The bag that was previously dangling from his hand drops numbly from his now nerveless fingers. It crunches ominously on impact, and somewhere it registers that he may have just broken a few of his new hyper potions, but he’s not paying attention to that at all. Instead his focus has narrowed down to his phone, nothing else in the world matters so much as the message he just received.
“Something’s going down, Magma HQ just got squashed. There’s a giant fucking hole in Mt. Chimney!”
It’s from one of his Aqua contacts, not Archie, but a person high enough up on the “food chain” that they’re his main contact for information. Team Aqua has never been formal in their communications, but there’s a distinctly shaken tone to the message that Wally hadn’t yet encountered from anyone on the Team. There’s more information, something about Team Rocket and Galactic HQs but he doesn’t care.
There are pictures, oh gods there are pictures! His breathing hiccups; someone bumps into his shoulder, and as is typical of very friendly Alola, apologizes instead of yelling at him for standing dead still in the middle of the street, but he hears it from far away.
There’s a hole in Mt. Chimney.
The volcano-! It’s active! What if it erupts? And all the damage just from whatever caused the hole- His family.
Maybe it doesn’t make much sense to worry about them so much. Petelburg is far away from Mt. Chimney and Verdanterf Town is nestled in the mountains, about as safe from the volcano as you can get and still be on the main island. Just because he knows that though, doesn’t stop him from reacting with fear and panic. Just because they should be safe doesn’t mean they are! More than that, Hoenn is his home, and it’s in danger and he’s not there!
He tries to breath and his lungs stutter, choking him.
Working at an observatory sucked, Sophocles decided.
While he was a trial captain, he was still technically a researcher there, so when anything “got weird” or started behaving abnormally in general, he was dragged into the ordeal. Scientists, disorganized and far more stressed out than they needed to be, were simply shouting over each other.
With a rebellious streak suddenly running through him, Sophocles threw on a hoodie, quietly snuck out of the observatory and caught a bus down to the bottom of the mountain. It wasn’t like they’d miss him, he was just the robotics guy slash...engineer? Guy-who-made-machines. He didn’t know much about legendary pokemon or astrology, whatever his title was.
After stepping off the bus, Sophocles figured he had about an hour or two before Molayne noticed he was missing, if he was lucky. There was always the off-chance that they needed him for something. But what could he do with his newfound free time? He’d just wanted to escape the chaos of the lab- he didn’t really think about what he’d do once he was away.
Malie City was just down the road, but there wasn’t enough time to go and visit his parents or walk all the way to the mall and actually do something...There was ice cream and malasadas, though. They were a simple trip into town and back, and they were out of ice cream at the observatory, anyways! With a newfound purpose in his step, Sophocles set off for Malie City.
...And immediately bumped into someone.
Sophocles let out a “Sorry!” half out of reflex, half because he was too caught up in the idea of sweets to actually pay attention to where he was walking. The poor boy he’d walked into didn’t respond, so he intended to keep going, but he hears a wheeze and stops.
It’s a little clearer after Sophocles turns around to look at the stranger that something is wrong. He’s standing in the middle of the road, focused almost entirely on his phone and he sounds like he’s about to die.
“H-hey, are you alright? Do you need an ambulance or something?”
