Did Professor Burnet have any more questions?

Some! Most of the rest of what she wants to know about magic seems to clearly run into opportunity costs, most notably given how much more efficient at it she'll be once she has a portal and access to scientific literature from Dusk's homeworld, but she does still have some questions on that and on the differences between the two worlds. She's also trying to make it clear that she's willing to answer questions, but it's surprisingly hard when she has so many things she wants to know and an hour-long flight!

"Aside from Pokémon and magic, what differences have you noticed between the worlds? There's probably plenty more there just isn't context for, but I take it non-magical girls don't tend to have anything like our occasional psychic or aura user? Did democracy catch on for you, too? For us, America, Russia, China and Japan generally counted as the most powerful countries; what kind of political organizations does your world have? Does your magic let you understand me, or did you somehow pick up our spoken language really fast? Do you also make use of your inter-dream zone? Does anyone in your world have any idea how it was created?"

Aside from magical girls nobody has magic at all, yeah. Her world has democracy, and she's still a little spotty on history but America is important, and Europe kind of in general; Japan is popular but she doesn't think it's especially powerful. Burnet is speaking the same English she's used to, except for the pokemon references. She's never heard of an inter-dream zone or anything that might get called that, so they probably don't use it at all and might not have one. A lot of people think her world was made by a god - people in her world are mostly monotheistic - but as far as she knows there isn't anything besides magical girls and swarms that isn't explained pretty well by science.

She nods along, fascinated, and then starts. If she had been walking, she might have tripped, but thankfully this method of locomotion is far less reliant on her grace.

”You’re world has the same countries and language as we do? What... how? Even the alternate timeline of our world has some fairly major differences, in language and locations and population density even at  the limited data we had, and that was still somewhat surprising in how similar things are. This makes no sense from random chance. The only explanation I can think of is designer’s intent, which would suggest your world was also created by Arceus, but doesn’t explain why every world but yours has Pokémon, and only yours has magical girls.”

She frowns for a moment, even more confused. “What kind of thing can’t be explained by science? The one doesn’t make sense at all.”

She has no idea, about the language; it seems pretty weird to her, too.

Science can explain pretty much everything, like she said. It doesn't have a solid theory about why magical girls started happening all of a sudden, though, or where the magic comes from, or much of anything about swarms.

“So magical girls just started appearing? That definitely points to them being artificial, even if the rest of the evidence somehow didn’t, yeah. What is a swarm, then, as near as you can tell?”

Yeah, magical girls started appearing a couple hundred years ago, and swarms started appearing just before that. Swarms are pretty weird; they start out as a group of palm-sized black shapeshifting things that are slow and kind of stupid, and if you leave them alone they get faster and a little smarter and a lot meaner and eventually merge with each other to make bigger versions of the same thing. If you leave them alone long enough they can get really huge, and those ones are called kaiju; one of her grownups is a coast paladin and fights kaiju that form in the ocean and attack ships.

“Huh. We sometimes have Pokémon attacks, either in groups or just a few particularly powerful ones, but those are almost always people’s fault. They aren’t  great at going after the specific people who are responsible, so we usually have to stop them, but there’s almost always a provocation and usually not that far out of proportion. I wonder kind of affect having random, life threatening attacks at random across the globe would have; I imagine your world has international organizations that help ensure cooperation in dealing with them?”

She doesn't know much about that but she thinks it's mostly by country, even big kaiju don't usually need more than a couple paladin teams to take them down. There's probably treaties and stuff, though, yeah.

“Maybe I’m misestimating the scale of these threats, then. It probably helps that they seem to form in international waters.”

There’s an island coming up ahead; not as big as Memelene, but still pretty large. The Charizard starts to shed some altitude.

They form in other empty places, too, but they don't particularly cross borders or anything, yeah.

Is that the place?

“This is Akala Island, yes. You can’t see all of it from here, but that’s Heahea city to our south. My lab is on the eastern edge of the city, out of easy view behind that hill.”

Cool. She's never been in a real lab before.

The Charizard sheds its remaining speed and lands out front, gently. 

“Thank you for the excellent flying!” She dismounts with the ease of long practice, and reaches out as though to offer help dismounting before remembering that Dusk has wings.

The lab is actually fairly fancy. It’s beige and white, but has windows and an automatic glass door of an unfamiliar blue color. It’s mostly flat, but not squat.

“Charizard! Char Chari, za cha.”

Thanks.

She switches wings again and glides down, gawking a little at the architecture once she's down.

“Za Chari.”

Task accomplished, it flies off to the northeast.

"We'll probably be taking the same Charizard back, unless someone else ends up needing transportation to Memelene first. Most of the equipment we'll want is on the second floor."

The doors slide open as she walks up, and open onto something like a lobby. There's someone at a desk, apparently to sign people in, a few seats and benches, a couple of potted plants, a door, and an elevator. Burnet seems to be walking towards said desk.

Dusk follows, still looking around curiously.

It's less impressive than the exterior, although still fairly pretty and orderly.

"I thought you had the day off, Professor."

"I did, but then this was more interesting. Sign me in, plus one guest; goes by the name of Dusk. We shouldn't be more than a couple of hours, possibly even less than that."

"Alright. Anything else?"

"I think that's it."

Burnet then goes towards the elevator and presses the button. It comes down and the doors open; it's empty. She steps in.