How much exploring do Bill and Lanette tend to do? I know that if I were a researcher, I would want to know everything about the world’s mythical places, like the Sealed Cavern in Hoenn or the Giant Chasm’s inner cave in Unova. Do they ever get to travel for work, or a least on their own time?

{Bill does a lot more exploring than Lanette. This is even a little canon. There are not only his exploration logs in LGPE, but at least in PokéSpec and Electric Tales, he’s been known to travel to do field research. Which is difficult to consolidate into his character because the anime and GSC also establish that he intends on sticking around his home for science and that he doesn’t like going outside anyway, respectively, but hey. I like to play that off as just talk.

In terms of the canon of this blog, absolutely, Bill will travel to the ends of the earth to follow leads about new pokémon, new talent for the system, or just scientifically interesting things in general, or he’ll be asked to swing by other regions to offer his assistance and expertise to other researchers and engineers. He still spends a lot of his time in the Sea Cottage performing experiments or in Goldenrod, seeing his family, but, you know. That’s probably like two-thirds of the year.

As for Lanette, she’s a bit less adventurous and more work-oriented/dedicated to the system itself. She’ll absolutely be sent places for work (especially if Bill can’t go or can’t be arsed to go himself, as in the case of anything involving Unova), and if Bill invites her along, she absolutely will go with him to meet new admins or to follow leads on adventures. It’s just that she’s a little less adventurous/curious, which means that she might check out the Regis’ chambers or reports of the Mirage islands, but she’s much less likely to do so without studying them thoroughly, weighing the pros and cons of going, stocking up, and very likely getting someone else to go with her. Or in other words, she’ll go exploring; it’s just that she’s often less … impulsive about it.

(Well, that and she doesn’t get paid nearly as much and can’t sweet-talk her way into getting a grant for anything, as Bill apparently does and can. Dude probably didn’t even have to pay for half the materials in his lab or the time he’d lost by getting stuck as various pokémon.)}

#META: bill and lanette are really good with codes and ciphers, which makes me assume you have at least a minor interest in that kind of thing yourself (especially because it took you approximately 1 minute to figure out the ASCII rot13 ask i sent!). my question would be, how do codes and ciphers relate to your interests as well as your characters’?

{First and foremost, thank you for the puzzle! 😀 That was a lot of fun~

That said, though, I fully admit I am cool with puzzles, and this really comes from two sources:

1. My fascination with ARGs. Not to date myself, but I first got into that kind of stuff with Eon8 and the Cloverfield viral marketing. Like, the super weird stuff. Then I just kinda stumbled across things like the Unfiction forums (which I’ve never been a member of, but hoooo those threads), Year One, Marble Hornets, Wham City, The Sun Vanished, preeeetty much any video analysis of the weird puzzle-like sites and creepy interactive things and videos out there. I admit I don’t think I’m clever enough to analyze these things or dig around myself (or, in the case of Marble Hornets, I’m too chicken to do it), but it’s always fun to see these things and see other people solve them.

2. My fascination with old point-and-click escape-the-room games. Like, anyone remember Mystery of Time and Space? Or Crimson Room/Viridian Room? Or My Diamond Baby? Samsara Room? All those Flash games where you’re locked in the room, and you have to solve all these series of puzzles to get out? Those I could do, and they were often fun. Like, a fun mix of challenging and absolutely bizarre. (The real-life equivalent—you know, escape rooms and whatnot—would probably be a different story. Let’s just say I don’t actually like being locked up in places, haha.)

Long story short, though, between these two things, I’d pick up things, like the full understanding that hiding messages in images that can be converted to binary that can be converted to map coordinates that can be rearranged to form a URL with a poem to decipher for said message is what the cool kids do.

