"I wanna try it and find out, d'you wanna try it?"

"Do you have an experimental protocol in mind?"

"Um, I know the lyrics to one song in what is probably badly garbled Ancient Cinnibar? And I could make up sound effects and nonsense words. And I could go out in the woods and make a fool of myself with all three things with Zag and then come back and he can say 'linoone' at you a lot and we'll see if you can reproduce whatever I said."

"Let's try it."

"You don't speak Ancient Cinnibar or know any songs in it, right?"

"Correct."

"Prove it," laughs Bella, "what'd he say?"

Sherlock repeats the sequence. His imitation of Zag's imitation of Bella is quite good.

"Okay," says Bella, "I have no idea how any of that can be encoded in repetitions of various parts of the word 'Linoone', so I'm leaning towards the psychic-or-maybe-magic explanation again."

"Has there been much study made of how Pokémon communicate with one another?"

"You certainly are," says Sherlock to Zag.

"Do you and yours want a rematch?" Bella asks.

"I am sure we could be convinced."

"We could try random toss, would that be fun?"

"I believe it would!"

"I bet your smart computer can do random number generation. Three on three again?"

"I accept your terms."

"All right." Bella returns Zag, puts him on a spot on her string of them, names his ball, "One," and the one on the other end, "Six."

"One two three four," says Sherlock, producing four Pokéballs.

"And - how do we get random numbers out of the computer?"

"We ask nicely, of course," he says, loading a Pokétch app.

Bella waits. She doesn't think she has that one.