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The gengar took the punch and went tumbling through the grass and dirt. Ulysses gritted his teeth, expecting a knockout, but Djinn somehow struggled to his feet. It actually looked much easier than it was. Djinn was barely standing on his own two feet, and would fly to relieve them if it weren't how much ether he would expend in doing so. At this point even hovering would consume enough to lead to a blackout in mere seconds. Even so, he soldiered slowly toward Synapse, one slow and carefully planned step at a time. Djinn, having always been one for theatrics, made it look as though he were marching with intent to intimidate the raichu in the most comical fashion possible.

Dr. Shonevsky couldn't help but smile at that for just a few seconds.

So that was it! Dr. Terrian had given them plenty of signs that he was incredibly proud of Synapse: boasting about how many opponents he could fight, allowing him to playfully beat at the party instead of going straight for a kill. But it was his reaction to Sequoyah's thrown knife that gave Schraeder the idea that (he hoped) would end this battle.

"Ha! Look at that. Your raichu is pretty stubborn, I guess, but in the end he's not all that special. I mean, you said he could take all of them at once, yet it barely took more than Djinn over there to reduce him to this. What's the deal, Terrian? I was expecting better." Hopefully, if Schraeder mocked Synapse, it would make the doctor angry again; they had already proven that attempting to divert his attention in other ways was futile.

Tsuki had a hard time believing his luck. Just missing an attack from the new comer? Very hard to do in his mind except by luck. He didn't like luck very much, to chancy. He got back in the truck before the sandslash could let go, if it ever did, and right after the new comer jumped out of the jeep. He didn't want to be outside when that thing disengaged, or if the bumber broke off.

The car shuddered as the sandslash tore into it, sending Tavish reeling in his seat. With a grimace, he pulled the shotgun from under his coat, then, rolling the window partway down(enough to admit his hand holding the gun, but just enough) aimed the gun straight down at the sandslash and pulled the trigger.

Meanwhile, Deadeye, having grabbed his pipe set, rolled down his window, and placing the rifle pipe to his lips, also began to fire at the pokemon holding the car. Both Tavish and Deadeye used their free arms/legs to brace themselves against the car seats, expecting it to flip at any time.

Alyssa glared from the bed at the ledian as it was released and did its things, simmering in her own self-induced rage.

Her awkwardness of social interactivity translated into rage, which was her fallback emotion. If something didn't go right, it angered her, if she felt bad, she felt angry, it had been this way since she could remember and it wasn't about to change, certainly not under these conditions. She was further conflicted over her emotions of not wanting to leave the first non-hostile company she had had in, well she didn't know, she never kept track of time.

But it felt like forever.

Spending the past forever of one's life not trusting anyone and relying solely on her own wits, skill, reading, and self in general didn't lend a hand to her sympathies with either Paul or the biker.

In all, Alyssa couldn't figure out what she wanted and by time all was set up to go (her having only stared at Paul as he relinquished the weapons to her), she was in a better mood despite herself, the promise of new, possibly better company intrigued her more than she'd ever admit.

Synapse wasted no time. He knew the gengar was losing it, and the misdreavus couldn't take much more; he steeled himself, gathered his bearings, and blasted both of them at once with twin arcs of electricity. Perhaps the attack was redundant, but damn, was it effective. Djinn valiantly moved to shield himself, but was downed, finally out for the count, and Mist fell from her floating position. Jason, concerned, collected her before she could be counted for the third knockout of the three required, and sent Joy into the ring. Seeing no other opponents, Synapse wore something of a smirk as he regarded the newcomer. The pale, oddly-decorated thing was placid and nervous; it was not created for battle. Smiffy's entrance, though, had drawn Synapse's eye while he blasted the other two.

Stetson's words had not gone unheard, and Terrian fumed, finding it much harder to conceal his anger. His fingers twitched venomously once before he finally schooled his mien to a smirk, glad to have watched Synapse finally take down the two ghosts. The smirk was also for Sequoyah's apparent exhilaration; it was nice to see his prowess respected by something other than fear. "Young Schraeder, I think you may have spoken too soon." Confident as his words were, he was perturbed, and he muttered under his breath, stopped as though listening, and muttered again. He seemed to be having a conversation he believed was private, with someone fluent in Mumble.

In the space of three seconds, a communication passed between Synapse and Terrian. The doctor cocked an eyebrow. The rat shook his head. The doctor's posture relaxed significantly. And then the rat jumped in the air over Smiffy in another stylized, twisting flip, his tail coiling about him as it prepared to lash out. The curved, blade-like outer edge of its tail gained a shimmering quality, and a silver line followed it as it whiplashed into the rhyhorn's granite hide with a shimmering clang. One of the great fin-like spines on Smiffy's back clipped Syn's shoulder so that his landing was half on his back, but he seemed proud of himself as he once again pulled up into a sitting position, favoring his good shoulder. This pride was further bolstered, perhaps to the point of true stupidity, when it was rewarded with a kiss on the cheek from the swift-approaching Joy.

Synapse blushed, hard.

Terrian smacked his palm to his forehead with a noise the entire party could hear.

