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Reno would give a curt nod to the older gentleman that they found Aile sliding up to immediately as they entered, giving acknowledgement to his being called out. "Yep. That, unfortunately, is me. Once again losing life and limb punching out things that I ought not be punching out. Last time was tyranny, this time was things not from around these parts." Reno would trail off, attention slowly drifting as he began to think on what exactly he had just fought off before snapping back to attention. "Right. Focus. Name's Reno. Nice to make your acquaintance, Robert." Reno said, extending his right arm to shake the man's hand. He wasn't willing to test his new prosthetic on something like this just yet. Maybe see if he can avoid crushing a glass before moving on to avoid crushing a hand.

Before he could get engrossed in any other conversation, Reno was beginning to see and hear something of interest coming from the TV. It was tuned to view what they wanted to show of the competition and it looked like they were doing an exit interview. An exit interview for Aria. Apparently Team Stella had taken her out and....oh god, she was plugging everything she had going on right on live television. Oh God, she was plugging her Soundcast on international television after bombing the interview with her announcer position. Of course one of them was going to do something like this. At least, for once, it hadn't been him. "So.....thats a thing." Reno said as the interview cut off back to regular competition footage, hoping that Aile and Isaac had also seen exactly what the hell he had just seen.

“I’ll take a hard cider, like the last couple of nights,” Aile told the barkeep as Isaac had started to give his order. She sighed as she heard Aria advertise herself and her music, shaking her head. “Oi vey. Of course….” The woman would turn to the screen that held Isaac’s attention, catching the tail end of the bit before Rose began to speak. “Ah… hah?” She stared in disbelief as her attention was held by the television, hanging her head as it finished and diverted to another part of the Wild Area.

“Pleasure teh meet teh bott of yeh. And maybeh yeh should take a back seat sometimes, take a day off, Reno.” The man would then turn to see what was keeping his drinking buddy’s attention now, tilting his head incredulously. “Might I ask yeh lot sometin’? How in teh feck do yeh lot ‘ave a chaos magnet like dat? Do yeh lot beh given sometin’ dat jus’ attracts it?”

“I don’t know, unless the SNAGs are made with something? Reno?” Aile would lift her head up to take the drink from the bartender and take a long swig of it. “And here, I thought we’d slow down on the dramatic s**t once the war was over,” the woman muttered under her breath.

Sliding onto a stool next to Reno, Isaac raised his pint of ale and sipped the golden nectar within, while still keeping his eyes trained on the television. Even if they were not going to call Sub, it still made sense to keep an eye on how things were going. Still, it was hard to follow all of the action despite the best efforts of the camera crew, the rest of Snagem seemed to be fighting a Gigantamax Kingler and a ground channeler of some kind right now.



"Oh," Isaac replied to Reno assertion with a raised eyebrow as the man in question rubbed his forehead. "Pray tell then, oh prophet, what doom lies beyond the horizon?"

Reno would take another breath before taking another draw off of his own bottle, making sure to savor the drink for a moment this time before answering. How best to word exactly what he knew and some of the conclusions he had drawn from it. Well, at least step one was neatly taken care of by the fact this tournament had shown where this began. "So back before the war really hit top gear, I kinda went on my own little journey of self-discovery. Did some meditating, kicked a lot of things, and accidentally called back that thing I lost my leg over to where its brain was. So, we started fighting and it was doing its best to shake me using what it had so it could take advantage and grab me. Most of those aren't relevant except when it tried to scare me with the thing that brought it to heel way back when. Even gave me a little dose of the residual energy the thing had on it still from its leash." Reno began, keeping himself turned away from his two friends as he kept an eye on the crowd nearby to see if anyone was paying too much attention to this. Robin had mentioned a cult and he still had no idea how widespread such a group might actually be.

Eventually, Reno would feel like he was at least relatively safe for the moment as he began to talk again, his robotic hand mindlessly drumming its fingers against his leg. "It obviously didn't work, but it left an impression. An impression I really did not expect to mean anything after that since I thought I killed it. And then Black City happened." Bringing his hand sup to his face again, Reno would run them through his hair a few times as he continued, indicating to Isaac as he spoke now. "Remember that wave of Sub's energy you sent out? The one everyone piggybacked off of to power themselves up? It.....it was eerily similar to what that thing tried to frighten me with. Enough so, when I took that cocoon after all that, I buried it as deep as I could because I wanted to believe that it was the cause of all this. And if not, then that it might be that meteorite, especially after what it made me do and everything related to that. But I never lost the thought that it was purely Sub that caused the energy. So now I just watch and wait for the other shoe to drop, if it even does. I could be completely irrationally paranoid, just using this as an outlet for all the myriad trauma I've repressed and called my life. I don't know anymore if I'm reading too much into everything around me or just enough to see the truth. All I know is I need time to process this away from Sub."

