The Sableye next to her seemed almost agitated towards Jude. Nonetheless, he had succeeded in approaching her and not getting destroyed. She almost seemed confused about how to answer a simple question, but that feeling went away when she assumed a more confident stance. The girl explained that she and her partner had apparently already been out in the wasteland for a couple years already. She definitely didn’t look like she was from a station (or at least, fresh out of one) but he was almost certain that some part of what she said was a lie. “I’m sure you can,” Jude replied with a growing smirk, “but if you’re so capable of surviving by yourself, I doubt you’d like company. Being so tested against the wilds, I’m sure you’re totally okay with just having that weird Sableye as your only company ever.” He pulled the scarf around his neck out more so that it almost covered the tip of his chin. Turning to the left to prepare to leave, he glanced at the girl one more time. Jude had tried to seem relatably friendly, just so he wouldn’t squander this meeting, but if she was going to lie to him he had no reason to be nice. ----- Dustin sighed. It seemed like a nice place to head to first, but Cerulean City was pretty much dead. He rarely found anything of interest in anywhere he checked, nothing really happened in public, and he hadn’t really met anyone face-to-face yet. It was almost… too quiet. All the trainers before him were warned of bandits and the weather, so the idea that that was the reason Cerulean was so ‘abandoned’ lingered in her mind. [i]Buuut,[/i] if it WAS so dead, there wouldn’t be reason for bandits or thieves or whatever to even be there! Aeita meowed in a warning fashion when she turned a corner in front of Dustin, putting both of them into a defensive stance. Listening harder, he heard a metallic rumbling gradually getting louder. In a panic he forced himself to the wall and motioned the Meowth close to him. His heart felt like it would literally fly out of his chest as the sound became ever so closer. The hand grasped firmly around Dustin’s pocket knife had whitened knuckles. The metal clanking was so close it felt like it was literally behind him… Both of them breathed a long sigh of relief when several Rattata looked at them from inside of a rolling trash can. Dustin cursed himself for being so paranoid to be scared by some clever rats. As he got up, he listened to the rolling trashcan slowly fade away. Unfortunately, the sound was quickly replaced with distant commotion. Far away enough that it was faint but close enough that it could be noticed casually. With one hand supporting him on the sand and the other poised with his knife, he quietly over to a spot where he could hear it better and pinpoint the direction the noise came from. Before he even managed that, he noticed a small trail of sand sprayed into the air. The already faded prints in the sand lead straight into another alleyway, the one to the left of the pile of abandoned wood he hid behind. Just before he sunk back into the corner, Dustin caught a glimpse of a short black shape quickly head into the alleyway. [b]Hopefully[/b] it hadn’t seen him as well. The fear Dustin felt was a different kind than earlier. This wasn’t just a paranoid, tense fear… It was more of a ‘threatened’ kind of fear. A dangerous fear. Not before long he heard, unmistakably, human speech. Why were they in an alleyway, was the question that Dustin posed on himself. Were they bandits, or maybe just explorers like him? The answer was an enigma to him, and the time he had to mull over it was cut short when he caught the sound of feet walking. The dead silence was still except for his suppressed breathing and the hard-to-identify signs of life headed past him. Just as he prepared to make a daring escape from the scene, Dustin accidentally shifted his foot to the wrong place and stepped on Aeita’s small paw, producing a sharp yelp from the Pokemon. His heart sank for two reasons: he had just hurt his faithful companion, and he had probably alerted this unknown adversary to his presence. The feeling he had when this happened was indescribable. An immense feeling of regret and dread.