Vote results
Quick summary:
[X] Plan: Footing, Fishing, and Fighting wins at 13 votes.
I've included some additional notes at the bottom of this chapter. |
The first thing you do is start backing away.
You don't have a plan right now, but you
are aware that the only thing standing there and staring at the Toxapex like a tourist will accomplish is further agitating the Pokemon and, by extension, risk having the boat shatter like a dinner plate.
All things being equal? The very last thing this place needs right now is a large-scale petrol spill to add on to everything else.
You don't turn away from the Toxapex as you wade backwards, which does nearly end with you tripping onto your rear a few times when the uneven terrain catches on your boots, but you can't particularly trust that the Toxapex won't take the chance to attack you if they see one.
With each passing step, however rough each one might be, the Toxapex visibly grows less hostile. The leg waving doesn't stop—you don't think they'll stop until they can't see you any more—but the movements become less frantic, and the Pokemon's posture eases out a bit more
You don't turn your attention away from the Toxapex, and likewise, the Pokemon extends you the same privilege, staring warily at you—but now with a wariness tinged by a note of confusion, you recognize.
Finally, you stop walking back, and let your mind process what you've witnessed.
This entire time, something has been bothering you. Something about the environment, the Toxapex, the situation
itself. Until now, you haven't had the time to stop and think about it—everything had escalated so quickly when you reached the boat.
But now that you're looking at it, now that you're presented with the totality of the situation, you're left with a strong hunch.
You're probably looking at a
very sick Toxapex. Not from disease—though you suppose that it's possible they were also sickened by something on top of what you think you're seeing here—but rather from petrochemical poisoning alongside poisoning emerging from other dispersed chemicals in the local environment, acquired not just by general exposure by occupying the area, but also by consuming contaminated Corsola corals.
You can see it in the flush of some parts of their body and the pallor in others. The drooped skirt, something you initially thought might have just been a variable aspect of each individual member of their species, now points towards some kind of growing internal failure in their body. The spasms, too, could be attributed to this—heavy metal poisoning caused tremors, at the very least, and it would not particularly surprise you if the Toxapex here
had heavy metal poisoning from industrial chemicals in the water decaying back out into constituent parts.
Even the odd feeding behaviour - targeting seemingly random spots of coral all across their territory - could indicate the Toxapex was trying to go for the least-contaminated corals first, but 'least-contaminated' did not mean 'uncontaminated'.
You, of course,
can't be sure. You did not even known about Mareanie and Toxapex before you got here, and you can't say Pokemon health is your area of expertise, even if you are trained enough to identify indicators for certain illnesses.
But you did know one thing with certainty: the idea that poison-types are immune to toxic substances as a whole is a widespread misconception. They taught that to you in some of the earliest classes you took—going over the many misconceptions the wider public had about what was truly healthy for Pokemon as a whole.
The only Pokemon you know of who actively appreciated being exposed to industrial chemicals and other pollutants are the Grimer, Koffing and Trubbish lines, who all have physiological adaptations that allow them to safely ingest and then process those chemicals, turning them into energy they can use.
For everything else, all they would get is incredibly ill.
What poison-type Pokemon
did have is a resistance to poison-type
aura and the more commonly-found types of poison and venom in the wild, with the effect being more pronounced the closer given species had to interact.
Unfortunately, recognizing the Toxapex as sick is only so helpful at the moment. What it tells you is that using your styler is probably not be the ideal solution—as effective as the styler is, the chemical poisoning the Toxapex is dealing with likely played a large role in their behaviours; not just because the Toxapex didn't feel especially good and as such is lashing out, but also quite literally because the Toxapex is probably having its mood altered due to the poisoning. Your styler could help calm a Pokemon, yes, but it relied in part on a Pokemon's emotions
trending towards a single state of calm once you calmed them down enough, something that would be severely undercut in cases where a Pokemon's state of aggression and confusion is the product of chemicals screwing with their brain.
It could still work, mind you, but the process would be slow, the styler, as it always is, would be seen as an attack, and that would get the Toxapex acting up again, which would risk the boat's hull. In the time it would take the get the Toxapex to calm down, they would have probably damaged the boat badly enough to empty what is left of its fuel storage into the water.
All the same, the Toxapex seems no more inclined to climb off the hull now that you've afforded them some breathing room than they were back when they were firing Toxic Spikes at you for being too close. If you had to guess, they would probably going to wait until you leave their line of sight and, after making sure you are actually gone, they would
then climb down and return to wherever their den was—quite possibly inside of the boat itself, now that you're thinking about it.
But you needed to remove the Toxapex from the situation all the same, so you could plug the active leak in the hull and do other repairs. Worse yet, there's no real chance of you hiding behind some of the local ruins and then sneaking your way over to ambush them—they'd definitely hear you coming, you aren't
that good; you are in
their territory and trudging through knee-to-thigh deep water isn't really a subtle activity in the first place.
If it was deeper, you might be able to swim over in silence, but if dreams were reality, this boat would be in one piece with no sign of damage or Toxapex infestation and you would not be in this situation at the moment.
Unfortunately, all put together, this means you are going to have to be...
direct.
When you took the collection of rangercraft classes back at school, you had assumed - incorrectly - that the bulk totality of the courses would be wilderness survival and styler usage, the two things you had come to associate with rangers at the time. Mr. Zok, your instructor for the majority of said classes, had made it clear how
very wrong you were in that assumption.
Before you were even allowed to
touch a trainee styler - the ones which had barely any power in them at all - you'd been expected to know how to use the traditional methods rangers had to use historically to deal with rampaging Pokemon. Things like rope binding, trap making, and other restraining techniques that had been around for far, far longer than the stylers had been.
Stylers are, in the grand scheme of things,
quite new. New enough that Mr. Zok - a retired ranger in his mid-70s - had been a trainee himself when the stylers had first been invented, and was well into his career as a ranger by the time they started to implement mass adoption of the stylers. He had stressed to you that he was very fond of the stylers—he'd shown you a graph of rookie ranger deaths before and after the advent of the styler and the comparison was... stark—but that he also thought, in line with the rest of the Union bigwigs, that one should never assume they would
always have access to stylers.
Your stylers could break mid-mission. They could be taken from you. You could be injured out on a mission and find that your mood was no longer controlled enough to use the styler without risking sending a Pokemon into a berserk rage.
Hell, your styler could just fail to work sometimes. They are sturdy pieces of equipment, but they aren't
infallible. You needed a backup plan if you couldn't calm a Pokemon down that way.
You scan the environment, lingering on the collapsed building next to the boat. Getting up there would put you on dry ground, and give you a better angle of attack, bringing you roughly level with the top of the hull.