He would take another drink as he finished, hoping to keep himself from going further into his more paranoid connections he thought he had found. Eventually finding the bottle to be empty, the red head would simply let it fall to the counter before he collapsed himself, only holding his head up with his own two hands. "So there. That's at least one thing about Sub I know you don't. There are other things that are less related to the eeriness if you want. Just to put all the cards on the table with other people besides myself."

Aile listened to Reno patiently, looking down at the bartop part way through.That energy back in Black City was indeed something else, but it was the same as other stuff Reno felt? Joyous. And Isaac’s whole listing of what some of the others could do didn’t really make her feel any better, in fact almost the exact opposite. Throwing indirect shade at Sub from Reno brought back memories from when she was a captured enemy of the Snagems instead of one of the group, and of what happened when Sub finally entered her cell. She had tried to shove it to the back of her mind, and after a while succeeded in that, at least until now. And Isaac listing off the others’ capabilities did not help her with her worry if something like that somehow happened again and they had no tolerance for it this time.

The first motion Aile took after staring for maybe a good minute at least at the bartop would be to down the rest of her cider, motioning to the bartender once she was done. “Can I get another one of these, mixed with some whisky this time, though? Cinnamon whisky if you have it.” The bartender nodded and returned with her ordered drink after a couple of minutes. “So. Pretty much, you’re paranoid about Sub because of two energy signatures being extremely similar, one of them being the leash to the thing that decided to nearly devour the mind of our purple furred friend yesterday,” she summed up quietly once the bartender had left to make up another drink. She had taken note of Reno’s pause and glance around, so she assumed discretion, or at least being quiet when they talked about it, was wanted. “I mean, that s**t has me worried, too, now, but I have my own reasons. If the man wants to do something, he’s gonna do ahead and do it, damned be talking to anyone about it. I mean, unless you all talked about and called it good, dropping me off in the middle of a desert in all black, shackles, no shoes, and my Pokemon scattered to the wind.” She had one hell of a stare at the two men she arrived with as she took a drink of her spiked hard cider, if that was even a technical thing, alcohol on alcohol, rubbing her wrists once she put her drink down.

Robert just took all of this in, looking at the three people discussing their boss. The old man just figured that he should keep quiet as they talked, as outside of wanting to help Aile out as much as possible, he didn’t have much of a vested interest or stake in any of this. His focus would turn specifically to the woman as she spoke up, a small bit of concern or worry on his face. Finally, he tore his gaze from Aile to his bottle of beer, taking a swig of it once more as he considered a thought.

“I don’t want the shirt, though. Can I get a refund on that? Maybe not meeting the people of Pyrite, I like some of those sons of bitches, including Robert here, but you know, the how that happened. Seriously.” Aile would take a long drink of her spicy sweet concoction before continuing. “Lovely, though. Good talk. So, it could also be crazy… What the hell is a Deoxys, anyways? But still need to keep an eye on Sub, for either his safety or ours, or more likely, option c, both. Lovely. Let’s hope he doesn’t get paranoid for whatever reason.”

“If fer watevehr reason yeh need a place teh hide out at, my bar’ll beh open fer yeh,” Robert offered. “Jus’ try not teh get yehr arses severeleh hurt. Hildeh might beh a good medic, but dere’s onleh so much sheh can do. Bringin’ one back from teh dead ain’t in dat skill set, an’ brink of deat’ll be a b***h also.”

“I don’t think any of us are planning on that, Robert. Thankfully.”

“Yeh especially, Windeh.” Robert would give Aile a poignant stare as she took yet another drink, though a smaller one this time.

“What? What? I’m not as bad off as I was back then. Now that I know that a good chunk of Snagem doesn’t somehow still hate my guts. Somehow. Somehow. I still don’t understand the reasoning he gave…” she muttered there at the end, staring at the liquor shelf behind the bar as Robert continued to stare at Aile, now with a more annoyed look.

Reno would glance between his two friends, a small smile creeping across his face as he did so. It felt exceedingly reassuring for the two people he had actually decided to open up to not immediately start calling this entire train of thought insane like he has expected. At least he had that win under his belt after.....way too many losses.

"No need for the camera thing. Yet, at least. If he does anything himself, then....maybe." Reno told Isaac, making sure to keep an eye on the engineer's reaction. He did not need to explain to Sub why GRAY was complaining about Isaac's secondary security measures. "But I will make sure to remember that offer, Robert. Appreciate the support."