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Novelux Smokestack Hostel & Bar

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"It's sort of a long story, but... just, another world in trouble, powers similar to this one actually--Blacklight, you know, Shadows and Radiance and all that. It nullified the native powers, but we were able to nullify it..."

"I'm not familiar, but Owen talks about it often," Mhynt said plainly. "But it seems you have suffered some powerful amnesia... but you remember some species."

"Yeah, I remember them, too," Owen confirmed. "It's not all lost."
 
Starr blinked at pair, scratching at her cheek fur. "Jeez, okay this is kind of a lot all at once." Part of her was tempted to dismiss it outright, but then... the other half of her was too damn hungry for something, anything to do with her past. Even if it wasn't exactly the era of her past she'd been expecting.

"I did hear that word before--Blacklight," Starr said in a low voice, idly stabbing at her omelette a few times before taking another bite. "Brisa mentioned it, and..." She chewed over her food and her words for a moment. "So, hang on, did you forget it too, or..."
 
"I did at first," Owen said. "I'm kind of used to losing my memory, though. I think it comes with the cosmic job description."

"I've had no such problems... but that was more a curse than anything," Mhynt admitted. "Thankfully, I've killed the source of my traumas here, and the only scar is that I now can't get rid of my ex-mate." She gestured a claw at Owen, who tittered nervously.

"But ever since... well, recently, the memories have been slowly coming back. And a big burst of it really did when I heard you were in trouble... Something similar, uh, kinda happened before. But hey! At least you're not super big this time! I can't remember the details yet, though..."

"Super big," Mhynt repeated with a frown. "Owen, it's rude to talk about that to a lady."

"Huh? No, but you don't understand!" Owen said, further digging his grave. "She was HUGE! Like, the ground shook when she walked!"
 
Starr glanced between Mhynt and Owen with a crooked smirk. "Exes, huh? Gotta say, that makes this whole 'arrangement' ten times funnier." Enough so that she could temporarily forget that she was sitting here talking to a shadow like that was a normal thing to do. (She vaguely wondered if she had any exes back home.)

It took a good couple seconds for the rest of what Owen said to sink in.

"Yeah, I'm gonna need some fuckin' context for that one," Starr replied with an incredulous snort, reaching for her coffee.

She was hit with a sudden weird flash between daydream and memory. Standing in a blinding, rust-colored hellscape, looking down at a scattering of Pokemon far below, all of them minuscule in comparison, and of being filled with nauseating hatred like bile in her throat--
 
"Right, let me... think about that. . ."

Slowly, Owen tried to recall the details of everything that happened surrounding the incident, speaking of some names perhaps only vaguely familiar to Starr, including a different world's Voice of Life, of entirely different appearance and temperament to this one's. Mhynt seemed half-fascinated, half horrified that such problems are apparently popping up across words like a bargain bin sale.

"...So in a way, this isn't my first time around with all this. Though, the problems here are... different. I can't even get a full grasp on what the problem IS..."

"It's because some of it is political in nature," Mhynt said. "You aren't used to that. Not in this way."
 
Starr nodded. "Brisa mentioned you guys had been flying blind for a while before helping out with some kind of Shadow bullshit. Apparently the same Shadow bullshit that fucked up the Radiance facility I was working in." Not that she wanted to think to hard about that little episode.

She took a long sip of her coffee while listening to Owen's tale. At least Mhynt looked just as weirded out for parts of it.

"Not gonna lie, it all sounds like a weird fever dream," Starr replied with a dry laugh. "It's weird, though. Trying to remember anything from my human life feels like... like trying to grab smoke. Like one second it's there, the next it's gone." She flexed her claws around nothing as she spoke. "All that stuff, though... Yeah, it feels like a dream, but it's also... familiar."

Starr twirled her claws in the air, searching for the right words. "Like, I could almost swear I remembered being a Pokemon before. Like, before showing up on Forlas? God this is weird…"

She was going to give herself a headache at this rate.
 
