Frontier Town Traveller's Haus - Lobby

[Chibi Pika]

It's a pretty close bond! Jade did her best to keep a neutral face. "Ah, not exactly first partners, no. Virga was the last one I met. And we weren't on great terms before, so..." She didn't want Lillian to feel bad for asking, so she quickly added, "Virga was the strongest Pokemon I knew back home though! So, y'know, a powerful ally--I figure that's why the summoning program brought her here. We just, uh, have some stuff to work on. You know how it is with strong Pokemon." She wasn't actually sure if Lillian knew, but it felt like a normal sentiment that applied to non-Legendaries just as well.

Her tail swished as she racked her brain for a continuation with a more positive note. "Oh, and my actual first partner was Swift, he's a Pidgeot." That wasn't actually relevant to the question since the question had been about Virga, and Swift wasn't here. "Who's yours?" she asked, only narrowly stopping herself from adding "and are they here?" to the end of it, as she managed to temporarily forget that Lillian was herself in the second wave of summons, and would not have a summoned partner.

 

[Shiny Phantump]

"Oh, yeah," Lillian said, as if she knew how it was with strong pokemon. The program must have different reasons to pick different people, because Lillie was hardly Gladion's most powerful connection. Quite the opposite, realistically. Maybe it was because she could rise to the challenge and become the best fit for the job? No, that felt too self-aggrandizing.

"Mine is Nebby, they're, uhh..." This required caution, so as not to openly contradict herself calling them a pokemon several seconds ago. "We call them a 'Cosmog', and they're odd. Actively destructive to any ball I've tried to put them in. But cute! Like a little cloud of stardust. Chaotic personality, honestly probably dangerous." Absolutely dangerous. They had some inadvertent role in the death of one person, nearly two. Somehow, that felt like bad information to share in casual conversation. "Wormholes and distortions and stuff, would probably beg a lot of legal questions if people knew about it. But we've both saved each other by now, so I guess that makes us partners? In a way?"

She hadn't really thought of her relationship with Nebby that way. But once she started describing it that way to Jade, she had to admit it wasn't far off. The main problem is that neither she nor Nebby really listened to the other, otherwise you could call it a non-trainer partnership.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade tilted her head, ears forward with interest. “Huh. Never heard of a Cosmog before.” Then again, wasn’t Gladion (and by extension, his family) from Alola? There were a lot of Pokémon in Alola that weren’t found anywhere else in the world. But the way Lillian talked about it made it sound like not an ordinary Pokémon. Almost like…

(Gladion had mentioned how he’d saved his partner too.)

“Is Nebby… sort of like Hazel? You know…” Different. Unique. “Special?” Not the most effective word.

Jade narrowly held herself back from coming right out and saying Is Cosmog a genetic experiment too? I have one of those! She was gonna feel real dumb if she was jumping to conclusions here.

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Lillie took a step back, startled. Did she know? Did she know what Nebby was all along??? Had she been trying to salvage a dumb obvious lie that Jade had seen through from the start??? Also, Hazel... Hazel was... Right! That was what Gladion called the Null he'd saved. Not an ultra beast. Of course.

"Nebby's certainly special, but in a different sort of way from Hazel. Not a chimera, but an Ultra Beast. A faller whose species doesn't exist in out world. Although maybe a little more self-directed than the fallers here, they can make cut holes between where we live and 'ultra space,' which is..." Lillian took a moment to consider her choice of words. "Bad. Technically, I've been a faller in my own world ever since Nebby saved me. They dragged out of my world, and back into my world somewhere else. Except, I don't know, I'd already heard that most fallers don't end up in their own world, but now that I've met Gladius I'm really having to think about how much worse that could've gone."

If she was a more cautious person, she would have thought about that in the first place, she'd already known Nebby had made Father disappear. Instead, she'd acted like her belief that Nebby didn't do anything malicious would protect her from getting hurt by them. As if another accident couldn't happen if she were only kinder. So far, she'd narrowly avoided being proven wrong twice. And if maybe Gladius had gotten involved with his world's Nebby and been less fortunate.

That would be a real bummer thought to drop on a stranger.

"I guess that's probably not what you meant by special, is it? I assume we both know the nulls are chimera?" She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Wait, there's not a reason for the codewords, is there? Am I not supposed to be saying that aloud?"

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade blinked. "Not a chimera but... whoa. That is special." Not that it was supposed to be a competition or anything. "I, uh... can't say I've ever heard of any Pokemon that can do that." She'd sort of taken for granted that Pokemon species seemed to be one of the very few things that was consistent across worlds, especially with Forlas having all the same ones she was already familiar with. Then again, could she really say for certain that these 'Ultra Beasts' had never visited her own world? It's not like she would've known, if it were kept under wraps the same way the Null project was.

Speaking of Nulls...

"Oh, uh... yeah, we kind of weren't sure if that was the sort of thing we should keep hush at first?" Jade replied with a shrug. "Gladion and Nova showing up here as chimeras, I mean. We thought that a man-made Pokemon appearing on Forlas might draw too much attention. But then Nova ended up on the front page of the Gazette, so that sorta... went out the window pretty fast." She laughed awkwardly. "He told everyone that he and Gladion were 'Graydians' and everyone was cool with it? And, well, since we're offworlders, it was hardly the weirdest thing about them."

She scratched her chin and then added, "Also it turns out they're not the only ARK Units here anyway? That was a whole thing. Did Gladion tell you about Sage?"