[ti]story[/ti] Find Professor Ash (invite only)

Orion had a lot of questions whirling around in his head as he made his way down the side alley that lead to the Cat's Meow.  Nagging concerns that churned and roiled in this head, threatening to spill out of his cranium if it wasn't covered with his sick Noir inspired bandanna.  Where did the professor go?  What was the meaning of her coded message?  What was she doing now that she wasn't part of the three ringed circus that was the expedition?  When the fuck the Briarbane get some many fucking buildings?

You are unlike anything I've ever seen before.

His heart fluttered as he recalled the line.  Some silly part of him wanted that to be personal, aimed right at him, Orion Cayge.  But he knew that it was a general hook for all of the players, something mass produced and sent out to everyone who'd gotten it as loot.  A nice little story quest, something to engage the players.  Yet even knowing that, he couldn't help but make it personal.  This world, for all intents and purposes, was real to him.  The people in it weren't just zeros and ones, they were just as real as he, or like...Borama were.

I do not understand you. Not yet. But I will.


His jaw clenched tightly as he found himself standing before the door.  It seemed almost cruel, a quest line about professor seeking to understand something so...borderline eldritch for her reality.  At best she would be fed some half truth that fit within her worldscope, an acceptable answer involving "pokepower" or some such in universe explanation.  Maybe she would never find out, vexed eternally to puzzle upon some unknowable quandary.  But what if she did find the truth?  To discover that her world, and her existence were some artificial construct made the amuse higher beings? 

Even the most stalwart of minds would buckle and fracture under that weight.

Yet even in all of these odds, she still put her best foot forward.  Even without funding, she'd chosen to continue her pursuit of knowledge.  He wasn't about to leave her high and dry, even if it meant possibly facing some uncomfortable realities, and difficult situations.  So as the peephole opened up and he was asked for the password, he didn't answer with the usual fair that had been posted on today's R/UNOVR thread.  He let out one singular word, not knowing where it would take him.

"Plasma."

Laguna had come to the Cat's Meow so often, she was practically a regular. Despite not really owning any cat pokemon herself, she really enjoyed the environment. The hot tubs were just the perfect place to soak after a long day of adventuring and to be quite fair, she had grown a fondness for all the different cat pokemon, even if she didn't own any herself.

But today, she was here for something different.

Orignally, Ash had sent her a letter. A heartful letter, seeking to understand the trainers. And she had sent a letter right back, equally full of emotion. Promising to help in any way that she could.

And yet, she had been so blind to see the truth behind the letter until she read it again just last night.

P L A S M A.

Team Plasma. There was genuinely no other answer to the meaning behind that word. Either they were involved, active again, or... something else. UNOVR was based on Unova, after all. But it was always easy to see the world as entirely different, just the similar landscapes and maps.

But maybe, the history and stories too. On one hand, she couldn't help but be excited to find out, but on the other, worried. It meant everything just got a lot more complicated.

When the individual behind the eyeslot of The Cat's Meow asked for the password, she almost on instinct said today's password. Fluffy. But that... wasn't the answer she needed to give, was it?

Ash was taking refuge here. The one place where she truly could hide in secret. It was no doubt that she'd have another code in place to protect herself, and others.

Giving the person behind the door one of her signature smirks. "Plasma."

Odile wished she could say that she had figured out Ash's Letter quickly, that it had been clear to her. That she had seen the spelling errors initially, figured this whole code out like she was Sherlock. However, she was not Sherlock. Not even close. Claudia was a ballerina, someone who, if she was going to be a cut mean to herself, just twirled and pranced about and looked pretty while doing it. Odile wasn't much different. Play what you know.

So no, she didn't catch the spelling errors when she looked into her messages and saw the letter. She caught feelings though. A lot of them, a lot of them she didn't really have names for, but she felt something. If that wasn't enough to prove to her that something about this was real, that these zeroes and ones meant something, then what could?

Odile still wanted to apologize. If there was a chance to do so properly, in front of Ash, then of course she was going to take it. When the maker on her UI popped up, she dropped every idea she had about doing anything else in UNOVR but to do this.

I do not understand you.

She had been reading the letter for the fourth or fifth time before she finally began to notice the spelling mistakes. A bit odd but at first, at the first one, she didn't think much of it. Not like Odile was that great at spelling either. Who was she say much? Though as she noticed more, it struck her as... weird. Ash was a professor. Someone way too smart to be misspelling so much. One typo, sure. Five? That's a bit too much.

Not yet.

