So will the scientists! They seem to not notice it, but apparently this is a common enough issue for them that there’s a rotstion of who’s job it is to go and get orders from nearby restaurants for those who don’t pack lunches. There are menus available; the cuisine appears similar to home, but many names of fruits are a bit off normal and meat seems significantly more expensive, even if she’s not ordering out from one of the fancier options available, and eggs are similarly priced up but not to the same degree; there’s correspondingly a lot more dairy, soy, and beans of various sorts to fill thr cuisine gaps. A few other types of plants seem less in evidence, although if  Dusk looks through it doesn’t seem like anything familiar is completely unheard of. Heahea city is fairly large, and seems to have a wide variety of available restaurants.

Most of the scientists are handing over cash for their orders.

“I’ll cover Dusk’s meal,” she says. To Dusk, she continues “Don’t worry about price; I’d prefer it if you didn’t buy something just because it was expensive, but you won’t come close to breaking the bank even if you wanted to skip these places and go somewhere really fancy.”

Akela snorts. “Understatement much?”

She looks through a few menus and picks something. (The third thing in the third section of the third menu, incidentally.)

Her order is taken; The restaurant in question looks French, or at least stylistically similar, and the third order down is some kind of sandwich. It's the genre that would have meat back home but is instead a substitute.

If she's tasted something similar from her homeworld, the flavor is surprisingly similar to what she would expect, but the texture is different; it's close, but slightly-off recreation seems to be dismissed in favor of a unique texture that's good on its own merits. The sandwich isn't terribly big, but it's protein dense and more filling than it first appears.

She eats, with a perfunctory sort of focus.

No one comments on this!

If Dusk doesn't get bored or desire to do something else first, Burnet will be finishing up at about 3:30.

She can answer questions until then, or occupy herself with her magic if the scientists somehow manage to run out.

They lose quite a bit of steam as various scientists hit the limits of Dusk’s knowledge in their feilds of choice or get called away to do various bits of actual work. By around 2:30 there are only a few people left, and not long after that Dusk is free to work on her magic uninterrupted.

(This gets some more people interested in watching, but no interruptions.)

“Unless you want to stay longer, I’ll be headed back to Melemele Island now. There’s no reason you can’t stay later if you want to, though; I’m sure one of the others who work out of Melemele would be willing to ferry tou back, or at least call you a ride of your own.”

She's ready to go back, yeah. Will they need her here again?

“Probably not until we have a prototype ready. Maybe if there’s some new equipment breakthrough, or devon corp desides to share its stuff, but almost certainly not unless those happen. You’re welcome to stop by, but we should have everything we need from you to figure it out.”

Okay. She'll stop by Professor Burnet's house every couple days to see if they have anything, if that's all right.

“That shouldn’t be a problem. We don’t tend to be busy enough that you’re likely to interrupt a meeting or the like.”

When Burnet calls another Charizard, it’s clearly not the same one as before.

”Seems that someone did end up heading over to Melemele before we went back. Well, that or they didn’t want another flight today.”

“Charizard. Char Chari.”

This Charizard is a good half a foot larger than the last, and its skin is a lighter orange except near the flame itself.

Hi, she sends.

“Zard!”

That’s definitely a response.

Cool!

Can Pokemon usually understand humans? She can't understand the Charizard, particularly.

(She mounts up; no reason to hold the trip up with chatting.)

Burnet mounts too.

"Most Pokémon you'll meet will understand People just fine; I would be really surprised to find one working in a human interfacing industry that couldn't. If I'm remembering my courses right, the current consensus is that almost all Pokémon thus far discovered can learn to understand human speech, although not all Pokémon do so equally easily and not all languages are equally simple to learn; the chief exceptions seem to be those who don't do much in the way of hearing. Sign languages and writing tend to be harder, but plenty of them can pick that up too. That's not to say it's impossible that we could discover some Pokémon that's cognitively incapable of it, or couldn't invent a language that only humans could pick up, but that's not generally applicable.

"Speaking is a different story, due to how their vocal cords and natural languages function; it's rare to have a Pokemon capable of directly communicating in a human language without doing so telepathically, and most of these occurrences come from a select few species like Chatot and Meowth."

Neat. This does kind of suggest that Pokemon are people, though - animals in Dusk's world can't 'hear' her at all, and with rare exception can't understand anything but extremely simple language.

"From context, I assume Animals are something superficially similar to Pokémon from your world? Here, the only people who deny that Pokémon are people are a few reactionary political groups and some hyper-traditional religions, and even then it's as much a political claim as an actual belief."

Huh, how Professor Burnet said it it sounded like people mostly didn't think Pokemon were people. Animals are kind of like Pokemon, though, yeah - they're what her world has for living things that aren't humans or plants. They mostly aren't very smart, and they're less - magical? She's not sure whether they think of things like the Charizard's flame as magic, but animals don't have things like that - and they don't have types. And she hasn't seen any really small Pokemon, yet, really small animals are pretty common. The kind of moth her wings are based on is smaller than the first section of her index finger.

“In addition to Pokémon and humans and plants, we also have fungi, archaea, and some people say viruses count as well.

”As for magic... Pokémon aren’t, not in the way the term is used in this world, but I’m not sure if we would consider it magic if it wasn’t part of our everyday life.

“There are species of tiny Pokémon, like Joltik; some are even microscopic, like many types of Solosoids. Most Pokémon are at least the size of... no, you wouldn’t have Caterpie. At least the size of my forearm, maybe, and usually significantly bigger.”

Dusk has no problem spending the trip talking about animals - she doesn't have a whole lot of personal experience, but she's watched plenty of documentaries and read plenty of books.