Your eyes flick back to the Toxapex, who is still warily watching you from where it's perched on the boat.
Your goal is simple: you need to get the Toxapex off the boat and keep them from getting back onto it, and in that time either drive them off or catch them. You are leaning towards 'catch', though, on account of the behaviours the Pokedex described to you—a 'driven off' Toxapex is probably just going to retreat to the safety of their den, which in this case is probably either the boat itself or
very close to the boat, and you aren't really inclined to experience what it is like to be constantly ambushed by a pissed-off, enraged Toxapex while trying to patch up a boat with structure foam.
Either way, getting them off the boat is going to be an involved process. B.B. himself might have the firepower to knock the Toxapex off the boat if you caught them unaware, but that firepower is the definition of indiscriminate. A powered-up Echoed Voice is about as likely to pop the boat's fuel storage like a balloon as it is to knock the Toxapex off of it, and at that point there is nothing stopping it from just climbing back onto the boat anyway.
Disarming Voice wouldn't damage the boat, sure, but you also don't think it's going to really damage the
Toxapex either. Toxapex is a defensively-potent poison-type with regenerative abilities, you aren't going to send one tumbling off the boat with a recently-trained fairy-type move being utilized by a Whismur.
That just left you to get the Toxapex off the boat, and you have an idea, at least, on where to begin with that.
You start by digging out supplies.
The first thing you pull out are the neutralizer pills. They work for twenty minutes at a time, so you didn't feel bad about preemptively taking one now, rather than later when you would have your hands literally full. You pop two pills out of the aluminum blister pack into your palm before stuffing it back away in your jacket for later.
Then, lifting up your respirator and ignoring the way the scent in the air goes from merely intense to overwhelming, you force one of the two pucks into your mouth and start to chew.
Your throat starts bobbing in the way you've come to associate with imminent vomit the second the taste hits you. It doesn't
quite taste like vomit, as described by Mahana, but it does taste like something about as bad: spoiled olive oil, with a dash of hard chemical edge, somewhere between sulphur and bleach.
You come very close to gagging, the only thing stopping you being the knowledge that if you start, it's really only going to end one way.
The seconds that pass are a gruelling test of your gag reflex and every instinct in your body telling you to spit it out, but you do, eventually, manage to swallow the chalky paste.
Then, steeling your nerves, you force your respirator back over your face, take the other pill, reach up, and carefully pull B.B.'s respirator away, pressing the puck against his lips.
Lips that remain stubbornly shut.
He is clearly smart enough to recognize that if
you didn't enjoy the experience, he sure as shit wasn't going to
either.
"B.B.,
eat," you say, maybe a little more tersely than is altogether warranted. You blame the foul taste in your mouth—a lingering taste so bad the saltwater below you looks vaguely appealing before you remember it's tainted with chemicals and dead Pokemon detritus.
Reluctantly, B.B. does eventually open his mouth for you, and you stuff the puck inside, which he promptly starts chewing on.
"
Muerrgh," is the evocative noise B.B. gives you, accompanied by a full-body shudder.
Yeah buddy, I feel you.
You pull the respirator back down over his mouth once you're certain he's not about to spit it out or get sick. Instead, he resolutely chews, swallows, and then proceeds to aggressively groom his chest in a show of palpable disapproval.
With that trial overcome, you reach into your bag and pull out your rope and one of the tethers from inside. A quick knot, tied just as your mother taught you, fastens it around the narrow opening on the blunt end of the tether, and a few sharp tugs ensures it's as secure as it looks. With that, you shuck the coil of rope, now with tether attached, up onto the shoulder not already occupied by a fuming Whismur, and reach back down to pull out your fold-out shovel before securely attaching it to one of the outer straps on your bag—for easier access if it comes to it.
Is this what the people who gave you the tethers wanted you to use them for? No, absolutely not.
Is this a use that you are going to get into trouble for? Probably not.
Taking a deep breath, you start moving to the side—circling
around the boat and Toxapex both, heading in the direction of the collapsed building.
Your movement doesn't go unnoticed. The second you take even a single step, the Toxapex on the boat jerks back to attention, their arms waving a bit more energetically, though only so much. You can sort-of tell they're not sure what to do with you—not unlike the Magnemites you met just days before. You're moving around and you're still there, but you're also not invading their space, so aside from trying to scare you off by waving at you, the Toxapex probably isn't terribly motivated to make this into an issue yet.
You are still, however, tracked for every single second you move, the Toxapex slowly rotating to always keep you in their line of sight.
B.B., perched on your shoulder, watches the Toxapex in turn, and you trust him more than enough to keep your own eyes firmly set on the water ahead, just to be sure you don't run into any hidden spines or other, equally unwelcome surprises.
You don't, to be clear. The ground is, aside from the considerable damage inflicted on it making it difficult to navigate, free of Toxapex spines or any other kind of trap.
By the time you make it over to the side of the collapsed building, the Toxapex is still waving at you at that slightly elevated rate, trying to look threatening, but it's no longer
as frantic as it was when you started moving.
Unfortunately, you're going to have to break the peace between you. The collapsed building is ahead of you, another several paces closer to the Toxapex and much closer to the boat. You know for a fact the second you start moving in, the Toxapex is going to respond negatively, no matter how slow you make the approach.
You are not going to be given the time and space to safely approach, set up, and then start your restraining attempt on the Toxapex.
You are, in fact, going to have to do that all in one go.
Rolling your shoulder, you slide the coil of rope back down your arm and grab onto it, loosening your grip just enough to let it unravel from the coil you wound it into, leaving the tether end hanging towards the water.
You let your muscles relax. You go over the plan again, then a third time, tracing your eyes across the places on the collapsed building where it looks as though you could get footing without collapsing parts of it onto you.
You feel the tides press against your leg like an affectionate Purrloin, sliding back-and-forth.
Then, you move.
You go from a standstill to as close to a sprint as you can manage in thigh-deep water, surging forward with all the strength you have in your legs—enough strength to carry you over to the edge of the building in just a few breaths.
The Toxapex
reels, flinching at your sudden movement. They let out a warbling, burbling hiss, this one urgent, louder than even the one you heard when right up next to the boat, where the Toxapex had the advantage of catching
you off guard. Their waving picks up to a frantic swing while their other legs scuttle against the surface of the boat, repositioning, tensing up for a fight—
"B.B.!" You shout, rolling the shoulder he's perched on and extending out your arm. "Launch! Battle!"
Your foot breaches the water, lands on the mound of crumpled wood and broken community.
As instructed, B.B. hops from your shoulder and onto the arm its attached to, body tense.
