firstonesexpert | Victory Road IC Inbox

Luckily she's not getting up to anything in her room: ever since Egon gave her his blueprints she's been utterly fixated on them (to the point, of course, of neglecting sleep in favour of making her own notes on his work.

When she calls back, her voice is as loud and awake as ever. "I'm awake! I'm just working, hold on!"

There's a significant pause before she pulls herself out of bed and goes for the door. When she opens it, Leslie is tangled limply in one ponytail and blinking blearily at Winter, and Nancy is growling quietly around Entrapta's ankles, but Entrapta herself is bright-eyed and wide awake. "What is it?"

She hadn't been asleep when he checked on he in the middle of the night, either. He gives her a brief, assessing look, then just settles on dealing with the problem at hand. She might be like him, and be able to go without sleep for a day or two, if there's a mission. (What kind of mission does she even have, Jesus. Papers?)

"She has eggs," he says bluntly, and with only a little air of bewilderment. "I think. On my bed."

The only "she" among them is the Absol. Grace. All the other pokemon are male, and Entrapta clearly doesn't have eggs.

"WHAT?"

Entrapta immediately shoves back him and rushes into his room to look at the eggs for herself. Mostly this involves dancing around the bed near-squealing; she's not getting too close to Grace but she is fascinated by the eggs. "When did you discover these? Who's the father?"

As she says that, Nancy trots in and hops onto the bed as well. "Oh!"

"Got to be. Fuzzle's too young, Leslie and the Starly are different egg groups." He lingers by the door, giving Nancy plenty of room. Fuzzle follows the electric cat inside, swatting at his tail, and the Soldier doesn't want to be in the way when someone gets zapped. "They were there when I woke up."

The mother doesn't seem particularly attached to or affectionate with Nancy, but she does have her forelegs curled protectively around the four eggs, nudging them this way and that gently with her horn. She's not doing anything to ward Entrapta away, either, at least.

Appropriately, when Fuzzle manages to sink his claws into the Luxio's tail, Nancy growls and a charge of electricity rustles through his fur and firmly zaps Fuzzle. He still seems quite proud of himself as he goes to brush against Grace almost smugly.

"That's incredible!" Entrapta sits cross-legged on the floor next to the bed and drapes her arms on the covers, reaching one hand out to see if Grace will let her touch an egg. "And you didn't hear her laying them at all?"

Fuzzle yowls and scampers over to hide behind the Soldier's feet. Grace gives Nancy a thwap on the rump with her tail, apparently not interested in his posturing or his possessiveness, but she does spread her forepaws and nudge one egg over for Entrapta to examine. So long as Entrapta is careful with it-- any sign of flailing it about will get a warning growl.

"I'm not sure she even laid them," the Soldier says, watching Entrapta carefully for signs of being less than safe with the egg, himself. "She wasn't. She didn't change. Wasn't. Bigger. Shouldn't she be bigger if she had eggs in her?" Eggs that big? Cuz they could fit in his palm, but only just barely.

The slap on his rump makes Nancy roll over, and then onto the floor with a loud thump.

To probably general surprise, Entrapta's actually handling it with a great deal of care - she's supporting it with both hands as she lifts it up and brings it closer to her face, holding it up and squinting as if she can see through it, weighing it and turning it gently to examine its entire surface. "Interesting," she murmurs, gently resting it back on the bed and holding it in place with one hand on its tip. With the other she's pulling out her notepad and pen from a pocket and making notes; as she does, Leslie starts disentangling himself from her hair to climb onto the bed and hold the egg for her. "Sexual encounters does not appear to be a required part of Pokemon breeding. Apart from general physical contact and-" she looks at Nancy for a moment. "-determined will from both parties, it seems that so long as both parties want to make eggs, this will happen."

Clearly there's something less than physical going on here, but the Soldier can't even imagine what it would be. He shakes his head, baffled, and picks up Fuzzle to let him chew on the metal thumb rather than growling at his boots. He edges around Entrapta and Nancy on the floor, both, to get to the Absol. "Why would they want to make eggs. Now."

Grace gives him a long-suffering kind of look and says, "Absol."

Not sure what that means, he just offers the flesh hand to Leslie for the egg. It looks big for the little guy's skinny hands.

The egg is about as large as Leslie himself - which makes the egg about a foot tall - so he's happy to hand it over to Winter.

