azume | Third.

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.