Third.

[azumods]

ENCOUNTER 3. Snowpoint City is small, cold, and definitely not covered in waist-high snowdrifts. The traveling becomes far easier as soon as you enter the city limits, and the bright orange roof of the Pokémon Center is easy to spot among the white blanketing of snow dusting the ground and the local buildings; it's warm in there, and the attendants inside seem used to this sort of thing - people wandering in bedraggled and cold, unprepared for the weather and the routes leading up to this place - and they'll give you warm, fresh blankets and mugs of warm drinks that steam in your hands. The taste is difficult to place - it's definitely made of berries of some sort, though it doesn't seem to be proper tea or coffee; the point, however, is that it's good at warming you from the inside, and while it doesn't have proper medicinal properties, it'll at least perk you up a bit and make it seem like facing the rest of the day might not be so terrible. Which is fortunate, really, given what's to come. Come mid-afternoon, there's a loud, sharp whistle from the doorway of the Center - it's high and shrill, the sort of thing that's designed to get as much attention as possible, in as little time as possible. It'll stop before it goes on too long, but it's definitely enough to be heard, and the source isn't exactly hard to spot. She's another one that isn't dressed like the other members of Team Galactic, her hair and outfit far different from the usual grunt attire; she seems a bit older than Saturn, her expression harder and more experienced. She's smiling a bit now that she's holding the room, but the expression is strange in that it doesn't reach her eyes, even though those are just as bright and alert as her fellow Commander's were. It's cold. Unwelcoming. And deeply, deeply wrong in a way that's both vaguely similar and completely different to the way the emotionless people here tend to present - it's unfeeling, but in a way that's natural rather than enforced. Dangerous. "So you're the group that left us before I could get to know you properly," she says, and her voice is as cold as the rest of her; it's cordial, perhaps overly so, but there's a firmness to it that heavily implies that she's only being nice because she's expected to be nice. Because maybe if she's nice, this will go nice and easy and nothing will happen. "I'm Commander Jupiter, serving Team Galactic under the orders of Master Cyrus. Sorry I couldn't meet you all properly before; things got a bit hectic. But we can change that now." Her tone implies that that isn't a request.

Comments

[discutio]

I find it odd that your own coworker would be your first guess. Dissension in the ranks, Commander?

[azumods]

More that I can't figure out who else I should be mad at for telling you to come here. Saturn would be the first guess, since he's the one who's, you know. Not supposed to be doing things like that.

Like I've said, he's been weird lately. I don't appreciate him being weird, but it's not like I'm going to beat him down for it.

[discutio]

Saturn certainly did strike me as a touch eccentric, I must admit.

[Refusing to answer at all was only going to strain the situation further. But what answer was there to give? Selling out Maylene wasn't an option. Set Jupiter and Saturn against each other was a better route, but not ideal. Even though Saturn remained an enemy, it would have been in poor judgment to make that situation worse while there was still potential in their last interaction. The only other choice was...]

We were told of the guardians' existence when we first awoke. Were you not already aware of that?

[Lying like a politician.]

[azumods]

I don't know how I would, given that I wasn't around when you woke up.

[...]

"Eccentric" how, exactly?

[discutio]

I got enough of an impression of him to know the sort. I've dealt with my fair share of people like him back at home--insufferable and perhaps a bit...shall we say, pretentious. [sorry not sorry, saturn]

Do forgive my assumption; I thought you might have had a closer eye on things than is apparently the case.

[He was willing to bank on one person being able to hold her own in a bad situation, and from a purely pragmatic angle it was better to take that risk than sell out Maylene.]

It was Cynthia who greeted us that day, and she who told us of the guardians.

[You know, like a liar. A really good one who is not entirely lying.]

[azumods]

[Mm.]

I'm not going to bother asking you if you're still in contact with her, because I'm not expecting you to sell out your own side.

[discutio]

A wise decision, I think.

[niceoppai]

You know, less going around like he owns the place and more "go away, let me polish my computer."

[And Zelda's already chosen who to sell out, it seems, and it's not Maylene or Saturn, so...]

When Cynthia picked a fight with him, he was kinda uptight, too.

[azumods]

I'd expect that. We thought she was dead; he seemed pretty mad that she wasn't when I talked to him about it.

[niceoppai]

What, did she, like, fake her death when rebelling didn't work? 'Cause I used to be a detective, I've seen the whole "secretly take swimming lessons, go out on a boat, ditch your stuff in the lake and run off to a different town" thing.

[semistableman]

It's not a bad strategy, but staying in the country isn't the best way to keep a low profile.

[niceoppai]

Depends who's looking for you, I guess. One of 'em was halfway to Ku-Rong when we caught up with 'em. Though that's still in the same system, but y'know.

[semistableman]

...System?

[He has absolutely no idea what that means.]

[niceoppai]

Y'know, like there's planets orbiting a sun, sometimes asteroids and stuff too, and a bunch of those planets have moons and stuff. That kind of system.

[semistableman]

I didn’t know there was a word for it.

[niceoppai]

Huh. Well, now you do? Guess they don't say that stuff as often if you just live on one planet all the time.

[azumods]

...It's a long story. Just disappearing like that isn't really easy, though.

[niceoppai]

Yeah, it usually takes planning if you can manage to get away with it.