Welcome to Gaia! ::

"What?" He responded to her teasing with his own, removing his hands from the wheel and letting the vehicle coast forward on its own. "I think I can handle the occasional glance." He returned his hands to their proper position, still grinning, and turned his eyes back to the road.

"Ahh, was that what did in your arm?" he guessed. He had always vaguely wondered and never properly asked, assuming that the job itself was a liability and she could have been hurt any number of ways. "Wait, at a ball? Like, all fancy and stuff?" He hadn't paid much attention when the last mission had occurred since he had had no interest in attending it, and the concept struck him as... quite strange.

"Well, it's only polite to look at your company when you're talking to them, right?" As if to prove his point, he cast another momentary glance in Claire's direction. He was confident enough in his skills as a driver to do that much, and it wasn't as though there was a whole lot of traffic in the desert. Camphoreon's silhouette had yet to appear on the horizon, and so he assumed it would stay that way for a while yet.

Lucas couldn't help but feel somehow grateful that that was one mission he didn't have to do, having never been a huge fan of fancy dress. Not that he had any delusions of remembering it if he had gone, but the sentiment remained. "Even useless pokemon have their own benefits, right? I mean, with cloning and all." Or at least that was the impression he had gotten. He didn't have a very good idea of how the cloning department actually worked. "Anyway, sounds like the kind it was kind of fun, huh? I mean, disregarding the uncomfortable dress code and the broken arm..." Maybe not so much fun then.

"No, I've never met him." Or heard of him even, really. There really were a lot of people around the base that he had never met... He frowned slightly as Claire complained, his instinctive desire to defend everyone surfacing. "I'm sure he was trying his best," he reasoned. People who gave less than 100% on missions were rarely well-received upon their return, after all. "Maybe he's just not suited to infiltration. Do you know what department he's with?"

"Ah yeah, I guess that would be expected. Throwing a bunch of criminals into some fancy-pants shindig - I can't imagine more than half of them were in any kind of comfort zone there..." He certainly wouldn't have been, and of all the Rockets he had met so far, he could think of few that seemed as though they would be.

"Mm, I see... Well, I guess it wasn't that important anyway. Just a curiosity." And anyway, if he had done as poorly as Claire suggested, it seemed pretty obvious that at the very least he was not with the espionage/surveillance department. As he idly considered these thoughts, Camphoreon's form began to emerge from the haze of the horizon. "Oh, check it out. There's the city."

"What, you mean you're tired of the sand?" he said, mocking offense. "But look at it! It's so... Okay, yeah, it's pretty boring." He leaned back a little further, pressing his shoulder blades into the seat. Unfortunately the seat was still made of bricks and iron and spikes. "You know, if you look far enough that way," he gestured slightly towards the window, "you can see the ocean. And then that way," he gestured towards the opposite window, "there's the mountains. ...Not that that makes any difference to us, I guess, but they're out there." He had half a desire to visit them some day, too, especially the mountains. It had been ages since he'd last been camping.

"Oh yeah? I wouldn't mind visiting it myself. Always wanted to try salt-water fishing." He vaguely remembered a promise to go with Morrison, but obviously that wasn't going to happen... Or maybe it would, if he could ever track the man down. "I'd say let's go for it, but I'm actually kind of starving a little," he said with a laugh. "Hope you don't mind sticking to the original plan?" Camphoreon was drawing ever nearer; the beginnings of roads could be picked out not too much further ahead.

"Aw, that's a shame. I can't imagine what I would have done for entertainment as a kid if I couldn't have gone fishing." And camping and hunting too, for that matter. He had always had an affinity for being outdoors, regardless of what the activity was.

"Oh, right, I guess I forgot it was winter," he laughed. "Though they say the beach is warmer than other places during winter. Something about the water retaining heat. Always sounded like a load to me, though." If nothing else, the wind across the winter ocean was positively wicked and destroyed any and all warmth the place might otherwise possess.

Before long they had arrived at Camphoreon's outskirts, the sparsely populated area warning of the population density further in. A parking garage was still a ways off, though, and so Lucas pressed forward.