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“Wait…you honestly…don’t know Mi-…” I was left stupefied for a brief moment there. If anyone knew anything, the rangers certainly did. Or at this point, I suppose the more senior members of that staff like Spencer. I suppose it didn’t matter. “Ninetales hybrid? Was…well…effectively the defacto leader at the time before Sub came into play. Also had a beef with Ein, but not as big as Sub had in retrospect. Left the regions when Sub took over, went to go play family man. I probably should have done the same when I had the chance, thinking about it.” I mused.

I then glanced at Essentia. I could effectively tell she was looking for excuses. But what was even more curious was Kess’s reaction. “Kess, either you and-slash-or Ein done something to yourself to forget effectively everything or you’re not the Kess we, let alone I, know. We never made it any secret about Black City for one and still don’t have any reason to, and two, you very well knew of Lysandre’s and Ein’s little joint venture until Lysandre got uppity with that Zygarde and Ein decided to pull out his proverbial trump card in that of that Shadow Mewtwo. As if S22 wasn’t enough of a headache to deal with; a headache I might add you were okay with for a while there. I should know…I took quite a few lumps and shocks out of you and a pretty nasty bite mark from him in all of that.” I said to her. Got to love that selective memory. If I had to take a guess, she’s been downplaying her involvement in all of that in front of Looker, let alone the rest of SWIPE.

I looked back towards Looker, taking one more glance at Essentia before giving Looker my full attention again. “…my question is still pending: Why did you come after us? We’ve been dotting every ‘I’ and crossing every ‘T’ since after dealing with Ein and between having a couple of slip ups, ones we ultimately paid for, I might add, and in other occasions getting hamstrung by bureaucracy every so often, Hoenn region says ‘hi’ by the way, here we are, in Sub’s now stripped-down office, talking to you for some investigation, if you can really call it that, all the while I'm getting postured by a mercenary and a trigger-happy harlot in a body condom. And I don’t know what that guy behind me story is…so. What got you to come after us so hard and so fast like this. Where was the e-mail? The phone call? Whatever.”

Once they finally arrived at HQ, Ulla stepped out of the helicopter they were all taken in. She's kept quiet the entire ride as so many emotions were stirring. Not just her own; she could feel all of Snagems as well. Agony, Rage, Fear, all of it. She tried her best to silent the noise, but they were all so loud. It was almost too loud for her to bear. Once they were escorted inside HQ, that's when even more emotions started flooding. The fairy child looked around at the destruction in horror. "...How can they do this?" She murmured. This was her home. This was her safe haven. And they destroyed it. Ulla wanted to look at her room so badly. She kept any journal entrees of her parents and Leon in her room. Journal entrees of when they were alive and photos.

So much was flooding into Ulla's mind. The fairy child started to breathe heavily as she gained her senses back as she heard a small voice. It was Yuna's voice. She turned to her family as she ran towards them. The emotions were still very loud, but. Ulla was able to manage it at the sight of her family. "Yuna! Serena! I'm so glad you two are okay!" She said as she patted Yuna's head. She listened to what Yuna said about her dream. It must've been scary thing to be so little without her parents here. "You were so brave Yuna. You took care of your sister. And you handled yourself well when nobody was here. You were very brave." She said with her best smile that she could.

After reassuring her, Ulla knelt down and sat on the floor next to them as she saw them take Sub and Blizz for questioning. She watched as Looker took both of them, but payed close attention to Sub's demeanor. Being called by his legal name probably wasn't something he thought he would hear. But, something in his eyes...was something Ulla would have never thought she would see. Regret.

Several moments later, Ulla noticed Blizzard come back out. It was her turn next for questioning as she recognized the Type: Null come towards her. She got up and looked at her family. "I'll be fine. I'll just be in the other room." She said as she followed along.

As Blizzard was let go, seemingly free to wander the halls outside of the collar wrapped around his neck, he would see guards everywhere. Even though they were letting him out, they weren't letting him back IN to the STR, at least not at the moment.

Passing by one of the windows, he'd take note of a massive pen of what looked like Wild Pokemon all crammed into one area, containing the Styler-compelled Pokemon Dim Sun had controlled earlier, along with many of the other Pokemon Snagems may have left out/lost track of. All of the Pokemon from the volcano and maybe some other stragglers were smushed together in close proximity as they tried to figure out what biomes to return them to.

