I always found it incredibly weird that Blue is hanging around a Team Rocket-occupied office building, in an obscure tiny room only accessible by warp panel, seemingly for the sole purpose of battling Red, and doesn't even seem to care about the whole city-in-peril thing. I have to give props to Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee for rewriting this part of the game to make way more sense (instead having Blue work with Red and new character Trace to infiltrate Silph).

There are a lot of plot elements in Pokémon Red and Blue that we didn't think twice about as kids, but thirty years on raise a lot of questions. Oh, the 90's.

 When you know your Pokémon team can easily cream that of anybody in Team Rocket, you're allowed to have a little sass.

 In a villainous base full of people who use Poison-types, you can bet there are going to be some pretty funky smells hanging around.

I wonder if the Rust Syndicate has this problem. Which of course is a segue into me talking about Pokémon Legends: Z-A! I finished the main game and I'm working on the post-game missions now, and overall I like Z-A way, way more than Scarlet and Violet. It's not perfect and I do have a few quibbles, but it does so much right that it's been a joy to play through. And I gotta get my hands on that DLC! I'm still planning to do a full blog post with all of my thoughts about Z-A because sometimes I like to pretend this is a gaming blog. I've just been really slow getting through the game because a) it is a delightfully massive game with lots to do and b) I've had a lot of other things going on, but that's okay because I'd rather have a life than spend most of my time gaming unlike Canari.

 In all honesty, Team Rocket are a bunch of pushovers as long as you have at least one Psychic-type Pokémon and somebody who knows Earthquake. Gotta love the imbalanced battle mechanics in Gen I!

(Which leads me to wonder why Sabrina didn't just go in and wipe the floor with them.)

 Fun fact: This NPC's dialogue refers to a real-world place, the settlement of Tiksi on the northern coast of Russia, which is actually the northernmost settlement with a population over 4,000. In the original Japanese dialogue, he states that he was sent to Podkamennaya Tunguska, a tiny village in the middle of Siberia.

Either way, definitely not the Tiki branch.

 Literally anything.

 One last FFTA2 sketch!

Vasily is a cantankerous, unsociable middle-aged bangaa who used to run his own courier business before joining Clan Excelsior after they helped him out of a jam. Aside from his skills as a Cannoneer, he's also an excellent airship pilot and knows his way around machines. He's extremely emotionally attached to his ship, a mid-size freighter named the Juggernaut, which he treats like his baby (since he didn't really have anybody else in his life before he joined the clan). After he joined Clan Excelsior, they lived on the Juggernaut and used it as their home base for a while. Eventually Qrrog secured Worgen Island for them and now they all live there, but still regularly use the Juggernaut to travel around Ivalice.

While generally cynical and blunt, Vasily is a decent guy beneath all that grousing, and he's very committed to the clan and always has their backs. In canon material, most bangaa have Scottish accents, but Vasily has a Cockney dialect because he just popped into my head that way. I dunno, maybe he's from a different part of Ivalice or something. He still has the usual bangaa habit of hissing his S's, though.

There are more characters who join Clan Excelsior in later fics, but I think I'll save their portraits for if/when I ever get around to revising those.