As for Bill and Lanette, believe it or not, Bill’s not that much into puzzles. There’s something about being asked to do them to prove your intelligence that makes the whole lot of them boring, you know? (The same thing could be said of chess, of playing classical music, of being randomly quizzed or given difficult physics problems on the spot, and of doing all those other stereotypically “genius” things short of being asked to hack stuff or build robots or, well, go on about his fields of expertise/interest, all of which are still the few pleasures he gets out of the whole genius thing. Other than that? It’s really tiring to have to prove you’re smart when you obviously are.) But that isn’t to say he won’t use code, of course—like, obviously, since he has right on the blog. Mostly, he uses it to avoid talking directly about what’s on his mind because he’s actually a pretty terrible liar. Or to send messages only meant for Lanette … because he is, again, a really terrible liar.

Lanette, meanwhile, is the exact opposite. She can’t get enough of puzzles, and she doesn’t even care too much if people shove them her way to make her prove that she’s smart. Incidentally, she has indeed had to prove that she’s intelligent, and she’s had to do it as often or even more so than Bill, given that, you know, she had been a teen genius and a female one at that—because, you know, yay sexism. It’s just that Lanette doesn’t quite get as bored with things as easily as her partner, and in any case, she’s always eager to flex her mental muscles with a good challenge. And anyway, mysteries are awesome. So she’s probably the sort of person who eats up Sherlock Holmes (hence all her deducing), grew up with Nancy Drew, would totally be down for an escape room, and secretly loves Scooby Doo to this day. But to her, puzzles and codes are still a lot of fun, and she’s a lot like me in that she absolutely eats up analysis videos and stalks the Pokémon world equivalent of Unfiction.

Bill, of course, will play along with her to make her happy. As in, if she shares a puzzle with him, he’ll help her out with it. If she watches yet another Sherlock Holmes special, he’s probably right there with her. And if she insists on trying out that new escape room … well, he’ll probably go but just sort of sit off to the side until he absolutely has to pitch in and help the group. I mean, ultimately, it’s Lanette who’s having fun, so he’ll, you know. Totally just let her have all the fun. Until she asks, of course.}

#META: what, if anything, is actually going on with bill, lanette, and steven stone?

{Well, between Steven Stone and Lanette, things are actually innocuous. It’s true that Lanette does have a crush on Steven, but then again, it’s also true that half of Hoenn does. Her feelings for him are more like those childhood crushes one gets on celebrities, if anything.

It’s just a tad less serious for her because she actually has a professional relationship with him. As Hoenn’s storage system administrator, Lanette serves as a liaison between the admin network and the Hoenn League, which Steven, being the (former/current/it’s complicated) champion, is a prominent member of. Steven has mild decision-making powers, and Lanette has full control over the system’s relationship with the League, which long story short means the two of them sit in on meetings regarding important decisions to be made. Think of the Pokémon Association meetings in the GSC arc of PokéSpec, and you’ll have what I mean. (It’s just that Lanette doesn’t take as active a stance in those as Bill does.)

Additionally, as a prominent member of the tech industry, Lanette sometimes gets sent to conferences that Devon is a part of, both to serve as a liaison for the network (and what’s technically their actual employer, the Pokémon Cutting-Edge Technology Research Center) and the rest of the industry and to see what other prominent actors in it are doing. Sometimes, she’s even sent to more formal galas too, if someone/the Symposium sends an invite. (Bill is sent to similar events in Kanto/Johto; these are the “formal dos” he can’t really stand.) Meanwhile, as the heir to Devon Co, sometimes, Steven is dragged to these events on behalf of his father.

Which is to say they spend a lot of time crossing paths. Eventually, after a few times crossing paths and talking about how utterly delightful conferences, galas, and League meetings are, they decided that crossing paths in more relaxed settings was in order. Now and then, whenever Steven has a moment and Lanette isn’t getting sent to other regions on behalf of the network, they sit down to coffee. It’s perfectly platonic, and it mostly involves catching up and talking crap about half the League. Steven is apparently more into gossip than one would believe, for someone who spends much of his time shirking duties in favor of cave-diving.

As for Bill and Steven, that’s a little more complicated. They respect each other as experts in their respective fields (technology and general pokémon for Bill; steel-type pokémon, battling, and rocks for Steven), and actually, because they’re both avid collectors of one thing or another, they get along well. That whole thing about how they trade leads for rare pokémon and stones? Completely true. It’s just that they have less of a reason to meet up than Lanette does with Steven.