--

Meanwhile, in the STR, Darts keeps trying to slip his fingers up and under the collar with somehow less and less success. He can almost feel Ogerpon's anxiety and anger searing through the Master Ball in his pocket, ready to come rocketing out at any minute as it's trapped inside its ball for the longest time ever and the first time in a year.

For once, she doesn't defy Just Darts' orders, the enormity of the situation not lost on the Legend as she tries to utilize the limited scope of information she got within the capture sphere. For now, she would bide her time and wait... something she wasn't particularly good at yet. Teacher had said as much when they had met, and she was determined to prove the old curmudgeon wrong.

The gambler groans, picking himself up off the floor finally, walking past the nearly comatose Sub to take a close look at the doors Ulla had just walked out. Without his Outrage and his strength, he knew hammering away at these was just going to be an exercise in futility. He could send out his Pokemon and probably cut out of here easily, but then what? A quick button press and an even faster death if what Essentia had said in the cave was true. No, just like his apprentice he was going to have to bide his time.

Darts crouches, keeping his weight balanced as he bounces lightly leg to leg, trying to limber up a bit. "So." He says, breaking the silence of the Training Room finally outside of some families celebrating their reunion. "What did they ask you about?" Turning his head towards Sub curiously, Darts cocks one red eye as he takes in their prone leader.

Sub would glance up and over at Darts, staring at him for a moment before turning his attention back to the door, setting his eyes back on it. "A lot." He replied simply, staring at the door in silence for awhile before speaking again. "About my time in Orre. About Black City. They even had the nerve to ask about Subbarao..." Sub said with a grimace, as if it pained him to even say that name. How they knew about him he didn't know, they must have really did their homework. Shaking off those emotions he finally turned to look Darts in the eyes as he spoke.

"They even asked me about what you were doing. What I was having you do. I thought we were being really careful about that but somehow they found out." Sub said to Darts directly.

Monique didn't know all of Snagem's doings before she turned up, but certainly the S.W.I.P.E. investigators were going deep into this team's history. They were going deep into the well, spelunking through its caverns (literally and figuratively). I may baffle them. After all, unless they are in cahoots with a bunch of Ultra Space people... How much will they know about me?

She exhaled, not wanting to say much. She felt a bit of relief, as much as relief as available in the moment before you were quizzed. If they were going that deep, perhaps they were digging past to a time when she wasn't in this plane of existence. Would they dig past her on a journey to the center of the world?

Brian was down for the count while the Snagems were taken, one by one, to be interrogated. At least, he was for a while. Unfortunately, none of his current Pokemon that could use Heal Pulse were out. Rachel didn't have any that could use it, and Spooky wasn't about to leave Amber's side. Luckily, however, the male trainer gave a groan as he began to come to not long after Ulla had been taken for questioning, his head pounding from the loss of blood he'd sustained. "What the heck happened?" he asked, his voice slightly hoarse. Rachel made her way over to him as she heard his voice, and Amber wasn't far behind. "You took a hit to the head," Rachel said. "I don't know if that's what cut open your head, but you lost some blood."

Brian gave a sigh as he reached up to feel the bandage Rachel had wrapped around his head. "It wasn't a person," he said. "I got clocked by a piece of metal when Lavana threw me off her after the gigaremo machine exploded. I just didn't have time to attend to it when we got ambushed by Dim Sun. Of course, getting punched in the head during the ambush probably didn't help. Speaking of which, where are we?" "We're back at HQ," Amber said, drawing his attention to her. "Some group calling themselves S.W.I.P.E. ambushed both us and Dim Sun and brought us back here. They've taken over the HQ, and all of us were herded into the STR. The controls are screwed, however, so we're out of luck when it comes to fighting back. And GRAY is currently out of commission, so we have no communications." Brian gave a heavy sigh at this news; who was S.W.I.P.E, and what did they want with Snagem?

"You've been awfully secretive about that this whole year," Sol commented, his attention drawn towards Sub after his last sentence. "I've held my tongue about it because I know you well enough to have your reasons, but this feels like the worst time to be holding any secrets when they're going to be laid bare before the very people deciding our fates."