You throw him high, up towards the peak of the collapsed building as the next pump of your leg hauls your other foot out of the water and onto the wood, finding your next foothold, putting you completely on dry land.
You flick your wrist, starting to spin the rope-and-tether, loosening your grip progressively to let more and more of the rope get picked up in the spin. You haul it above your head as it picks up speed, keeping it clear from catching on the mound beneath you.
A lunge carries you up the rest of the mound just as B.B. comes to a landing next to you, fur already puffed, body tense and mouth pulled back in a defensive snarl.
The Toxapex perches on the top of the hull across from you, expression warped into palpable hostility—rage and fear congealed into something more volatile than the aggression they had showed you when they'd first appeared. Their legs reel back in with a sharp twitch, abandoning the threat display, knowing a fight when it is about to happen, and bringing them up high, ready to respond to any approach with immediate violence—
Your spin of the rope picks up as much as you can, this throw is going to be a tricky one, and you'll need as much force to compensate for your lack of aim and timing.
The Toxapex
howls, abandoning vocalization entirely—a noise so far beyond a warning that you feel it in your spine. A primal kind of fear catches in the back of your throat, a warning found deep in the core of your species, genetic memory telling you to
run when you hear a noise like that, for there is nothing but pain awaiting those who don't.
You ignore it. "B.B.,
Screech!"
B.B.
erupts with pent-up energy, the noise produced from his mouth quickly overwhelming, then fully eclipsing, the sound of the Toxapex's growing fury. His body flares with energy, tendrils of white pulsing with the ear-shattering decibels of his Screech.
The Toxapex's head snaps back as if punched, reeling. Their arms waver, their howl of outrage cuts out, and their motions falter briefly, overwhelmed by the noise.
You swing your entire body with the spin of the rope, and release it.
Carried by the weight and force of the tether, the rope swings in from the side like a flail, lashing out and across the gap between you and the boat. The rope catches on the side of the Toxapex's body, around two of its still-down legs, and the rest of it pulls taught accordingly, carried in by the weight of the tether as it curls around once, then another half, before the tether finally swings home and
thuds into the Toxapex's side, the barbed ends quickly catching on the Pokemon's jutting spines.
The Toxapex yowls, a combination of pain and surprise and disorientation.
You brace your back foot, breathe in sharply, and channel every last bit of strength you have.
Then, you pull with your arms, your hips, your back,
everything.
Mister Zok had said it like this:
if you put anything short of your full effort into restraining a Pokemon, you will fail. Why? It's simple: because Pokemon, especially enraged Pokemon, are almost always going to be stronger than you. Never assume you have the upper hand, because you almost never will.
The Toxapex barks out a shriek of fury and fear as you tear them violently from the surface of the boat and directly towards you.
They slam head-on into the shallows below, at the fringes of the collapsed building, with the boat several paces behind them, landing with a heavy
thunk.
Before the Toxapex can regather themselves, you haul sharply again, with as much force as you did before. You feel your body ache with the effort, but your second tug proves fruitful as you haul the Pokemon up out of the shallow waters and onto the wooden banks of the collapsed building.
The Toxapex
screams this time, and their legs flare out—you can
hear the rope encircling it creak under the pressure of their strength as they begin to thrash, the rope starting to come loose in places while in others being on the edge of snapping—
You haul on the rope again, forcefully, but the Toxapex jerks back with more force, driven by frantic, panicked energy, nearly dragging
you towards
them instead of the opposite. You're losing this tug-of-war, and
quickly.
"B.B, Echoed Voice!"
"
Whismur!" B.B. bellows, flaring white for a second time as air is sucked in through the holes on his head to power the sudden, growing concussive force of his voice. His vocalization breaks off into a progressive cry of deafening noise that scatters wind against your face and punches down to slam into the Toxapex below the both of you, making the Pokemon flinch sharply as they're driven down into the ground by the force, the water near to their tangled position peeling back under the pressure.
And that, it would seem, is enough for them to give up on escape, as the second the attack lands, the Toxapex stops thrashing in their attempt to get away with you and, in the moment where you're trying not to stagger from the lack of pull on the rope, the Toxapex lunges
at you.
They don't get far with that first lunge, and it's more of a hop, but what it does accomplish is getting a couple of their legs loose. Had the Toxapex been thinking clearly, that would be it for you; those free legs would let them retreat back to the boat without problem.
But they're not thinking clearly, so instead, those legs claw onto the rubble of the building and they start rushing at you with a howl of violent triumph, scuttling up the rubble.
You hear B.B.'s voice tick up a couple dozen decibels and a few octaves, and the Toxapex's rush falters, B.B.'s voice combined with the Toxapex's destructive rush to shatter the wood beneath and around the Toxapex, sending it sliding back down the ramp.
A fourth leg pries itself free of the rope and joins the rest.
Four legs, then, swivel up, then swing down, slamming into the wood nearest to it. The Toxapex's body glows with purple light, spines bristling, pushing out from their growth points—
—Another Toxic Spikes?—
And then, at the last second, where the purple light foams out from them, the Toxapex twists one of their free legs sharply until the spines align with
you.
The move reaches completion, the spines fire.
You only have enough time to twist your body and head to the side.
A line of searing hot pain erupts across the side of your face a fraction of a second later, one spine managing to scrape across your cheekbone rather than lodge itself directly into your eye socket.
Your grip slackens again under the pain as you stagger backwards.
You hear B.B.'s voice cut out, however briefly—
The Toxapex wails out a noise of triumph as they pull themselves fully free of the rope, legs bowing as it lunges forward, crawling back up the ruined building with a burst of speed as you stagger under the flare of white-hot pain spreading across your face—
Then—
"
Whis." The noise is quiet, almost gentle for B.B.'s normal volume—but the force behind it is something you can feel in your bones, a rattle.
The Toxapex reels, head and legs bucking backwards as if struck by a hammer.
You twist to see B.B., having at some point in the last few seconds hopped right up to the Toxapex's side, standing there with his ears fully raised, his mouth pulled fully back into a wide, wide snarl.
Your heart jumps into your throat as the Toxapex, almost disdainfully, raises one claw to try and take a swipe at B.B.—
"
MUR!"
This time, B.B. isn't quiet—it's loud enough to briefly deafen you, leave your ears ringing. The force is no less immense—it kicks you back, almost off your feet, bruising your chest and arms as though you'd been slapped by a Makuhita. B.B. himself
glows like a small sun, ringed with boiling white energy, arms pushed out from his sides, eyes wide with rage beneath his spectacles.
The Toxapex, taking the shot point-blank, fares far worse.