"Like grabbing smoke, hm?" Mhynt said thoughtfully. "I suppose it means whatever brought you here wanted to make those memories intangible to you here."

"Yet some fundamentals are still there," Owen pointed out. "Subconsciously, you still talk about the same, and your values seem to be pretty similar, too. Those don't come from nowhere, so... echoes of what you forgot must still be driving you."

"Speaking from experience?" Mhynt hummed with a wry smile.

"I have a lot of that..."
 
Starr sighed. "Yeah, yeah, I know--obviously it can't all be gone. I know shit about, like, how the world works. Big-picture stuff. I know that where I came from had grass and trees and cities, and basically the same kinds of Pokemon. It's just anything specifically related to me, my past--that's all been blocked out." For better or worse. The few scraps that'd come back to her in that goddamn Comb dungeon... hadn't exactly been reassuring for the type of person she was.

She reached for the bottle of hot sauce on the table, shaking a few drops of the stuff onto her omelette. "I know it's not gone. I know I'll just go back to my old life and this place'll be the weird dream once I go back home." She still didn't know how to feel about that. She knew her life back home was important to her, she could feel it. And yet...

"So, 'experience' huh. Guessing you mean something other than our mutual acid trip to Cibus?" She'd meant to say 'wherever-the-hell', but her mouth had formed the name without her brain's input.
 
"Yeah... it's a long story," Owen said evasively.

"Let's say that he was hard to kill," Mhynt said, "so people reincarnated him instead so he'd forget to be troublesome."

"And then I got the memories back anyway..."

"Only further proving their point," Mhynt concluded.

"It was like there are... different people vying for 'existing' in my head when I got them all," Owen said. "I hope I can get that sorted, somehow..."

"In a way, won't that also be you?" Mhynt wondered aloud, looking at Starr. "Do you think 'you' right now and 'you' before are entirely different people? Is one dead while the other lives? I always wonder about that, these people with amnesia and how much or how little remains..."
 
Starr paused with her fork halfway to her mouth, cheese hanging from the end. "Goddamn. Are all you Wayfarers this... this existential?" She resumed eating, chewing thoughtfully. "I guess if that's all true, then, uh... you really would be the expert, huh? Sounds rough." Some part of her still wasn't 100% sure this wasn't an elaborate bit, but she decided to take it seriously for now.

"I've never been into philosophical crap like that, but I guess it's probably more like... the me from back home is asleep? I think that's how the Voice of Life put it. Time not passing back home while I'm here, and all that. So... by that logic, the me here is the dream after all. Except there's that little detail of apparently having done this song and dance before." Discordant fragments of half-remembered times, flickering through her head...

Starr furrowed her brow. "You were... green? Why were you green." Her eyes flickered toward Mhynt as if the Sceptile were responsible somehow.
 
"Oh, that one's easy," Owen replied. "I was echoing some powers back home. And back home, I had an artifact that cursed me to be Grass type." He paused. "I also became a tree."

Mhynt pinched her brow, but said nothing. She would allow Owen to dig his grave.
 
Fucking hell she'd actually remembered correctly.

Starr smirked. "Alright, sure. A tree. Why not." Given the Charizard's current state, she couldn't exactly say that was any weirder than present. "And I was a hundred feet tall. Let's see, what else..." Her claws drummed the table as she took a long sip from her coffee. Stark-white rocks, gleaming under harsh sunlight. "How about... what's up with us having a party on the goddamn moon?"
 
"Oh, that... umm... I think... an ally got crazy because of a big evil thing, and... wanted to use the moon to crash on the planet, or something?" Owen seemed foggy on the details as well. "I think it turned out alright, though..."

"What kinds of antics do you get up to wherever you go?" Mhynt finally blurted. "Next you're going to tell me you beat up the gods themselves for sport!"

"We did that a lot, actually..."

Mhynt stood up. "I'm getting food." She walked, leaving behind her shadow.
 
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