What was going on then? Was she okay? Was this some sort of code? The whole "blink twice if you're being held captive" sort of thing? This felt something out of a crime drama, and while she's not a big fan of those, her mother had on one too many episodes of Law and Order growing up. Something was up, and as she looked deeper, as she walked to the Cat's Meow, it finally hit her. Oh. It's one of those sorts of things. Hiding words in the typos. Oh Professor Ash was a smartie wasn't she? But then... why did she even need to do this in the first place?

"Password?"

But I will.

"Plasma."

She'll come to understand you too Professor.

Kallisto still wondered why he was given a letter, when it felt like he barely had a connection to her besides being the first NPC he saw in the game. He thought back to it, when he was still trying out the avatar he so painstakingly created to get a better idea of how to act the role he was given. It was hard, moving around in that cape and in those stuck-up clothes, and knocking down his tone a pitch, like he was back at work. In hindsight, it was a painfully stupid idea, and now he had a penguin calling him Master (even if none of his other Pokemon followed) and a scarred memory that made him quit his career as a streamer (on paper, he simply graduated).

Maybe that was why he paid so little attention to the letter until it turned out there was a quest associated with it. And then he sent a message to a "friend" (though the term was being stretched) because he didn't really felt bothered enough to solve it (he had to admit that he honestly didn't notice the spelling mistakes either. Maybe he would've caught it if he gave it maybe a few more reads, but he only skimmed through it once, and he was left with...little). The contents of the letter, after all, were already things she said before, specifically during the Thunderfall Raid. It was nothing new to him, though it was nice to read them rather than hear them being shouted amidst pouring rain or popped through the notification bar.

He squinted, giving it a couple of reads. Anomalies was the L, supernatural was the P...he had trouble finding S, but once he had all of the other letters, he could guess out the word they were trying to form. What did it even mean, though? According to the internet, there was apparently a Team Plasma that was like the main bad guys of Unova, and one didn't need to spell out what UNOVR was named after...

Was the game bringing them back in some way? Kallisto wouldn't even know how that would work nor what they did other than the light reading he did. In any case, he might be entangled and forced into finding out. He wondered: was Professor Ash going to follow the trend of meta-breaking characters they have been seeing in recent years, where pre-programmed faces cry out into the void, wishing to break free from their chains, but could never do so? He supposed that was entertainment, to make them think. He would like to see how far the game decided to push this narrative, then. (And it didn't mean that he didn't care, because he cared about his Pokemon, who were also bundles of data and code. He just...maybe his circle of compassion was smaller than he thought).

❝Plasma.❞

The door would open a couple of moments later, and he was invited to step inside a place he had never been.

Time to see what the cat dragged in.

Jinx couldn't have explained, exactly, why she kept reading and rereading the letter from Professor Ash, at least at first. She knew the Professor a bit, had spoken to her back in the raid... but then, so had everybody else, often with more thoughtful questions and queries than her own. So why her? What made her so special?

Well, that much the letter explained pretty straightforwardly, at least. Jinx was special because she was one of the players. They were all special, in a way, to the NPCs. And hearing that was... oddly touching. Sure, she knew that really the words had been drafted by some nerd behind a computer screen somewhere, but they felt real. They felt... right.

Except for the spelling mistakes, that was.

"Suppernatural" she caught on first read, and it made her smile a bit every time. Supper-natural? Natural like supper? Thinking about how supper worked in the Pokemon world too much would just lead to trouble, though. And most people probably didn't even use that word. A lot of people not from the South just call it dinner, like some weird TV newscaster.

"Incadents" she caught quickly too, if only because Jinx herself had trouble with that word sometimes. But Jinx always tried to put an S in there instead of the C, she didn't futz with the vowels like Professor Ash did. "Incadents"... trying to pronounce it in her head, it didn't even sound like the word it was trying to replace. What kind of Professor was Ash, making sloppy mistakes like that? I mean, maybe she was in a hurry, or stressed--well, the stressed part probably went without saying at this point--but even so, to swap out letters like that in a word that didn't even make sense when you said it out loud... why would she do something like that? What could leave her so predisposed to making mistakes that even Jinx never made in all her years of bad spelling?

Unless... unless they weren't really mistakes after all.

A secret message. A code. A letter within the letter.

And so Jinx's rereading took on a new light as she painstakingly spellchecked every word, putting together the misplaced letters, trying to find a code, thinking vaguely of the codebreakers back in World War II and how she'd dreamed of being one back when she was in middle school, even writing letters to friends in the clearly unbreakable code of "swap letters out for the number of each letter in the alphabet"...