Beneath the keening in your ears, you hear some part of the Toxapex go
ka-crunch, joined by a faint popping noise. One of their legs gives out, collapsing inward in a way it most certainly should not be able to. You see their mouth peel open in a scream of pain, but you don't hear any of it—lost beneath B.B.'s howl. The rest of their legs try to fight the force, but only accomplish slowing the steady descent of their body as it is pressed against the ground by B.B.'s voice.
Yet, the power of the attack is waning already—B.B. couldn't sustain something like this, not for long, you know that, you have to act.
You try to find your bag in your peripheral vision only to find that the side of your face you'd taken the hit on has swollen up, your eye nearly forced shut from the growing inflammation. As if prompted by your recognition, the pain hits a fraction of a second later, an intense itching and cramping that drives your jaw up, catching your top lip on your bottom row of teeth. You pry your jaw apart, only just, as the pain threatens the steal your breath away.
Half-blinded both literally and by pain, you reach out to your bag and fumble for the pocket with the pokeballs—managing to find one in the next instant. You haul it forward, relief flooding over you as you spot the distinctive colours of a lure ball—
The waning power of B.B.'s voice finally gives the Toxapex a chance to haul their legs together, which they do with a sudden, jerky movement. Sealed in, the Pokemon flares with purple light—wide spikes of energy jumping from their body, surrounding them in a shell of jagged points, using the species signature move, Baneful Bunker.
B.B.'s howl still breaks off the spines, leaves behind growing cracks, but it's not enough—he's flagging now, volume dipping further, weakness filling his voice—
The shield
bursts, then, and the Toxapex surges up from inside, trying to stand—
Only to fail in that.
Two of their legs—ones that still look functional—fail to hold up against the Toxapex's weight and crumple, while a third, the one you saw before, remains bent and broken at the side. Wild eyes twist around as the Toxapex claws at the ground, finding
you, and they raise their last stable legs up, purple light bubbling, then bursting like a font of energy out from their body, spines bulging against their body.
A last-ditch attack, trying to kill you even as they have taken damage that would all but guarantee their demise out in the wild.
You throw the lure ball, and despite everything—despite the pain and blindness and the lingering shakes in your arm—
The lure ball lands, bouncing off of one of the Toxapex's legs and cracking open. A font of white light surges over the Toxapex, suffusing their form, swallowing them up—
The light stretches in two places, then bursts as a scattering of spines fire past you, lodging themselves deep into the wood—
Then, the Pokemon is hauled inside, and the ball snaps shut with a pronounced
click. The ball drops, landing first on the collapsed building only to then bounce off, dropping into the water below.
Your hand is already pawing around, gripping another ball from inside of your bag. Your eye takes that moment to fully clamp shut, and you're left gritting your teeth against the growing, vicious cramp in the base of your jaw, one that feels like it's aggressively hauling on your tongue. Your heart hammers, even while the pain in your face begins to subside as the neutralizers fight against the spread of the poison.
The lure ball rocks once violently, as if kicked.
Then twice, weaker this time—
...Finally, then, a third rock, this one a limp bump that barely nudges the ball at all.
The button in the centre flashes once, and you hear the distinctive 'click' even despite the loud ringing in your ears.
The Toxapex is caught.
Palpable relief nearly has you collapsing as you stand there, breathing heavily, feeling those same cramps from before no longer worsening, but not getting any better at the moment either. Your body joins those aches a few moments later as the adrenaline starts to drain out of you, a reminder that you've just put every muscle you have in your body to their limit to do what you did.
No wonder pre-styler, novice rangers died with such frequency, if they had to do
this with every raging Pokemon.
"Whis! Whis!" B.B. cries out, hopping between shattered boards to come right up next to you.
You wheeze out a breath from between clenched teeth and reach down to pick him up, only for B.B. to lunge forward and press his paws into the space around the wound on your face, reminding you that you're probably bleeding right now. He comes in to sniff in, letting out a series of distraught
murrs and worried squeaks as he frets.
"Ah—shh, sh, buddy, please," you croak, limbs still weak, each word like fighting against a wired-together mouth. "I'm okay, I'm okay."
"Whis—!?
Whismur!" B.B. barks at you, and it's definitely the Toxapex venom that makes you think he sounds almost
affronted by your attempt to soothe him.
You gently pull away from him and reach up with your right hand, touching the wound on your face. A straight cut goes from just beneath your right eye and drags itself nearly down to your jaw, passing over your cheek. The wound is a bit numb to the touch—the venom, you think—and you can feel the slight dip in your flesh where the spine had scoured across it.
It's... honestly pretty gross, but judging by the depth it's only surface-level—or at least it's not deep enough to warrant stitches.
If you hadn't moved your head, though... you could have lost or taken significant damage to your eye.
You shudder.
You glance at your fingers when you pull them away, finding the gloves wet with blood. Breathing out a sigh, you lower yourself down into a squat, pawing around on the collapsed building beneath you to make sure you're not about to sit down on a rusty nail or something, before finally letting your legs collapse and sit down entirely.
B.B.'s nearly in your lap a moment later, but you keep him from completely getting into it with one arm, moving your bag in the way instead. You pull it open, reach inside, and haul out your medicine box, pulling the bandages and rubbing alcohol out.
You dress your wound in short order.
You stuff everything back inside, your face now partially wrapped in bandages to keep the wound from getting anything in it. Once everything is back where it should be, you reach down again to offer B.B. a way up onto your shoulder, and this time, he lets you pick him up and place him there, though he does pointedly spend some time inspecting your handiwork with his nose, snuffling and
murring in concern.
Making your way down the slope of the collapsed building, you pluck your rope and tether up, unfastening the rope from the tether and checking if any of the rope has taken too much damage to be used. To your eternal gratitude, it hasn't, so you stow it and the tether away without further incident. Then, and only then, do you finally arrive at the ball, still floating sedately on the waves, and you pluck it, shrink it, and then place it in the main compartment of your bag, to keep it separate from the empty balls.
With all of that done, feeling fatigue flagging at your limbs, you nonetheless grab your shovel. You didn't get much use out of it back then, but you are certainly going to have to get use out of it now.
You turn back to the boat with the leaking hull. With your position as it is, you're on almost the opposite side to the crack in the hull you saw coming in.
Around it sits the two rings of Toxic Spikes, waiting patiently for you to accidentally poison yourself for a second time and perforate the protection your boots and wet-suit are providing.
You ford your way forward, unfold your shovel, and when you arrive, start smashing them. You're not above admitting the following few moments of violence is cathartic, though you're also willing to admit it's... maybe a bit
too cathartic, after all of that. Each spine you break with the head of your shovel bursts into a cloud of venom that fogs up the water, another reason to make sure you get every single one of them, as if you take a wound on your body that at any point will need to be underwater, you will now have to deal with not just bacteria, not just Pokemon detritus, not just
industrial pollutants, but also, the venom of a Toxapex.
