reaches for him even when he knows his voice will never pierce the veil between them - "don’t."

illuminated by the glow of jeweled veins in the stone as well as by the light of the regirock’s eyes, dominic watches as stone lurches underneath the boy and strikes upward, crushing him. did he cry out? was it drowned out by the sound of grinding bone?

the ensuing violence and harsh light drown dominic’s spectral form. "fuck," he breathes, throat tight with a frustration that he can’t articulate.

dominic has never been helpless, his very blood repulses at the idea. he reaches for capsules at his belt - or for a gun, for anything - but drops his hand as shades of legendary deities fill the space around him. not even they can re-write events made absolute.

@hoennhistoria
not recognisable at the moment

frankly, the roserade knows he's above all this; he hasn't worked a day in his life and he's not about to start now. petulant, he sits atop of the fence lining the pumpkin patch, glowering at both the curious ghosts and his so-called "colleagues" alike.

if anyone did draw too close to him, they'd find themselves treading on TOXIC SPIKES while the roserade brandishes his thorny arms in a half-hearted display of aggression as the flowers shed from his bouquets in a PETAL BLIZZARD.

@pokejob

the vines protruding from the corpse are oppressive and dominic finds himself forced to be in close proximity to his braviary as it slashes away at them, its beak and claws glinting in the gloom.

elsewhere, dominic can hear the efforts of other pokemon and their trainers as they make their way through the newly-sprouted undergrowth, accompanied by the scuttling of smaller creatures as they make their escape.

[attr="class","pokesprite pokemon braviary"]

SLASH

dominic watches the parade of toxtricity and exchanges a glance with his own pokemon. the wild ones may be driven to act out by the poison or whatever else bizarre phenomenon has seized the region, but dominic's pokemon matches the disdain of the swarm with its own unimpressed, haughty stare.

when they get to close, dominic's pokemon strums at its chest to assert its dominance with an OVERDRIVE as if trying to prove a point.

OVERDRIVE

[attr="class","pokesprite pokemon toxtricity"]