P-L-A-S-M-A.

Jinx didn't know what significance "plasma" had in Pokemon, if any, and while she could have just gone to Google and searched for "plasma Pokemon", somehow that felt too much like cheating to her. She was going in blind, if she was going in at all.

But Jinx did know, vaguely, of the meaning of the word plasma. The fourth kind of matter, wasn't that it? Or part of your blood? Either something they could take out of your blood and donate to those in need, or the kind of stuff you only found in stars... either way, seemed a bit ominous, but that fit the tone of the rest of it well enough.

And when Jinx got that quest marker about find professor ash, while she hadn't known where to go, she had a pretty good idea about what to say when she got there.

"Plasma?"

Jinx hadn't meant to sound so unsure of herself, but... she was pretty unsure of herself, truth be told.

Professor Ash was gone, sending secret messages in code, and Jinx was left scrambling to put together the pieces.

Orion would casually step into the dimly lit establishment, reaching a hand out and scritching the waiting ears of a litten posted up on high, right at perfect scritching access for anyone coming in.  He was clearly the greeter, and purred sonorously as Orion laid some love on him.  What a perfect spot for their reunion, when he and Ash had first met she'd handed him a kitten that had grown up to be his Ace.  Now they were meeting in an illegal Litten den.  His pulse quickened as the proprietor led him down the hallway, his heart pounding.  He was expecting some sort of group pow wow, and had seen others lurking outside.  Yet it appeared that the moment he'd stepped through the front door, reality had schismed and he was sitting in some sort of...instanced event maybe?  

Curious.

He wasn't sure if he was ready to face her alone, after everything had happened, after what he may or may not have started backfired and blew up on her.  Ruining her career, drawing the ire of so many angry players incapable of understanding what was happening, the sheer confusion and anxiety that must have run through her head.  That is, if she was even capable of feeling those things, but as far as he was concerned she had?  So that was enough for him.  Still, he couldn't help but fear that she harbored some sort of resentment against him.  Or maybe she was mad he was keeping secrets from her, secrets he could never divulge to her.  Not from a desire for secrecy, but she either couldn't or wouldn't understand, and perhaps that was for the better.  What could he possibly tell her?  You exist at the leisure and pleasure of higher beings who venture into your reality to play a fun little game?  That sometime in the next however many months or years Hydance might shutter the server and by extension kill her?

The door swung open, and Orion braced himself for the worst.

Yet it didn't come, there she sat, dressed down from her usual attire though the lab coat was not far from her, ready to be shrugged on at a moments notice.  She was drinking her coffee, just like she always took it, hells if anything HE was the one bringing a tense air into this room not her.  He would let go of the breath he was holding and give her a casual two fingered wave and a hesitant smile.

"Yo!  Welcome back."

Taking the porcelain cup filled with black coffee, Orion would glance between the chair and the bed before carefully striding across the room and taking a spot on the bed, admiring the softness of the mattress while she went through her whole spiel about Plasma.  It...made sense, this was Unova yeah, she would know about them he supposed.  Of course, he tangentially knew of them as well, but in a...different context.  He would listen and listen until finally it was his turn to speak, but for once in his life he found his words abandoning him.  Nervously he would take a sip of his coffee, scalding his tongue.

"Fuck! that's hot."

Grimacing he would blow on the drink slightly before finding a safe place to set the cup, it was a distraction and would probably not help as he imagined his might engage in some Cayge hand waggling through this whole speech.

"So..."

His hands clapped onto his knees, slowly gripping tighter and tighter as he willed up the words he wished to speak.  Where to even begin?  How to even begin?  He would take another deep breath, hold it, and slowly release.

"I suppose I should say that I'm sorry.  I feel like you gave me a choice back when we were discovering everything there was to know about Asper.  We could go north, or across the ocean, and I said we should go north into Mystra.  I don't know if I was the sole deciding factor on that or not, but frankly even if I wasn't I still feel like I played a part in creating the situation that went down."  His jaw clenched tight, and his gaze shot to the floor, staring at his shoes.  "I could have done a million different things, I could have told you we can talk to Pokemon, I could have picked a different direction, I could have tried to de-escalate the situation during the Zapdos fight, so many countless things that could have been different.  So many ways you could have kept your job, so many ways to save your reputation, just..."  he practically deflated as he spoke.  

"So much of what happened can be traced back to me, and I have spent all of this time wallowing in that guilt.  But I know..." his grip on his legs tightened, and he could feel his digital molars about ready to crack from the pressure his clenched jaw was exerting.  "That wallowing in that guilt will do nothing going forward, so once I again."  He would bow his head as low as his seated position would allow him.  "I'm so fucking sorry."

