AETHER VS. ULTRA

[indigo_league]

Who: The Aether Foundation, the Ultra Beasts, and YOU!
Where: Aether Headquarters on the Sevii Islands.
When: October 30th-31st, immediately after the Emergency News Bulletin
Summary: Showdown at the Aether HQ! The Ultra Beasts have found what they were looking for...
Rating: PG for action violence.
Log:


If there's one thing that can be said about several weeks straight of chaos, it's made the general response-time of rescue teams and emergency services across Johto and Kanto alike extremely quick. Within moments of the urgent news bulletin regarding the Aether HQ going live, relief efforts start taking off from every feasible point. With volunteers eager to watch the Aether Foundation go down in flames help any way they can hopping on board with the rescue forces, aid is coming, and fast.

... But not as fast as them.

At the exact moment of the broadcast, almost as though heralded by some unknown frequency, every Ultra Beast in land, sea, or sky drops whatever they're doing and turns their heads (or... headlike appendages, in most cases) to the south. And then they'll take off, pausing ONLY if they happen to have befriended a human or two over the weeks. These ones will gesture-- beckoning, dancing, even dabbing (because you KNOW at least one person taught one to dab)-- anything at all that they may have picked up throughout the month in order to communicate with the "aliens" they've met in this world.

Wherever they're headed, they want their strange allies to come with them.

And, if their invitation is accepted, they will sweep a trainer or two right off their feet and shoot off for the Sevii Islands.

_______

The temporary Aether Foundation HQ, a rather advanced building considering it went up in a matter of weeks after they first arrived that year-and-a-half-or-so ago, sits on the water's edge with its floating Pokemon sanctuary (which many consider to be the Foundation's crown jewel) neatly attached.

It's normally a pretty peaceful place, with volunteers coming and going as they please. While no small amount of property damage and general chaos has gone down on the mainland over the course of October, at no point had the marauding Beasts launched a concentrated, or indeed deliberate-seeming, attack against any one location at all.

This is clearly no longer the case.

An explosion sends billowing smoke (and a fancy white golf-cart) high into the air above the palm trees surrounding the building. Local islanders and wild Pokemon spill onto the beach to escape what has seemingly become an all-out warzone between Aether agents and Ultra Beasts of all shapes and sizes...

But while there is definitely fighting going on, taking a closer look will tell anyone that the Beasts are focused mainly on the building... and not just destroying it, either. The battering they're delivering seems to be with the intent to find a way inside, only stopping to attack humans and Pokemon who try to get in the way.

But why?

What's in there?

Whatever it is... those Aether agents who haven't already fled aren't keen to let anyone, human or Ultra Beast, too close!



[Happy Halloween! See the updated info post for more info... and comment below to join the fray...]

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[indigo_league]

A room full of complicated machinery, its walls completely covered in schematics and data.

It seems the scientist in this room was in the process of destroying what he could-- some of the schematics are torn down and a disconnected seismograph in the corner is churning out reams of blank paper without any data to transmit.

However, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the stuff in this room was measuring. One entire wall is taken up by a huge diagram of a wormhole, surrounded by photograph after photograph of them appearing in real life. Big, small, at nighttime, in broad daylight... At first one might think that these are photos documenting the chaotic storm of wormholes appearing throughout October, but a closer look shows dates ranging long before now... almost nine years' worth.

Because of the sheer volume of recorded material in this room, there's still quite a bit left scattered around, although most of it is pretty incomprehensible without context for it. Pawing through what little of the readouts and machinery are clearly organized allows the discerning investigator to reasonably conclude:

An enormous amount of the Aether Foundation's resources went into research, development, and constant operation of facilities that allowed them to detect the specific space-time anomalies that directly precede the formation of wormholes. Although it began as a very not-exact science, in the last year they've gotten it close to perfect.

Up until the beginning of October, incredibly detailed, often-handwritten logs of every instance of a wormhole accompanied the computer data. After October 1st, the notes start getting messier and more frantic, eventually becoming barely-legible scribbles as the time increments between detections keep getting shorter and shorter. By the time the log reaches the 15th, there are no more records. Coincidentally, there is smashed piece of wormhole-detecting equipment by the doorway with a post-it note on it that reads "RIP, WH Detector 11, 10/15/2019. Also RIP Geoff's patience". They may not be connected, but an educated guess would be that October 15th was not a good day to be one of Geoff's coworkers in the lab.

Although it doesn't appear to be present in the room, some of the logs (including the first appearance of Nihilego) indicate the Aether Foundation is also in possession of a device that actually forces the formation of wormholes when activated rather than just detecting them. However, it seems this machine was not involved with any of the known wormhole incidents occurring after March...