"What... were you having Darts do?" Amaranth asked, clearly out of the loop on the whole thing. Of the two that did know anything of it, neither one were exactly available to talk. "Whatever it was, you weren't careful enough."

Aria would already be attempting to get her SNAG up and recording to aim towards the goons that had just thrown the Snagems into their own base and entrapped them here. Unfortunately, her plan to transmit all these atrocities to the world for them to see and judge this group over was cut short by the very notable and loud sound of the antenna on the peak of Mt Silver being completely removed, alongside all connection to the outside world. Staring towards the swiftly closing door for the STR that was now serving as their holding pen, She let out a huff and sat down on the floor. Looking beside her, she would see the comatose form of Beau lying on the floor where he'd been deposited by the SWIPE people. Whatever that....thing had been that suplexed him into next week before making sure that collar stayed put, it had made sure he felt too heavy and beaten down to do anything beyond simply collapse into unconsciousness once he had stumbled on board his particular transport copter.

Looking towards Sub and Darts, Aria would give a huff before sliding herself over to where they were. "...Black City? You mean the place we turned into a forest?"

Leslie would be staring towards the door as well, for a much different reason than some of the others. She had been forced to abandon her hammer inside of the base once they had cleared the front door, for the obvious reason of it weighing enough to potentially make salsa out of the lesser SWIPE members. It didn't mean that having to abandon her baby wasn't actively killing her inside. And it didn't help that as much as she wanted to try and talk to GRAY, the internal network was dead. Staring towards some of the broken walls and the exposed wiring, Leslie decided the best cure to her minor isolation was to begin poking at what she could see and maybe get lucky about at least finding a small function she could re-enable to make this place feel a little more comfortable. She wasn't going to engage with any of the talk about Black City, not when Porygon-3 might have managed to escape with at least some portion of GRAY before things fully locked down here.

While normally Reno would have been engaging with Darts and Sub, doing his best to figure out what exactly it was that these new kids on the block were exactly hunting for and what those two might have done to trigger it, he had a different goal in mind. Having managed to tuck herself away on his person before they had been arrested, Harleen would scramble her way back onto Reno's shoulder as he walked over to where Crystal had been abandoned by the SWIPE people. "Not sure how much you can hear in there, but I doubt its pleasant even if you can see out here." He said, taking a few looks over the hybrid as he attempted to ascertain if there was anything actively working on her right in that moment.

Grimacing as he confirmed the utter lack of any sign of life beyond enough unconscious reflex to not collapse into a pile, he would look into where her eyes would normally be. "Well, I can at least keep you company until we either break out or somehow get these guys to relent."

Lowering himself to the ground, Reno would place Crystal's form between him and one of the more glaring lights. Taking a cross-legged sitting position as he made himself comfortable, he would blow a few stray hairs out of his face. And then he would casually pierce through the barrier of Dark energy enclosing Crystal's mind with his telepathy.

This probably warranted some explanation, as Reno rendered one of the normal rules of reality a suggestion. That being that a Psychic type can't affect a Dark type without prep work. After his discovery of how his telepathy could work through shadows in the final days of their stay in Paldea, Reno began experimenting with the little quirk. After a few attempts to prove to himself that the increased ease was a part of the ability and not the fault of some other environmental factors, he had expanded efforts to see if it would allow for increased clarity or sensitivity for things like his ramshackle method to telepathically communicate with his Houndoom via the pulse given off by failed Psychic abilities on a Dark type. And instead, stumbled his way directly into the Pokemon's mind, a place that he had never accessed before in any capacity. And using this same backdoor method, Reno would find himself slipping into Crystal's mind.

Finding himself on a storming Alolan beach, it wouldn't take long for Reno to locate where the struggling form of Crystal was. The conduction of this storm of turmoil and her shouts of frustration at the situation made it easy enough to figure out. Giving a small push of mental effort, a pair of malasadas would pop into existence in Reno's hands as he began to walk over. "Hi there. Figured it was my turn to be a roomie in your head, especially since you seem like you could use the company. Want a malasada?" Reno said, offering the dessert to his friend like this was simply a casual meetup.