"Pokemon are smarter than outside-universe people seem to give them credit for, if some of what Ford said is correct," Entrapta says absently as she writes. "So it makes sense that they'd notice our inexperience and feel obliged to assist us in some manner. This way we can learn about eggs for ourselves without needing to worry about harming other people's."

Yeah, there's no way the Absol had been carrying these inside her for the past four days. No way. They're too big. He takes the egg gently, suddenly glad for his normal strength being gone, and hefts it, holding the shell to his ear, wishing he did still have his stronger senses. Maybe he could hear a little heartbeat inside, if he did.

Then he twitches violently as Entrapta explains her theory, and only with deeply ingrained skill and carefulness does he not drop the damn egg. The Soldier's expressions are usually pretty subtle-- he has yet to smile, he certainly hasn't laughed, he never looks angry-- but in that moment, for the space of a question, he looks afraid. "We're not-- we're not going to hurt them. Are we?"

"I imagine if we tried, Grace would be upset to the point of violence," she comments. "I've been informed that a mother's protective instincts can be extremely intense."

She snaps the notepad shut. "Okay! The book had some information on this we can refer to!" She shoves the notepad into her pocket - since of course she hasn't actually changed out of her overalls yet - and dashes over to Winter's bag to root through for his copy of their breeding guide. "There's a seventy-five percent chance that each individual egg is going to be Absol, which means there's actually only a one point four five percent chance that we have an entire batch of Shinx. Luckily there's a severe size difference in Absol and Shinx, since the former isn't known to evolve into anything, so we ought to be able to tell what each egg is more likely to contain based on their parents' suggested weight! Hah!" She pulls the book out with both hands triumphantly.

The problem isn't trying to hurt them. He'd never do that on purpose. It's hurting them on accident. The Soldier gingerly sets the egg back down in Grace's care, while she paws at his wrist to keep him next to her. At least she doesn't seem worried, but who knows if she's ever handled babies before. He absolutely never has. He's sure of it.

(He's wrong, of course, but how's he supposed to know that?)

There is one egg that seems a little smaller than the others-- not the one they'd been handling, one closer to the crook of the Absol's elbow. "Does it matter what each egg is going to be?" He's not even really sure what they're going to do with the offspring.

"For the sake of collecting data on them, yes." Like it's an obvious answer. "And if we wanna sell them, like people suggested, it's good to know what we're handing out in advance."

She's rifling through the book now. "So it seems like certain Pokemon can only lay so many eggs in a month - a four-egg clutch isn't terribly common, so it looks like these could take anywhere between two to fourteen days to hatch, we'll have to keep a close eye on her to see when that is so we can know for certain what her cycles are like. We should also see if she lays more eggs, because that changes how quickly they hatch quite drastically."

Enjoy the couple weird little notes he's made in the margins of a couple pages, Entrapta. Most of them don't seem to be actually anything in relation to pokemon breeding, and they switch languages randomly.

The Soldier watches, idly stroking Grace's fluffy neck ruff, as Entrapta rambles. Grace makes a snorting noise then says firmly, "Absol."

Frowning at her, the Soldier asks, "More eggs before these hatch, you mean? Because that sounds like she thinks she's done. Are we selling them?" Grace doesn't seem particularly broken up about that idea, at least. She doesn't react at all, in fact, and he knows she understands him perfectly well.

"We should. We don't have the resources to take care of a huge amount of Pokemon right now," she points out, her tone nothing less than pragmatic. "Frankly, I'm not sure we actually have enough currency to take care of ourselves, without finding ways to supplement it."

She might not seem observant about those things, but she is taking notes constantly. And three thousand local dollars didn't stretch far, based on how most things tended to be priced in the low hundreds at a minimum.

"I was trying to look for work. But." He looks down at his metal hand. "Not sure how much use my skillset has here. There's some scavenging we can do, but. Not enough for me and you and them. So I guess we'll have to."

The Absol-- Grace-- bumps his hand again, and he resumes petting. "Nancy won't mind, will he? The Absol. Grace. She doesn't seem to."

"No, he's fine." She looks over at Nancy, who is indeed paying the eggs very little mind, and has instead jumped onto Winter's bed so he can steal the pillow to curl up on. "I don't think he cares."

She claps Winter's book shut. "There's very little I can contribute here too, unless people don't mind me trying to make robots or fix their engineering, but I've been informed that people don't really like it when you rip up their vehicles without permission. Which means they won't want to pay me."

He considers that a beat. That seems slightly wrong. Not the part about ripping up vehicles, but about her skills being useless. Like there's something he used to know about that. Fixing vehicles. (Well. Know how to fix the arm, so maybe it's that.)

