[ti]solo[/ti]Contact With You

SSSSNAP.

Orion sipped on a purple can labeled COLA, lounging in the afternoon shade of gazebo hastily tack welded together out of the hoods of Nissans of various shades of puke green.  It was oppressively ugly to look at, yet in a strange and fucked up way beautiful.  Words failed to describe the various thoughts that ran through the fighters head as he stared upon this heap of junk day after day.  The myriad of questions that bubbled up in his head like a freshly cracked can of cola used to slate one's thirst for knowledge.  First and foremost of which was a rather simple one.

Why?

Having walked the dilapidated streets of the Nexus, Orion was intimately familiar with the rough spread of make and models of these streets.  An idle hobby started ironically at first, a jest to pass the time between fights and idle exploration, but had quickly devolved into an obsession that had long since blown past the speed limit of healthy.  He happened to now that Nissan was criminally under represented in the rusted fucked up car department, and furthermore this unholy shade of Puke fucking Green was certainly not in high demand either.  This wasn't something done in an afternoon, this mangled fucked up Rome took some real time and commitment to fucking craft.

The welding was impeccable too.

It made Orion furious, this was the sort of weird metaironic bullshit he and Bee would have cooked up.  It was the most evocative piece of art he could have ever stumbled upon, and it was a dope ass place for a can of cola on a hot summer afternoon so long as you didn't sit upon any piece that had been sitting outside the shade for free of frying your ass off.

Outside the gazebo Arachnae was teetering about in the ruins of an old playground under the watchful eyes of Loki the sneasel and Achilles the incineroar.  His paldean Tauros, Asterion, was meandering through the grass whilst his Buzzswole perched upon the mangled and rusty ruins of what were once monkey bars.  It's bulbous eyes watched the entire scene in a silent vigil.  He was unnaturally still save for the idle buzz of his amber wings.  Orion regarded the bug with a nod, which the creature seemed not to register.  A few moments went by and Orion simply raised a single fist and gave it a thumbs up.  The creature mirrored the motion, holding it until Orion dropped it.  He was unsure if it knew what the meaning meant or not, at first he thought it understood what the symbol of affirmation was.  However, it quickly became something the bug bandied about willy nilly, at almost random times, and Orion was beginning to worry the creature had attached some other meaning to it, though contextually he hadn't the fucking foggiest what that could POSSIBLY be.

Vexing really.

Still, he had to figure out a way to make contact with this creature.  It was part of the Plasma Creed, and he sure as shit wasn't about to let Laguna beat him to it.

Figuring out what exactly a growing buzzswole needed to eat was a bit of a shitshow and a half.  Orion was deeply enraptured with the ritualistic nature of stopping for snackies with the gang on a fairly frequent basis.  Three squares with the squad if you would, and any time he was online for "mealtime" they all chowed down.  However, unlike in the pokemon anime Orion refused to just buy pokechow in bulk and feed some mass produced carcinogenetic bullshit to his found family.  He'd instead sunk some time perusing in universe literature on what the best sorts of diets were for the various digital dependents he'd collected under his wing.  He'd gone out of his way to master the cooking minigames, and only served up the most patrician of plates for his pals.  

Queue Adze.

There wasn't ANY in universe literature for the dietary needs of an extradimensional bodybuilding bug.  Shit, there was hardly any literature on the bug in general, and so Orion had been forced to use...alternate forms of information gathering.  He'd taken to Reddit, UNOVR Forums, trawled chatrooms and discords of others who'd gone down the same rabbit hole across several servers.  He'd spent a night or two translating the notes of a Korean player with the help of google and an old friend from highschool (who'd for what it was worth was SUPER down for the task despite having ZERO interest in pokemon).

He'd joined support groups, attended meetups and noteswaps, and his own theories had begun to clutter up the pages of physical notebooks hastily tucked aside in his desk.  He'd endured Eddie's not so subtle teasing, and the strange looks the rest of the family had started to give him when he poured over observations in the dining room of the pizzaria, snacking on za with one hand, the other pinching a disposable vape betwixt two fingers like a modern day Da Vinchi as he puzzled this predicament.  

Gatorade.

The answer had been a strange analogue to gatorade, Adze seemed to have a preference for fruit punch to be precise, though how much he actually enjoyed it to this day seemed to evade him other than Arachnae saying "he's singing a happy song" What that meant to Orion eluded him, but she ensured it was a good thing and he in fact was enjoying the meal.  It was crafted with a mix of vitamins, electrolytes, creatine, and copious amounts of processed sugar.  How his metabolism handled the sweet drink and didn't find itself rendered diabetic was a testament of the alien physiology of the creature.  

Still, as Orion managed to settle down with his squad and dispense with the goods, Adze seemed to be in an especially jolly form today.  His wings kept fluttering, and based on the flick of Achilles' ears, he imagined he was using them to "sing" his happy song.  He couldn't quite hear it, and the wings were fast enough he couldn't "see" it per se, but he could assume it was there based on other factors, almost how astronomers could detect large masses inside asteroid belts, not because they could see them, but via the way their gravity manipulated the debris around them.

Maybe he should go back to college...