Once you're done smashing a path through the spines, left huffing, you work your way fully over to the boat and take the route around to the opposite side you approached from, inspecting the boat as you pass. You can't just patch up the front and consider it a done deal—if the front took that much damage, what about the rest?
Coming around to the other side, you find that 'the rest' does have another rift in the boat—another opening, though this one is smaller than the first, and is a wide, circular opening, rather than a long tear. If you're not mistaken, this would have been roughly where the Toxapex came from, though they could have also come from the reef itself nearby—there are plenty of crevices and openings, that's for sure.
Arriving at the opening, you glance inside and freeze.
The opening isn't leaking petrol, even if it's a full breach into the interior of the hull.
You'd... prefer the petrol, honestly.
Inside of the hull, down where shallow waters, chemicals and petrol have gathered into a kind of cloudy soup, is a clutch of eggs. Seven in total, all of them stained dark and glossy with pollutants. Each of the eggs are twice as large as your closed fist, leaving them on the smaller side.
You stare at the eggs for a long moment, a sinking feeling riding down your spine to land somewhere in your stomach.
Pushing past it, you slowly, gently reach out to brush your fingers across one—
...One that promptly crumbles at your touch, falling apart into denatured, rotting sludge that spills across your fingers, having only remained in one piece because nothing - until you - had disturbed it.
The response from your body is virtually immediate.
You turn to the side, brace one hand against the metal of the hull, and pull your respirator to the side, gagging wetly towards the water below. Between the taste in your mouth, the smell—oh the smell that gets worse as you go without the respirator, now joined by the scent of decaying eggs—the poison still in you... it's all too much.
You stand there, heaving and gagging and gasping for air. You wait for the bile to come, but it never does.
You feel and hear B.B. humming soothingly, grooming your hair with his paws, trying to keep you calm as you did for him.
Your throat settles, so does your stomach. The nausea abates, or more accurately, pulls back into the pit of your stomach.
You pull your respirator back on.
In ranger school, you went through a series of programs meant to get you used to the realities of nature. Pokemon were a cultural monolith in the world, and most people couldn't stand to see a dead carcass. You, personally, had been prepared for that part of training, being a fisher and all. Hell, you weren't the only one in that class who got to sit parts of it out—that's how you met Lazza, in fact: her family were butchers from the slopes of
Mount Battle of all places; a kind of combination that meant she had seen more dead Pokemon in her life than you did, and your family brought in huge hauls of dead Magikarp on the regular.
You wish that training was applicable now. You
wish you had gone through a class to desensitize you to decaying cadavers and eggs.
Turning back to the mess, you breathe out and, with grim determination, go about looking to see if any of the eggs survived.
Out of seven, only two don't fall apart when you touch them. You determine the cause of the decay in the other eggs is likely that the life inside expired due to absorbing chemicals in the water, chemicals in the water that likely also led to their soft shells—most aquatic Pokemon have soft-shelled eggs—deteriorating until they arrived at the state you found them in.
The eggs that fell apart on touch were long-dead, waiting for someone to realize that.
That just drags your mind back to the Toxapex, though. You think back to the Pokedex, going over the entry in your mind. Toxapex and Mareanie protected their clutches of eggs, instinctively seeing said eggs as part of their territory, but after the eggs hatched, they didn't participate in any parental behaviour. No, instead, the subsequent baby Mareanie, still vulnerable without venom production, are driven out by the irate parent, forced to find their own den and nesting spots in the surrounding ocean—something that is exceedingly difficult in well-established Toxapex and Mareanie colonies, leading to a natural selection for the ones who could be combat-viable the quickest.
Maybe that is why the Toxapex fought you so much, or maybe they already knew most of their eggs were dead.
At the very least, this wasn't parental behavioural instincts—it was territorial ones, further amplified by chemical poisoning, driven to their most extreme as a result.
You pull the two soft-shelled eggs that remain in one piece out from inside and ever-so-gently dip them into the patches of clear seawater near to you, carefully wiping your palm across their surface to clean off the grime, decay and chemicals from the egg's surface. You do this for each, placing the first one on the hull as you do the second, and B.B. watches it all happen in silence, only ever interacting by reaching over to gently groom your hair.
He's a good boy, he knows you're not feeling great.
When they're both as clean as you can get them, you fish out two pokeballs from your bag, the swelling in your face finally dying down enough to make actually visually finding them a possibility, giving you back your peripheral vision.
You take the first of the two eggs and cradle it, bringing the pokeball up and pressing the button against the egg. A second later, the weight on your arm vanishes as the egg is sucked silently inside without any fanfare.
Pokeballs could 'catch' eggs, but while inside, the egg wouldn't develop, instead placed into a kind of stasis. The fact that the pokeball accepted the egg at all is a good sign—it means the egg is still alive, but whether or not it's viable is another question altogether, one left for whoever gets these eggs when all is said and done with.
The second egg, a touch smaller than the first, also gets sucked inside of the pokeball you press against it without any resistance, and though two-out-of-seven is not good, you are impossibly glad that you go two-for-two when it comes to the still remaining eggs. You really don't want to think about disposal protocols right now.
You shrink the pokeballs down and stow the pair away in your medicine box, just to be sure they're kept separate from the rest. You don't have a marker to write 'egg' on the top at the moment, and you really don't want to get it mixed up with any Pokemon you catch later, to be completely honest.
Finishing packing everything away again, you breathe out, long and hard, and stare at the boat.
You have work to do, and hopefully that'll take your mind off of the sensory memory that's kicking around in your skull like a bad joke.
It takes you an hour and a half to clear out all the Toxic Spikes and patch over the ship's hull. You thought you'd get it done sooner, closer to an hour, before discovering smaller gaps and rips in the underside of the boat, where you'd needed to get creative to keep your head above the water to avoid getting anything on your injury while still patching them over.
The boat is, to be clear, never going to float again, but it's also not at risk of tearing itself apart when the reef is pulled out from under it. At the very least, the boat would be safe enough for a team to extract the oil from it or haul it away, whatever they ended up deciding on.
The swelling in your face has died down into 'just' mild inflammation, taking you from someone who looks as though a Weedle stung them in the mouth to someone who looks as though they simply had a very unpleasant allergic reaction to something recently. The deep pain of the venom has similarly faded with the most severe swelling, but with it went the numbing effect closer to the skin, leaving the cut you dressed pulsing angrily against the bandages with each beat of your heart.
You could be doing better, but you could also be doing a lot worse.