But Bill is a little jealous too. On the one hand, he has the same mild crush on Steven as Lanette has. He sees Steven as a fascinating person, a good-looking one at that, and, hey, the heir to a prominent tech company, so worth a conversation or few. So yes, he’s a little jealous that Lanette spends so much time with Steven. On the other hand, he’s also a little jealous of Steven for spending so much time with Lanette for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with how much attention Steven gets from Lanette.

Bill’s relationship with Lanette is a mite more complicated than just professional partners. They met essentially as kids, so they do see each other as childhood friends, even if by “as kids,” I mean “in college.” But not to give a character a needlessly angsty backstory, Lanette is quite literally the first human being Bill ever considered a close friend. Sure, he’s had friends before, but … let’s just say not a lot of his childhood friendships lasted, especially after his older sister took off for a pokémon journey when he was eight. Lanette, meanwhile, always had Brigette, and in any case, she’s generally better at socializing than Bill is. She was basically the one who took the first step and reached out to befriend him, and he never really forgot that.

So from Lanette, their relationship actually is platonic, even though she jokes frequently about The Phase. There is some truth to it, though. Literally everyone goes through a weird period where they think they have a crush on Bill, and that does indeed include Lanette. It’s just that the crush for her was still a mild one. And also still in the past tense. Otherwise, she considers herself a close friend and partner to Bill. She’s protective of him and will do what she can to make him happy, but it’s not in her mind romantic in nature. (An anon put it best, actually. She considers their relationship queerplatonic if anything.)

Bill, on the other hand, has this fierce need to preserve that relationship because he’s constantly astonished that it’s actually lasted this long. In some respects, he’s a little confused by it too. He sees Lanette as this beautiful, intelligent, absolutely amazing woman, and he does feel a sort of happiness whenever she walks into the room. It’s just that he’s not sure whether or not these feelings are actually romantic. Yes, he’s dated other people before, so he knows what romantic feelings look like. The problem lies in the fact that occasionally, he has feelings similar to those with Lanette, but he can’t tell if he’s actually feeling that or just a deep, unwavering loyalty to a friend and partner.

Either way, Bill ultimately tries to agree with Lanette on the subject of where they stand with each other, but he’s lying about the idea that it’s because he wants to discourage the other system admins from hooking up and making a dramatic mess of the network. It’s actually because he’s afraid that changing the status of his relationship with Lanette or otherwise making a move that is definitely romantic (when Lanette clearly wants a partnership out of this and when he’s not sure if he doesn’t want anything else) would be a terrible, relationship-destroying move.

Or in other words, Bill’s pretty sure “queerplatonic” fits them, but human interaction is just … really weird for him.

(Also, yes, Lanette is fully aware of all of this confusion.)}

#META i gotta ask, how did you first get interested in bill and lanette? was it because they’re cute, the interest in storage, did you think they’d be best suited for this blog, so on and so forth

{Haha, long story! And to put it in short, it actually started with Bill.

The story goes that I first stumbled across his character ages ago. Like, literally around 2000 because the mun is old, folks. See, there used to be this huge site that served as a sort of library for anime fanpages back in the day. It wasn’t a search engine; it just listed links, sorted by series and categories. I used to go to this library practically every day to check out new fanpages, and one day, this tiny fanpage for Bill popped up.

To be honest, I can’t even tell you what about it or him fascinated me, but I guess I always was a bit of a sucker for side characters and mad scientists and British characters and transformation stuff, and Bill was just kinda that center piece of the Venn diagram for all of these things. (This, incidentally, is why the Bill of this blog is “animeverse with bits of the other canon universes pasted on.” It’s because I was first introduced to Bill through the anime, and that one stuck because holy god is that one the weirdest and therefore amazing. The rest of the world can probably be best described as gameverse/its own thing, though. Gary Oak exists, but so does Blue, and I got nothin’ in terms of an explanation. Yet. ~~Dude goes by many nicknames, I guess.~~)

Needless to say, I kinda got obsessed with him specifically and started collecting every little bit of information I could about him. And then, of course, I started writing him into fanfics or roleplaying him across mailing lists, boards, LiveJournal, and then here, at which point, he started to become my own character.

