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Dealing with Terry had been excruciatingly functional so far - he went through all the regular motions of a gym leader, offering this and that to weary travellers, but with none of the warm conviction that he was somehow doing the right thing. At least his friend, a lady that was apparently a botanist in this near-wasteland and had roughly a decade on Terry, has proven much friendlier and given Devi a blanket and a spot on her couch, and Batsen a spot on a thin but surprisingly comfortable plastic mattress, along with three layers of bedsheets 'sufficing as a blanket in a pinch'. To make up for it, it's Batsen that has a proper pillow - Devi's having to put up with the skewed armrest.
The couch table's been moved roughly a metre from its usual position, leaving space for the aforementioned mattress, the arrangement filling the small living room almost in the entirety.
At five in the morning, the very first rays of sunlight are poking at the edges of the sky - not that it'd be visible from most of Nahla, but that doesn't stop it for being a point on someone's chronological map. Somewhere at the distant edges of their unconscious perception, Devi and Batsen, in the middle of their slumber born of travel exhaustion, would hear a conversation from the hall (too small to be called anything of the sort, to be fair, but lacking a better descriptor), muffled by the door but no less energetic for it.
And then the door opens with a similar energy, wholly without care for their state of rest, and in emphasis, Terry's voice barks, tone firmly resentful: “Guess who has time for you? Rise and shine.”
Devi's first thought is to ask who let a train run right over their roof, rumbling and clattering obnoxiously as it passes by. Her second thought is 'fuck, no, please just five more minutes', head drawing in under the edge of the blanket and eyes squeezing shut in rejection, soft and further muffled noises of complaint eased into the fabric of her make-shift bed. Her third comes with a bitter scowl, fortunately hidden from sight, and tension in her shoulders: There is no way this isn't on purpose. A brief wire of anger lashes at her gut, prompting her to quietly grit her teeth. At least it wakes her up.
Batsen's somewhere in the middle of a dream about trying to evacuate the entire island while Thorn is getting ready to erupt when suddenly light and sound crash over him. For a few moments, his subconscious decides that means he's run out of time and the volcano's erupting, and then the dream promptly ends, dropping him unceremoniously into consciousness.
He twists in his sheets, squinting out in Terry's general direction, uttering a sound somewhere between an unintelligible grumble and an annoyed whine. A few moments later, he seems to have found his words again: “Gah, what time is it?” he manages to mumble.
“Five,” Terry responds promptly, only to venomously append: “Not that it matters - if you want your chance to battle in my gym, that time is now or not all.”
Yep. Definitely on purpose. Devi heaves her torso up from the couch, glaring down at the fabric to resist the urge to glare at Terry instead. Not a morning person in the least, this is a terrible transgression from her perspective and utterly inexcusable - but it will be pardoned for one reason alone: She's not going to abort the gym circuit just because Terry is doing his damndest to alienate her and Batsen out of it. Maybe if the next gym leader is a similar asshole, she'll reconsider, but right now, she's rather convinced this is Terry's attitude problem, and Terry's alone.
Funnelling her rage into waking up and into energetic motions, she grabs her jacket, tugging it around her shirt - she's slept in her clothes, owing to the crowded space giving her little subjective impression of privacy, but even if she'd changed to pyjamas, she would not give Terry the joy of seeing her try to change into proper clothes with awkward hurry, privacy or not. Her hands dive into her rucksack, rummaging for a brush, surfacing with one to get her hair into some semblance of proud order, and next thing she knows she's fumbling for her shoes - set down beside the couch as they are and tugging them on, all while biting her tongue. Irrationally, she wants to say something like 'clearly we won't be battling in here, so “now” is evidently not the time', but a part of her recognises the useless barb as what it is and keeps it restrained.
She's not sure she can give any verbal reaction at the moment without verbally assaulting Terry, so there's not even a verbal acknowledgement. In a way, it's fitting, with how it's her going through the motions without conviction right now, listening to that implicit order simply to get things over with.