You don't find any more eggs in the area, even after checking inside various other openings in the hull, which is a small but appreciated mercy.
Sparing one last glance over your work—the bright yellow hull of the packet boat now punctuated by splotches of greyish-pink fused to it, reinforcing the construction—you're left feeling mostly confident enough to turn away and make your way back over to the collapsed building, climbing up onto it.
You did, after all, still have one more boat to check up on before you could move on to other things. The abandoned fishing trawler and theoretical dumping site for people in Pacifidlog who didn't want to keep petrol around but couldn't justify the overhead cost of official channels to get rid of it.
Fishing the map out from inside your pocket, you crease down the water-damage wrinkles along the edges, no doubt acquired during your fight with the Toxapex. It's all still legible, thankfully, and as seen before it remains an ocean of blue dots joined by two red dots—red dots in close proximity to one-another, no less, separated by the building you're standing on as well as some additional distance.
Staring at it for a moment later, you slowly turn around until your back completely faces the boat, and then glance up from the map.
The electric boats you see in the distance initially make it hard to find what you're looking for. Very few of the boats are in good condition—most of them are fully or partially destroyed, leaving large metallic chunks jutting up out of the water where hulls and engines have been torn apart by tidal and geological forces. It's a forest of dead and dying vehicles, and you're trying to look for one that, as seen in the picture, is hardly unique among them.
But you do, eventually spot it, largely because it's the only vessel out among the others that's got a lot of rust on it. There is rust to be seen on some of the electric boats, but none so all-encompassing as the nose you see peeking up above the waves, wearing a second layer of rust like a ragged coat.
It's joined by the rest of the boats nearby in a series of torn-open valleys and trenches in the reef system, these ones looking far deeper than the ones you traversed to get close to the packet boat. You can see the path you'll need to take to get to the boat without resorting to swimming - something you're not opposed to but would prefer to avoid whenever possible when the threat of hostile aquatic ambush predators is involved, frankly - but in charting that path something starts to itch at the part of your brain that had you on edge when you saw that the packet boat had no traps laid near it.
At least this time, it only takes you a few moments to realize why.
You turn away from the fishing trawler to glance back at the packet boat, still surrounded by patches of chemicals and other pollutants, clear of most signs of Toxapex and Mareanie traps, but with signs that something had been eating the corals all the same. The lack of traps there could be attributed to the sick Toxapex, who had claimed the region as their territory, but had probably reverted to 'conserving energy' because of how ill they felt. Normally, a very sick Toxapex would still eventually have to lay said traps just to catch food, but in this case, that need would have never occurred, given the surplus of - admittedly contaminated - food nearby.
Further out, beyond the packet boat, is the boundary where you're starting to realize the weaker Mareanie - and possibly Toxapex - can be found, with their variety of traps. Traps that are present because the population there, however many there might be, are still healthy enough to participate in hunting and territorial behaviour, and not relying on instincts telling them to conserve as much energy as possible until they felt better.
Not to say that the area with those traps was left untouched by pollution—just that, unlike the Toxapex you ran into, they aren't completely overwhelmed by it yet.
And now, finally, you turn back to where the fishing trawler is, and compare.
It is, simply, empty.
By that you mean you can see no traps, no spikes, yet also no chemicals in the water, no signs of pollutants or spills or anything like that, even despite the fact that
you do not see a single coral that looks to have been fed on for any real length of time. Oh, there's
some signs—you see a bramble of corals that looked to have had their pointed tips gnawed down, but
nothing that points towards prolonged feedings, leaving most of the area defined by jagged brambles in a way even the route you took here simply hadn't been.
You feel your stomach twist, hesitating bubbling at the surface. Part of it is that the fight with the Toxapex you got into still sits heavy in your mind, but another part of it is that you're really starting to get sick of mysteries. You don't like the contrast of untainted water and untouched corals next to a hyper-aggressive Toxapex who, despite the wide-scale pollutants, fed on the corals with little restraint.
It makes no sense. You rack your brain for any chemical that might go unseen and might instantly poison anything that gets near it, but you come up with nothing—nothing that wouldn't be visible for other reasons, anyway.
If that area is so unpolluted, and the Toxapex you just caught was clearly trying to avoid ingesting excess contaminants with its feeding behaviour,
why aren't there anything besides trace signs of Toxapex and Mareanie?
You shut your eyes and breathe sharply out through your nose.
Why this couldn't be more simple is beyond you, but you did have a job to do, and you're about as healed as you're going to get before the day is done and over with.
"B.B., alert," you instruct, tucking the map back into your pocket and turning your attention back onto the fishing trawler.
"
Whis," B.B. concurs, standing straighter on your shoulder.
You work your way down the slope of the collapsed building and back out into the water, wading through it and keeping your eyes focused on the path ahead. You glance down every-so-often, expecting to find some spines—
maybe, your brain considers,
there's an odd colour-morph Toxapex or Mareanie in that area with bleached-coral-white spines, letting them camouflage spines against the corals—but nothing ever reveals itself as you trace around the vast valleys and crevices of this part of the reef.
You find no pollution or floating chemicals, and the smells getting in through your respirator retreat now that you're upwind from the packet boat and it's assortment of pollutants. The air returns to the normal smells of the seas, tainted by that distant note of rot, something you now realize is most likely the smell of decaying Corsola.
There are no threats, no signs, no warnings or cries or even just
clues as you trudge ever-closer to the fishing trawler. There is
nothing. Just broken, yet untouched corals.
Something which starts to raise confusing alarm bells as you get close enough to discover that the fishing trawler is actually in two pieces.
You can see how someone would think it's in one piece from a distance—you certainly had—but, no, now that you're close enough, you can see that a third of it is separated from the other remaining two thirds by several feet, having been cleanly torn off of it like an inauspicious wishbone. The corrosion, it would seem, had been more than extensive enough to let the boat shatter when it had hit the reef.
There's no putting this back together. If there
was anything in the boat, it's out in the ocean now.
But then—maybe the boat didn't
have anything in it? Maybe you are just really, really lucky this time?
Of course, that wouldn't explain the lack of signs of feeding in the area. If anything, the lack of chemicals despite the boat being nearly torn in half sends a thrill of worry up your spine as,
if not the chemicals inside, what in the actual hell is keeping the Pokemon away?
The crumpled remains of the fishing trawler, for a brief instance, become more threatening than a Toxapex lining up a spine with your skull. You swallow thickly, muster your nerves, and work your way closer, navigating across the narrow ridge of reef running through a cluster of deeper crevices. You glance down into them as you pass, finding that all of them go deep enough to leave the bottoms obscured by gloom.
But you still find no signs of feeding, not even in those deep crevices where Mareanie and Toxapex would thrive.