Interest in the rest just kinda fell into place after that. As in, I got super into the other storage system admins because they were associated with Bill, I’d worked out headcanon about the storage system because it was Bill’s invention (and also because it’s one heck of a challenge to tackle explaining it omg), and so on and so forth. But in the process, I realized that each storage system developer is their own unique, often fascinating character. Like, Bebe has this loud personality to her, Cassius is a straight-up bunny-ears lawyer/punk rocker, Molayne literally battles you for championhood, Amanita is an eight-year-old technological genius and what is this…

…and then you have Lanette.

By the time I’d learned about Lanette, I was actually writing my first massive Bill fic. One of the reviewers dropped the news about her in a comment, and ngl, my first thought was, “I need to find out everything I can about this woman because I must add her to this fic.” Spoiler alert: I discontinued the fic in question before picking up Sapphire for the first time, oops. But Lanette’s factored into every major Bill fic since, at first as a love interest/the female side character who always worries about what her superhero friend/boyfriend is up to, but over time, she just sort of … took a life of her own.

Until ORAS happened, anyway. Then I realized she was really damn cute on her own, not to mention she’s got this whole personality to her that stands on its own. Just the way she introduces herself in those games, by straight-up Sherlock Holmsing you … that was just a work of beauty. So I just kinda retooled her character from there, and she quickly evolved into the LH you see on this blog. Still a foil to Bill in a way, but also very much her own, independent character: passionate, intelligent, down-to-earth despite her housekeeping habits, caring in her own way, and so on.

So, uh, very long story short, this blog features Bill and Lanette because I really like writing about them, and I like writing about them because apparently, it didn’t take much to convince me that Bill is an awesome character, and therefore, so is everything else associated with him. Also, yes, they are indeed adorable.}

#META So your FAQ is, well, what it sounds like. Are there any sorts of questions you wish you’d see more of? (And on an unrelated note, did anyone ever draw Bill’s pokesona? I remember seeing some talk about it)

{To the easier of these two questions, alas, no. I would love to see someone try, though, and on that note, submissions are still open, and the post in question is somewhere in the Dragonite tag. I’m just sayin’. 😉

On the harder and more serious of these two questions, I think it’s more about variety than anything else. Sometimes, when I get a question, I’d actually get something like five or so of them, either intentionally (like how I currently have five asks I’m working on for facts related to different species because of the Decidueye fact post) or unintentionally (the numbers of times people ask about how to take care of standard/Alolan Vulpix at the same time or what happens when you have them mate with each other). Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy answering these asks. It’s just that after a while, they get harder to answer because I feel like I’m going through a template of sorts. That’s why I tend to stall out on questions about caring for different pokémon and why I might skip around the ask hopper a little.

If I had to choose a specific topic, though, I’d probably say more worldbuilding asks. Like, not necessarily “tell me everything about this city” so much as “hey, I have this specific not-necessarily-pokémon-related interest; what can you tell me about it?” I’ve always been fascinated with worldbuilding/building societies and cities and whatnot, so the sorts of questions that make me go deep into the setting itself are just fun, even if I fully acknowledge the fact that Bill probably doesn’t know everything about those topics. Or if he did, he might not always speak of them favorably. (Looooool, his opinions on Unovan politics are pretty much “it’s a garbodor on fire; next.”)

Also, full disclosure: asking Bill or Lanette personal questions is like free license to stan, so that’s always fun.}

#META: What are Bill and Lanette’s favorite pokemon?

{With Bill’s, I stick to canon: eevee and all of its evolutions, with a preference for flareon, jolteon, and vaporeon in particular for the latter. He’s still fond of the pokémon on his team as well (kadabra and venusaur and so forth), but really, eevee and its evolutions have always taken his top spots.