He let that hang in the air for a moment before, as if to reinflate himself, he took a deep breath and raised his head back high.  His clenched fists released their grip of his stylish jorts and his hands rose up to slap his face, as if to smack the sorry right out of him.  Sad boys were only attractive on Tumblr, and here he was on a one on one coffee date with the fucking professor. 

No need to blow it by being a sad sack of shit, get it out and get over it was what gramps always said.

"But if you want questions rather than apologies, I guess my question for you dear professor, is what's next?  I know you didn't just send me a letter with a code hidden in the text just for coffee, you could have just asked me out for a cup anytime you wanted.  You-" he would raise an eyebrow, all traces of sorrow that had been lingering in his blue eyes were quickly being routed by a a burning bonfire of curiosity.  "Have something cooked up.  What are we up to?  Where are we going?  You give me a challenge and I swear on my bones I won't ever let you down again.  I'm already elbow deep into Ostellia and the shit cookin up in there, so if you need a man on the inside I'm on it like peanut butter on jelly."

The meowing made the place feel more homely, little whispers of the kittens around as Odile wandered inside, bowing her head and thanking the proprietor. He led, and she followed.

<They're here for that woman...>

I am.

<Hello, human.>

Hello little one, it's nice to meet you.

<Are you her friend?>

I hope I am. I hope she lets me be one.

<Where are you going?>

Somewhere better, hopefully.

The fourth door opened, and there she was. It was almost odd to see Ash out of a professional environment, not even having her lab coat on. She looked different. Looked... well enough, at least. Odile wasn't quite sure what she was expecting; maybe some hair frazzled or what have you, but she there, alive, well, even had a cup of coffee. It was almost like nothing had changed.

But things had changed. So much of it. It would be easier to list off the constants rather than the variables.

"I'll take the bed if you don't mind." Odile quietly offered, legs crossing over one another as she took her seat. The barkeep was kind enough to hand her a cup of it herself, and a soft nod was given, thanking them once again. The mug didn't even reach her lips, violet eyes trained onto the professor as she began to speak. Immediately she felt dumb. Plasma. Of course it was about Team Plasma. When she actually played through the games, she remembered thinking their goal was noble, just going about it the wrong way. Didn't help their leader (the real one) was more than a nutjob. Still, she remained silent, letting Ash speak uninterrupted. The professor was ready to answer. But was Odile?

"I... I've been thinking a lot on what I was going to tell you, Professor." Odile started, her eyes falling down to the dark liquid in the cup. "Even before the raid ended, I wanted to speak to you. Like this. Us alone, so we could maybe... come to an understanding."

Crimson hair cascaded forward as she bowed her head. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. What I said to you was uncalled for. To suggest that you shouldn't be a professor... that was cruel of me. Just because I haven't seen much of your research, that I didn't... that was me being ignorant. If the tables were turned and someone suggested that I didn't care about my career, what I've worked so hard for... I..." Her voice broke like glass, a hand coming up to her lip, trembling. "I think I would have acted a lot less gracefully than you did."

A few quiet moments passed before Odile forced her head up, eyes struggling to hold back tears. "I don't have an excuse for saying that. I don't. Even under the stress we were under and the situation we were in, it wasn't called for. I hope that you may come to forgive me, but I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. I'm just thankful I have the chance to give you this apology and that you wanted to see me, despite everything."

Odile exhaled a shaky breath, bringing the cup to her lips finally, taking a tiny sip. Warm, luscious, it filled her cold core. Did she feel better, to have finally gotten that off of her chest? She wished she could say yes, but there was still this nasty coil in her stomach. Maybe it was the people pleaser inside of her, the one that came alive whenever she danced on the stage, but this couldn't be nearly enough to begin to earn acceptance. Nights were spent in bed, staring out a night window to the orange headlights outside, trying to formulate this. It was almost like she was back in front of her always disappointed mother, trying to say something to satisfy so that maybe, she would be graced with a smile.

Almost. As much as Claudia would hate to admit it, there wasn't ever pleasing Victoria Kingsley. There still might be a way for Odile though.

"I want to make it up to you, Professor Ash. I truly do. If there is anything I can do for you, anything..." Her knuckles were beginning to turn white as she gripped onto her mug tighter. "I would love the chance to help you. I would love to show you that I'm not the same person who shouted at you during the raid. I would... love to come to a place of understanding with you, Professor Ash."