As you clear the ridge, the corals rise up once more, bringing you up high enough that water descends back down to your knees, rather than sitting at navel level. You continue forward until you stand just a few short paces away from the torn-off nose, staring at the corroded, rusted metal, looking for any sign of what's kept the local invasive wildlife away.
Carefully, ever so carefully, you flick your eyes between the boat and the ground, searching for something,
anything as you gradually circle your way around to the opening. Your heart hammers in your throat as you make your way around to the side and get a glimpse into the interior of the nose, anticipation buzzing in your teeth.
The interior is not unlike a cave: dark and gloomy, crusted in places with salt and dead seaweed. The water fills up about half of the nose, creating a kind of tidal shallow that ebbs and flows as the waves knock against your knees, made more wild by the uneven terrain near you.
It's then, inspecting it, that you see, at the very tip of the nose, furthest from you, where the gloom is deepest—you see a shimmer on the water.
Your eyes focus. So there was petrol on—... on...
The 'shimmer' shudders, and what you had thought was water splashing against some kind of obstruction near the nose moves, curling deeper into itself.
A droning noise rattles up from the tip of the nose, mournful and scared.
"
—Uuuuuuk..."
You snap back as fast as you can, anticipation proven correct. You feel B.B. bristle on your shoulder, but you're almost tempted to put him away in his ball, to keep him safe, because—
"
Muuuuuuuuuuuuuk," the Muk, obviously, drones from inside of the ship, making no attempt to get any closer.
Muk are dangerous, one of the kinds of Pokemon you didn't want to run into and have to deal with as a ranger. They could acidify their body to deal significant damage to flesh and bone, they are an animated, semi-amorphous mass of virulently toxic venom, and to top it all off, they cultured bacteria in their body that gave rise to a bacterial infection known as Muk Pox, of which there is no known vaccine on account of every Muk having a slightly different strain of bacteria.
It's survivable, absolutely—but the way they got you to survive it is by sticking you under intensive Pokemon-induced healing to
heal you through your body burning out the bacteria, which could take days and was done while you're in a medically induced coma because of how painful it is to go through.
Your instinct, right now, is to turn and run and then regather yourself and try to figure out a plan. This isn't an apocalyptic scenario, but tangling with a Muk is not something you wanted to deal with in the first place.
Only...
The Muk remains where they are. They don't move, they don't charge you, you see no attempt to make a threat display. They crowd against the nose of the vessel, pulled in a vast, roiling wad of sludge that huddles away from you, as if you're the Muk and they're the ranger facing them down.
And that, and that alone, is what gets you to not immediately run and call for backup. Even B.B. on your shoulder seems confused. Muk are not outwardly hostile most of the time, but they aren't exactly... fearful, not like this.
"
Kuhhh," The Muk warbles out from the nose of the ship.
You squint at it, taking another step back, just to be sure. Your eyes can't adjust to the gloom being out in the open light, but you spot something—the coloration of the Pokemon is a bit off. You can also spot white stones of some kind floating across its body, and at first you think they're Corsola branches, only for that idea to end up dead in the water when one of those stones runs up against the metal of the hull and rather than bouncing off, shatters like chalk and is swiftly reabsorbed.
Your gaze catches on the shimmer again, and you realize—it's not only the shimmer of light, it's also actual colour. The Muk isn't all purple, rather there's bands of yellow, blue, green and vibrant pink that shimmer and twist across the surface. It's only then that you also spot the next feature on the Muk's body—spikes, no,
spines. Mareanie and Toxapex spines that stick out of the Muk's body like arrow-shafts jutting from a target.
You know this kind of Muk—this is the Alolan variant. They found use in Alola as part of their pollution clean-up, plastic and chemicals both. They had these coastal facilities, you're remembering—partially floating on the ocean, which are basically huge Grimer and Muk habitats. They'd net in a bunch of plastic garbage out and sea and haul it over to the facilities, at which point the local Pokemon there would consume the garbage and turn it into, well,
more Grimer and Muk.
They're used elsewhere too for clean-up purposes, especially because of how docile they are when well-fed.
You continue thinking for a moment, staring at the Muk.
You know that the majority of Muk nowadays used human garbage as nesting sites, but that their wild habitat is places which are geologically active and gave rise to stuff like hot springs, where they fed off the natural sulphur in the water as well as other trace minerals and chemicals that rose up from the planet's interior. City sewers are their preferred spawning ground now as there are a lot more resources for them to draw from, but—
You can't see a Muk being hauled in from
either a sewer or a hot spring in Alola.
Which meant... you are probably not looking at a wild Muk, are you?
The passivity, the timid nature—you breathe out, and then slowly, slowly crouch down.
A lot more made sense now. Whether or not the boat had petrol or other industrial chemicals in it - which, judging by the fact that the Muk is here at all, it probably had - the reason why none of it is present nearby is
because of the Muk. The reason why there are no traps here is similarly because of the Muk, because for all that the Muk seems utterly unwilling to get near you or confront you, you can't imagine a Toxapex or Mareanie really meaningfully damaging it when the Muk was out in search of things to eat.
"Shit buddy," you say honestly. "It's luck that you managed to survive being hauled out here, but it's also really bad luck you ended up here at all."
There's a pause as your voice carries across the area.
"...Muuuuuk?" the wad of poisonous chemicals burbles at you, sounding less fearful, more curious.
This Muk is probably an industrial Pokemon—a working Pokemon, one who lived a life doing a job with a team as a partner, not unlike how Mulligan and the repair crew back at Mauville are. This isn't a battle-trained Pokemon, this is a domestic Pokemon, one that managed to survive being dragged from a pollution processing facility in Alola to Hoenn and end up here.
Judging by the amount of sludge you can see in the gloom, it's probably a very old Muk too—that would explain its ability to survive all that it did. It was probably quite powerful even without training.
"You know humans, right?" you ask the Muk, your own nerves finally settling, recognizing the Muk responding positively to your voice. "I'm not here to hurt you, I know you're afraid—my face looking the way it does probably doesn't help either, huh?"
"
Kuuhh?" The Muk gargles, and you can see, in that mass of churning rainbow colours, a single eye peel carefully open to squint at you. "Muuuuuuk?"
The pupil hovers on you for a moment, before a second eye opens.
"...Muk?" they mumble, more quietly, more... hopefully, almost.
"Yeah, see? I'm a human, not a Mareanie or a Toxapex—B.B. right here's a bit grouchy because I got hurt restraining a Toxapex," you tell the Muk, feeling something loosen in your chest. You are still holding on to nearly losing an eye, aren't you? "B.B.'s my best friend, he's really good to me."