As for Lanette, she’s got a soft spot for anything that’s cute, especially any and all feline pokémon (of which delcatty is probably her favorite). She’s also very fond of clefairy, which are basically the magic spacecats of the Pokémon world anyway … and also because she’s gained a new appreciation for them thanks to the whole Clefairy Incident. (She thinks they’re hilarious now; Bill decidedly does not.)}

#META since you mentioned it i have to ask: what kind of weird stuff is bill into, exactly? (realized i forgot the #META the first time, sorry about that!)

{Haha, no worries!

In all seriousness, Bill’s interests are … pretty much clean. Sure, he’s a scalie, but he’s part of that huge chunk of the furry fandom that … pretty much has no interest in the subculture’s dirtier sides.

But to get a little further into it, Bill’s (sex-positive) ace(/panromantic) but curious. As in, he doesn’t really have actual fetishes, but he’s pretty much willing to try a lot of things, just because it’s in his nature to ask questions and experiment with everything if it’s brought up to him. So you could literally tell him, “Hey, how do you feel about being handcuffed to a pole while I drip hot candle wax on you, and by the way, you’ll need to wear this rubber mask of Professor Oak while I’m dressed as Delia Ketchum,” and his response would probably be, “I have no idea why that would be pleasurable, and I actually sort of want to find out now.”

Or in other words, Bill’s not really into anything, but you could still probably get him to do anything. Within reason. Like, he won’t do it if it’s very clearly illegal. Or extremely dangerous. In that order.

But as a casual thing to do with partners? Nah, if anything at all, Bill much prefers just, you know. Vanilla stuff. Although he’d very much prefer just taking Netflix and chill literally, if we’re honest.}

#META: I’m sorry to be the one to ask this, but how are you treating that one infamous bit of lore from Sinnoh’s Canalave Library? Ignoring it, treating it as weird myth that people ignore?

{If we’re talking about the one where people and pokémon were once the same species (or at least married each other), the latter, I have to admit: it’s just a myth, not really truth. It’s more or less the equivalent of all those Greek/Roman myths about Zeus or Poseidon or somesuch turning into swans or bulls to go after mortals, except somewhat less … disgusting.

To go just a tiny bit more in-depth, the thing about that myth is that it’s (seen by modern anthropologists as) an attempt from early/prehistoric humans to “humanize” those strange, magic creatures with whom they shared a world. That is, in order to fully understand aspects of their world/pokémon themselves, the people of the pokémon world would write these elaborate tales that featured pokémon that essentially lived their lives as humans, that talked and plotted like humans, or that were literally humans at one point or another but were either transformed into pokémon or could go back and forth between human and pokémon forms at will. Somehow, some of the origin myths (or in other words, prologues to such stories) wound up in books about the origin of the world itself, which is why some people might be confused or might otherwise think humans and pokémon are related.

It doesn’t help that a number of humans do actually display the abilities of pokémon (psychics, Aura users) or some sort of affinity with pokémon (anyone who can talk to pokémon, such as N), but as far as anyone knows, these abilities are unrelated to pokémon … despite the fact that they’re still not well-understood on their own.}

#META How hard is it to keep all the fanon you publish straight? (Or, related, how often do you get asks saying stuff like “in June you said Salandit try to remain close to their Trainer, but last week you said they remain a respectful distance away?”)

{Answering in reverse order, but you’d be surprised! Not too many people notice if I’ve accidentally contradicted myself. I guess it helps that I only publish once a day, and with about three years’ worth of content, there’s just so much to look through it’s easy to forget if I’ve covered something already, even for me.

And in a way, that actually helps me too. Like, for the bigger stuff (like stuff about Bill or Lanette, the general world, etc.), that’s usually actual headcanon that I’ve had for ages, and other stuff I just remember because it’s hilarious (like how to properly care for an unown). But the other stuff, like how salandit evolution works or somesuch? That can get trickier. If I’m not 100% certain how something works, I usually make it a point to look through the tags/search myself to see if I’ve written about it, then go from there. But if I don’t find it at first and I’d already written about it (which happens from time to time), usually, people don’t notice, no. It’s actually more frequent that I get asks about stuff I’ve already covered (no salt intended there), so … to be honest, I don’t worry too much about whether or not I’m about to say something that contradicts another post, haha. :’)}