"Maybe if you got their permission, first," he suggests hesitantly. "Eventually. When we're settled. People would need things fixed when they actually break, and would have to ask someone who knew how. Might pay you for that." There aren't a lot of vehicles around here, that he's seen, but there are other appliances.

"That's true," she says, standing up and bouncing to sit on Winter's bed. "But people have historically not been very appreciative of my attempts to improve things without their permission. They get mad when I do it without telling them." She lifts one knee up and props her arms across it. "I can fix things just fine, sure, but there's no challenge in that. It's not as fun."

"That's why you get permission first. Make them come to you with their things to fix or improve." He tilts his head a little, trying to mentally prod at the feeling of knowing what that is, then gives up and suggests, "Or let me find work, and you can tinker on your own things without bothering anyone. Or sell pokemon eggs, I suppose," he adds, putting the flesh hand on the nearest egg on his bed, almost reverently. That's life, there. Weird, magical life. "And camp out as much as possible to save funds supply for food."

It wasn't like she didn't know that, but based on what she's said so far she can understand why Winter thinks so. It was more like a compulsion: she simply had to make improvements when she saw a possibility, no matter what permissions she may or may not have. To do so was as natural as breathing, to her.

(She did it on a spaceship while in space despite promising that she wouldn't because of the risk of being crushed by the cold void of space. Darla was a good ship.)

"That sounds like a logical plan," she says instead, grinning happily. "It'll be fun taking care of the eggs, as well. Biology is a whole new topic of research for me, especially that of Pokemon! It'll be incredibly interesting!"

...from anyone else that would probably sound sarcastic.

Yeah, he hasn't caught on just how compulsive her engineering problem really is, since she has in fact managed to restrain herself when it comes to the tech closest at hand-- that is, his arm. He'll figure it out eventually.

Instead, for now, he just relaxes a fraction more at her easy acceptance. He'll take care of her, they'll take care of pokemon, and they'll stick together so he can keep her safe. Right now, that's frankly all he wants. "I know less about. Biology. Than I do about engineering, too. By a whole lot. We'll have to learn together. Violet City's supposed to have libraries. Classes."

Frankly the only reason she hasn't torn her 'gear apart for scraps, aside from the obvious tool situation, is that she can't steal Winter's without him noticing it's gone, and it seems to be something of a support sytem for him at this stage.

"Oh, excellent! Violet sounds like a much more engaging city than Cherrygrove!" She leans around Grace and gives the eggs a brief pat - one that probably seems surprisingly gentle, given how hard her enthusiasm has been running.

But then she pushes herself off the bed and onto her feet. "We should probably go back to sleep though. If we're going to leave today we ought to try and be well-rested!"

Really, he's not that surprised. She's been careful when she needs to be, enthusiastic or not. She's kind that way. (Grace gives Entrapta's cheek a nuzzle when she leans over her, just to be friendly.)

He's also pretty sure he won't be doing much sleeping, but he can understand the sentiment, and maybe Entrapta can sleep, herself. So he nods, standing up, too, to get the door for her and Nancy. "Okay. That's probably a good idea." At the very least he can rest, and gently poke at the eggs until maybe he feels like he won't break them by trying to carry them around later.

Nancy pounces off the bed, and struts out the door first still looking very proud of himself, even as Entrapta gives a quiet giggle at Grace's soft nuzzle and pets the Absol in return. Leslie takes a moment to yawn wide, showing off the full length of his fangs, before he clambers sleepily back into Entrapta's ponytail, and starts climbing her hair once more as she goes for the door.

But Entrapta pauses in the doorway beside Winter, and her hands wring uncertainly for a moment; before, with some hesitation very deliberate care, she stretches her bare hand out and places it softly on Winter's sleeve.

"I know you don't think you need much sleep," she says, and her tone has a soft, almost kind tone as she carefully chooses her words. "But you should try to get a proper rest as well." She looks up at his face, and gives him a warm smile. "Good night."

And she takes her hand away, so she can trot after Nancy and open the door for him.

She does still surprise him, more perceptive than she seems sometimes. Or maybe just better at reading him than most people. (Also, pot, meet kettle, little miss I-never-fucking-sleep.) He even only twitches a little at the touch, especially since it's not on skin.

Still, that's very sweet. He doesn't smile, he's still not sure how to do that anymore, but his face does soften. "I will try," he promises, and his voice does manage gentle and even a little warm. "Good night, Entrapta."

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