ooh another prompt: times flare staff were super confuddled seeing manon rollering around the hq halls
((i wasn’t sure you meant literally on roller skates, but chose to trust that you did. <3))
1. The noise is deafening, between the whirr of the wheels on the concrete floors, the fracas of the collision and various gadgets clattering to the floor, the sheer pitch of Xerosic’s shrill scream, and Manon’s laughter.
Fleurdelys considers hunting down the person responsible for giving her those blasted things, but the whole sequence of event is somewhat entertaining.
2. Bara and Correa avoid an actual crash — although only by way of throwing themselves into each other’s arms and against the wall — but they are even louder and angrier.
“What is that hideous brat even doing here?!”
“And why is she not wearing a uniform?!”
They’re still clutching each other, Fleurdelys notices, numbly.
3. Pachira is not surprised about the girl being there, nor about the roller skates. What five minutes she has seen of the kid were enough to figure out roller skates don’t clash with her image.
What she’s more curious about is that the kid is hollering down the halls in roller skates, laughing. Currently.
Brushing her index finger to her chin, she pops her head into Fleurdelys’ office to confirm: “Wasn’t her Pokémon dying?”
He throws her a tired almost-glare. “Not dying, Pachira. It is comatose.”
She leans back out to watch as the brat comes back the other way, wearing Flare-patented sunglasses and pursued by a yelling glasses-less grunt.
Aah, now she sees it: the little strain around the kid’s mouth from forcing that grin, the emptiness in the sparkling irises behind the lenses, the bags under those wide-open eyes.
She waits for the comedy duo to pass and for the ruckus to die down before commenting: “Sure fucked up how human nature feels the need to make it look as though everything is fine when it clearly isn’t, huh?”
“Keeping up appearances,” he says. “Beauty before anything.”
4. The novelty passes, mostly. Bara and Correa still seethe between gritted teeth, but within a few weeks, even the admin have internalized a reflex to stick to the wall whenever the sound of wheels is heard, and since she does not have much else to do, Manon quickly becomes good enough that there is no crashing anymore.
That is, until the professor Platane drops by to check up on her and test a few things on her Harimaron.
And it’s not even that surprising to anyone in the Fleurdelys labs that the kid has acquired a pair of skates and pulled him along with her within an hour; neither is the fact that the man is bad at it. The surprises are:
1) exactly how much of a clutz that man is;
2) considering their relative heights and weights, how he managed to make the director fall and end up on top.
Pachira is startled, but too much of a pro for that to stop her from whipping out her Holo Caster and immortalizing the scene. Fleurdelys’s venomous glare tells her she would be fired if she were actually in his employ, but hey, lucky her.
5. Well, she didn’t have roller skates that time she broke into the lab with the professor, the Hoenn Champion, and a bunch of other rude kids, but the amount of surprise and chaos caused amongst the staff was comparable.
(bonus prequel to this just to be mean)
1. The next time they meet, she is not wearing roller skates anymore, and Xerosic is not surprised to see her.
“I thought you might come,” he muses, checking all the equipment for the first test. “Brave girl.”
“I’m not brave,” she mumbles as she puts on the small helmet. “I just need this.”