"
Kuuuuhg," the Muk rumbles back at you, sounding less nervous, but they make no attempt to come any closer.
You wrack your brain for a moment, trying to think about what you could do to get it to come out. Ideally, you'd offer it a pokeball and hopefully it'd recognize what it was, being a domesticated Pokemon, and willingly be caught. After that, you'd bring it back and give it off to someone to find their way home to Alola. Muk are, frankly, no less invasive than Mareanie or Toxapex for Hoenn, though they are much less likely to meaningfully collapse the Corsola population, you suppose.
Your brain supplies you with a memory of the movies you watched as a kid. Orre... had, technically, a movie scene, but it only really existed in west Orre, where there existed money to make productions like that. Most of the movies you watched growing up were smuggled in from Konrin, and in Daugo, it's how you learned the language. One of those smuggled in boxes of movies had turned out to have a number of Alolan movies inside, and you'd been excited up until exactly the moment where you'd found out the movies didn't have any subtitles in any language besides Alolan.
Not even in Daugo, which you might have been able to stumble your way through.
You did end up watching a single one of the movies though, out of morbid curiosity about what Alola did with movies, and there was a scene in it—near the beginning, that had a line you hadn't quite ever been able to forget, because the expression the person it was said to looked so unimaginably furious when he heard the words. It always made you crack up, even if the scene had been clearly meant to be very serious.
You mouth the words to yourself a few times, knowing you're certainly about to butcher the line, but you ought to try—maybe if the Muk heard something in Alolan, it might come forward.
Maybe you're trying to lure a Muk you only think is domesticated and is, in fact, completely wild towards you. You have a back-up plan if that's the case - run, phone for help, scream - but you don't really think that's what's happening here.
You clear your throat.
"'A 'ole e ho'i kō wahine ia mau hana," you try, butchering the pronunciation thoroughly in the process.
Both of the eyes on the Muk pop wide open, and they slowly inch forward after a moment. Then, after pausing, they do it again, and again, until finally the Muk is emerging out from the boat, staring at you beseechingly, curiously.
The Muk's body roils as they take proper shape; a pair of arms, joined to a sloppy mass of sludge that spread across the ground like a slug. Out in the open, you realize you've dramatically underestimated the number of spikes in the Muk's body—there's enough to make them look like they lost a fight with a gang of angry Qwilfish.
They're huge, of course—the largest Muk you've ever seen, but you expected that much.
The Muk stares at you from the mouth of the ship, mouth forming and pulling open, revealing white rocks lined up like teeth, strings of sludge dripping from their body and down into the water below, only to surge back into the Muk's body. "Muuuuk," they announce, before continuing. "Muk—kuh."
You reach into your bag, carefully, and pull out a pokeball, presenting it to the Muk.
The Muk takes a second to notice it, and when they do, recognition flashes across their face. They don't recoil or retreat, but look up again at you. "Muk!" they warble, coming closer, within arm's reach.
"I really hope I'm not pissing you off when I do this," you say frankly, before leaning forward and gently pressing the button up against the Muk, keeping your hands clear from their mass. The ball cracks open a small sliver and white light swallows up the Muk, hauling it inside before clicking shut again.
The ball doesn't even rock a single time before it clicks loudly, the button lighting up and indicating a successful catch.
You stare at the pokeball for a long moment. You hope the next time they're brought out, they'll be back in Alola, rather than out here.
Your nerves finally fully leave you, and the relief this time leaves you
actively nauseous. First an enraged Toxapex, then a docile Muk. Beyond parody.
You tuck the ball away, breathe out, and wipe the stress sweat from your face with your sleeve. You lean your head over so that you rest your cheek on B.B.'s body. "Good job," you tell him, knowing he could have been a lot worse.
"
Murr," B.B. grumbles, but leans into you all the same.
You get back to your feet and inspect the boat, revealing that there's no pollution left and no signs of it having been there in the first place, though you definitely do think there
was pollution there. The Muk would not have stuck around if that wasn't the case—you would have found it where you fought the Toxapex.
Thinking about it as you walk around the shattered boat, the Muk being here makes a lot of sense in retrospect—you hadn't been able to put words to it, but you thought it
was odd that whether or not there was a petrol leak was so up in the air. The Muk is the reason why: people hadn't noticed it because the Muk had presumably been siphoning off a lot of it as it spread.
In one way, the reef is very lucky—you expect that boat probably had enough petrol and related chemicals inside of it to make the patch of polluted waters you found the Toxapex in look meagre by comparison.
Turning away, you reach up to rub your neck. Both boats have been properly identified and the one that needed it is secured. Your face still hurts a lot, but you have more to do before you can head back towards the floating wharf.
The question is, then: where do you start?
Choice:
[ ] Get to work setting up the tethers
[ ] Start looking for invasive Toxapex and Mareanie
QM: Hey fellas! I just wanted to say that whoever guessed the existence of Alolan Grimer / Muk was right but not in the way they were expecting. The major clue is in the fact that despite two boats which were being used to store excess fuel being thrown at a reef nobody was quite sure if there was a petrol spill. I'm still shocked anyone at all guessed this twist early on, and it did kinda deflate the reveal but eh, I can live with it.
On that note, I didn't stop the chapter at the emergence of the Muk because—well, frankly you guys put enough EXP into perception and handling to mean it wouldn't be up in the air if the Pokemon was about to attack you. If not for that, the chapter would have ended there with a 'how do you intend to respond', but I felt it was kind of pointless to go "here's Kylie very obviously laying it out that the Muk is the Pokemon equivalent of a scared house cat that got out and is hiding in an alley, do you want to attack it?"
I suppose I could have given the option of how you wanted to approach calming the Pokemon down but I also... didn't really feel that was warranted as there's no aggression display here. Like you needed that with the Magnemites because Papa Mag would have kicked your teeth in if you tried to calm it down with just talk, but this is not a wild Pokemon, if that makes sense?
Regardless, if you have any tips or advice on how to approach situations like that I'm all ears. Also, if you guys really wanted the option to interact with the Muk in your own way, tell me, and I'll try to adjust for the future. I'm still learning.
Anyway, the translation of that bit of Hawai'ian roughly comes out to "these things won't cause your wife to return". It's not a reference to any actual movie, it's just like the only partial string of Hawai'ian I know and had to double check through a dictionary. If I got anything wrong, please tell me.
With that, I'll be going on break for December since I am flagging hard and need some time to rest. I'll try to get some updates to the move list out, as well as the types 101 post, and I'll still be closing the vote within a couple of days. I should be back closer to the end of December (pre-Christmas, maybe) but I'll have to see how I feel.
I'll see you then! |