She'd hoped to get in a shower today after waking up, but it looks like morning routine is not going to happen here. Fair enough. Travelling with minimal supplies automatically came with restrictions of that sort. She can try again after the gym battle, assuming their host was so kind to let her, or in Nightclaw. Nightclaw should be easy - chances are they can grab a cheap hotel there, and that comes with all the associated benefits… including, apparently, not having the gym leader barge in and wake you in the middle of the bloody night.
*
The next time Saccharine's consciousness hooks into reality, everything's changed. In the past, the landscape had stayed mostly the same around those deterministic blips of amnesia, induced by his storage in the pokéball. Now? All the invariants have changed. His trainer might as well no longer be Devi, even if she looks like Devi, and he's sure that maybe with a bit of effort, he can get her back. His chores have gotten increasingly dangerous and the scolding for failing them has become painful. And now, they're not even in Togi.
It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness - the dawn-tinged sky looks strange above them, neither spattered with the silhouettes of leaves, nor stretching wide. Instead, a hard but irregular black outline frames a sliver of sky. The last three weak pinpricks of stars are visible. The ground is some mixture of sandy and gravelly - he has it mostly for himself, as far as his grass-instincts go, with only a few handful of tiny shrubs lining the edges, fed with too little scattered light to possess much volume.
Some stranger is ahead of them, practically backed against the dead-end that this small canyon forms. A Donphan and a Kabutops stand beside him, the outlines of the Kabutops' left shoulder twitching slightly, as if it was waiting for the first instruction with impatience. Next to Saccharine, Viracocha gives her head a light shake, though the casual motion gives little indicator of her attention; proud fighter that she is, she knows better than to let herself be anything but alert.
The first few moments are more confusing than usual - nothing's the same as it used to be. The air is different, drier, and the ground is raw and delicious. In the blur of gaining consciousness, there's a soft, satisfied purr. Have they found some place new to play? He could get used to this place. It might take time to set down roots, but it could be nice. The sky is dark right now, but it looks like the sun is starting to rise… or maybe it's almost finished setting? Being unfamiliar with this area, it's hard to tell.
Reality snaps into focus. He's not here to enjoy the scenery, there are unfamiliar pokémon over there and Viracocha is next to him and she looks ready to pounce and this must be a battle! A delighted chirp spills from him, proud at having figured that out so quickly. ~Devi smiles down at him, gives him a berry as a prize. It's juicy and sticky and has the wonderful taste of iron to it.~ He looks up to Devi, half hoping the fantasy would play out, but she's not looking at him, instead focused across on the enemy. His gaze turns ahead, eyeing the two opposite him. That Kabutops looks delicious. He can picture it vividly: Vines wrapped around it, struggling to get free, drinking up all the lovely nutrients in its body. The sundew-like tendrils quiver as he awaits the order to attack.
The partly natural architecture of the 'gym' offers little opportunity to conceal ones instructions - the walls of the canyon are good at reflecting any sound, no matter how soft, back onto the playing field. With freeform rules in play, that allowed changes on short-notice, of course, but normally, all you could do against a brutal move was brace, anyway, so it was - almost - moot.
At least Saccharine's vision has rapidly adjusted to the relative darkness.
Terry's eyes narrow, lingering on Saccharine with a venom the grass-type pokémon is probably not used to seeing in human beings, though perhaps he might not interpret it as something directed at him. Humans didn't usually hold strong emotions against individual pokémon in trainer battles that he'd witnessed, after all. “Vergeltung: Sandstorm,” Terry instructs, taking a step back from the battlefield in the same moment. “Schicksal, Curse!” The words of both statements are rapidly spoken, but the volume of his voice is soft, even while the Donphan raises itself off the ground slightly, then drops back down, its trunk seemingly batting at the sand. It's slowly retreating a little, itself, attention on Viracocha.
Across the dual instructions, Devi's spoken her own commands - Vine Whip for Saccharine, directed, for now, at the Kabutops; with Viracocha instructed to Faint Attack the retreating Donphan, even as the air begins to stir and draw wisps of sand from the ground, for now merely rising like the tendrils of a fog not of liquid but of the tiniest fragments and shards of stone. The action of the Kabutops is invisible, change of inner state as it is, but it does crouch itself down a little in autonomous brace, presumably against what it anticipated was about to follow.
✘ IN PROGRESS