Synapse then punched Joy directly in the face with his good paw, a flash of etheric light, and a reverberating pow, sending her spinning through the air, and celebrated with an absurd, stumbling, drunken victory dance he didn't seem to have much intention of halting soon; his eyes were closed and he was in his own moment. She wasn't out, but she was down at least for a bit, and... well, the rat didn't really seem to care. He was dancing.

The eerie, metallic sound amplified faster and then, in the bottom of the clouds, a few steel shapes could be seen bounding idly about, as though inverted dolphins in the growing thunderhead. Magnets had answered Roger's shrill call. Terrian showed only a slight flicker of doubt before turning resuming his now-careless posture. Roger would be able to feel the magnetic pull of the storm, slowly waking him up. His kind had answered his cry, if slowly, and seemed to be dropping lower and lower. Any moment, the cloud would burst, and while Synapse would have gained a deadly advantage, Roger would not be without one of his own.

---

The curled-up sandslash twitched and scrambled as it was pummeled by suppressive fire; in irregular intervals, it would pump out a volley of needles, but each one was successively smaller and weaker. Even so, it was something for Mikhail to be wary of.

The sandslash underground had not expected such a sudden and powerful combined attack. It lost its grip on the Jeep and staggered backwards, shielding its eyes and starting to curl up before the falling Jeep knocked it off-balance; successive shots rendered it quickly unconscious. The vehicle was in free fall for less than a second, and was more a quick, backwards roll than anything else, quickly jolted to a halt by impact with the hedgehog. The hole it had left was big enough to drive up through, if they could find an easy way to the surface. The two gunmen remained motionless, quite clearly deceased.

---

One further back, mangled from a fall, a motorcycle laid down beside him. Another further up, a victim to a shotgun blast that had missed her body armor. Scyther corpses strewn about. It was a mess here, but Paul McCulloch wasn’t amongst the dead, and judging by the broken glass spread across the road, he’d been driving something bigger.

Shotgun shells here, rifle shells here. Unless Paul was in the habit of switching weapons up, that meant he wasn’t alone. Many of the scythers showed signs of slugs hitting them instead of shotgun pellets. Paul had never been a big fan of shotguns, at least not when the young man had known him. It had been so long. Eight years? Nine, maybe? Paul couldn’t stay hidden for much longer, though.

His totodile tottered about the motorcycles, growling at random points in the woods. “Carl, c’mon,” the young man called, brushing a few specks of dirt off his jacket’s sleeve. As Carl obligingly ran back, the young man drew a pokeball from his jacket and drew him back in, then mounted his own motorcycle. Paul couldn’t have been through this way more than an hour ago. Time was of the essence.

Getting a large mass moving is relatively simple, making it change directions is much more difficult, a real rhyhorn would have had a lot of trouble keeping up with Synapse's jump and Smiffy was relatively new to the body, he didn't bother. With a stomp the front right foot buried itself a few inches into the ground, and with the other three inclined he tore four sweeping arcs in the ground, throwing a hail of dirt at Terrian and Sequoyah. Careful not to stumble he broke from the drift just before facing straight at the now dancing rat, this let him keep what momentum was left as he again pushed up to ramming speed. Smiffy snorted and tossed his head, the thin whine of air ripping joined the thick screech of the storm over head as his horn began to spin, ripping itself free too fast for the vacuum to fill again. He had a good shot, might as well hit for everything.

Maddy was almost thirty feet away from the tree now, she had slowed a bit when the sky started to darken and her hair started to stand on end. Maddy had been extremely careful on the trek to avoid pokemon based natural disasters, but even without having been in one all you had to do was look up to know the worst place to be right now was near Roger. Turning on her heels she was surprised to see a rhyhorn, and rainbow smoke, but above she could see streaks of light in the clouds running along with her. If she had turned around any later the pillar of light that consumed the tree Roger was in would have left her blind as well as deaf (and quite likely brain dead).

A bolt several feet thick erupted around it, instantly vaporizing the outer branches of the tree, leaving a ball of naked twigs around Roger, still mostly out of it. Following the strike the magnetics of the storm picked up and his metal body began to lift, pulling free of the branches now supported only by a deeply charred trunk. Knowing in the back of her head that it was too late Maddy turned her stride into a leap when she saw the flash of the strike, aiming to land on her shoulder and hoping to avoid the charge that would be moving out through the ground, and hoping much more strongly that she was far enough away for it to not matter. Back near the battle Ulysses's Jeep began to rock, and then shake, and all around make a good effort of pretending to be driving down a dirt road with some serious potholes and washboarding, the swarm could have lifted it easily if they wanted to but this was just magnetic wash from the other things going on in the cloud. Next to it the eltpach's aluminum frame sat unresponsive, as if looking down on the jeep from it's nonferrous pedestal. You silly car with all your iron components, I hope you don't have a radio, cus that's not gonna work tomorrow!

Gloria was close enough. The regal pokémon took a seat, looking all the more majestic in this lax pose. She opened her mouth and looked for all the world as if she were about to sing, strange as that might seem. Rather than sing, however, the ninetales hurled (double entendres!) a ferocious blast of fire at Synapse from just two yards away.

Synapse's opinion of the fairer sex would likely be damaged for many years to come.