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Margaret is on her way to work at the CDC, walking instead of flying today so she can drink her coffee without spilling it, when she sees the cryptid. She's a truly far-out one, no limbs to speak of, just a long snaky body with a mirror for a face. Margaret smiles at her and goes to walk on by, but the cryptid slithers right at her all of a sudden and--hits?--Margaret with the giant mirror. Except she doesn't experience getting whacked with a sheet of glass.
Foresight among Pokémon
the_very_best
"I think Chansey do five or six a day." She inspects the pearls. "What are these? They're pretty."
shiny-things
"Pearls on Earth come from a kind of animal that lives in the water. That's why I can give them to you, things that are sort of alive don't stop when I stop having them. I thought maybe you can sell them, or just have them as a pretty thing." Given the eggs, she's glad the response wasn't, "oh, these, we have a Pokémon that makes huge ones that glow in the dark and are impossible to damage and they cost five cents apiece, but nice thought".
the_very_best
"I don't know how to sell shiny objects but maybe I can figure it out." She transfers them into a little plastic bag.
the_very_best
"Yes, I want to know all about it! You can make shiny things, you have wings... you started out regular human?"
shiny-things
Margaret nods. "Magical girls need to stay in a . . . in the right kind of body. We can change however we want except we can't become very human. And if we become very not-human, like if I tried to make a plant and have wings and everything else at the same time, we are 'cryptids'. Cryptids, their, how do you say, their who they are gets really different, not human anymore. They don't talk, they do things and humans don't know why." She makes a piece of paper with some pictures of cryptids--a tiny fairy, a unicorn, that one ambulatory pile of flowers that was on the local news last month--and holds it up in one hand, and an image of a borderline magical girl with perfect skin and unearthly cheekbones and pointed ears and cat eyes in the other.
the_very_best
"So the magic happens to you and changes you this much -" she points at the cat-eyed girl - "and then you can do other stuff yourself?"
shiny-things
"No, it not change you, you have to change you. If you do nothing for days, or do too little, you stop have the magic. If you do at least this," she gestures with the cat-eyed girl, "you keep the magic and can't look all human again, but can keep changing. Some people stop wanting magic, can't change anymore."
the_very_best
"A doctor will probably laugh at me if I bring you in and say I want a blood transfusion," Bella grumbles.
shiny-things
"Yes, but can try it if you want. Oh, but it does things in your head! Important to say that. Changing more makes you like magic, like strange things, not like 'swarms'--I can talk swarms--makes you want to, um, I do not know the words. Want other magical girls." She cannot blush through her scales, but her body language suggests she would if she could.
shiny-things
"Yes, kiss them. And not other people. That's all the head changes, if I did not forget one."
shiny-things
She doesn't have the words for "scientist" and "church", hmmm. "Nobody is sure. Some people say, maybe magic is a person, and wants magical girls to be like them, but lots of people see a weird thing, say, might be a person, and lots of times they find out it is not."
kindestgarden
Renée gets downstairs and collects some of the scrambled egg Bella made and eats it quickly and heads off to work, hugging Bella goodbye.
the_very_best
Bella doesn't have any books between approximately kindergarten level and YA (to judge by the covers and density of the latter), so she reads Margaret the rest of the kindergartener books and then moves on to the harder ones, slowly, pausing to explain things.
shiny-things
This will probably end up being several useful lessons in local society and culture and stuff, in addition to shoveling vocabulary into her brain as fast as she can come up with menmonics!
the_very_best
Pokémon continue to be culturally ubiquitous. Every single character has at least one; Bella pulls up pictures of the species when they come up. Bella is steering towards relatively realistic stories, so a common genre in the mix is someone setting out with their first mon, acquiring more, making friends, solving various problems, coming of age, etc.
shiny-things
Huh. Are they proportionately more useful than pets? Presumably the balls make them easier to care for, as does the societal expectation that you'll bring them everywhere. What do they do besides fight and lay edible eggs?
the_very_best
Some of them give milk - one YA protagonist grows up on a dairy farm - and they also pop up generating electricity, carrying heavy stuff, gardening, being vehicles, fighting fires, and doing service animal jobs. The fighting thing seems more useful than it would be if it were just recreational gladiatorial combat; if the books are anything to go by, wandering out of town will get you attacked by wild mon pretty much right away.
shiny-things
That does all sound super useful! "I should decide what job to get," Margaret remarks when one YA protagonist is contemplating the same question.