"No, sorry, language. You think about what you want to look like. If you know what you want but not how it will look, that's hard."

"Why?"

"Why is it about what things look like? I don't know. I don't know if anyone knows. Maybe something to do with how being this one kind of pretty is important?"

"Weird. Do people study that?"

"Yes, but they haven't found anything that really makes it make sense."

"Sounds frustrating."

Nod nod. "What else do you want to know? Maybe I have better answers to some of it."

"Besides stuff about magical girls what's different?"

"Other than magical girls and swarms, I mentioned we have animals not Pokémon? We have hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of kinds of animals; how many kinds of Pokémon are there?"

"...hundreds, but not hundreds of hundreds."

"Wow, that's so few! How did they all start? Were there more before?" 

"We're not sure. There are fossils of old Pokémon, but there might have been about the same number of kinds that have just changed over time."

"Do you have--" she takes a stab at explaining evolution, leaning heavily on diagrams.

"I think that's a botany and microbiology thing. The principle makes some sense with Pokémon, maybe some of them used to be bigger or bluer or whatever, but you mostly don't hear about it applied to them."

"Weird! What about . . . hmm. Humans and plants and animals where I'm from are made of small pieces called "cells", too small to see, and each "cell" has stuff in it that says what kind of cell it is, and that's what makes different people have different colors of eyes and be taller or shorter and look like their parents and stuff. Do you have that?"

"Yes, we have that. Cells and DNA."

"Do Pokémon have DNA?"

"Sure they do."

"That is less strange than if they didn't but it's still strange they're so different from everything else! Do you know if humans are closer cousins to plants or to Pokémon?"

"To Pokémon, I'm pretty sure, but we're definitely less related to them than they are to each other."

Nod. "Okay. I don't have more Pokémon questions . . . . Can you tell me about the government here?"

"Uh, the current mayor is part of the Infrastructure Party and keeps tearing up the streets to update the plumbing?"

"I mean more, what kind of government, how is it chosen, what laws are there that aren't obvious?"

"Well, there are laws to do with Pokémon, which I guess wouldn't be obvious. We vote on mayors."

"Each city has a mayor? Is there a government for all the cities? What are the laws about Pokémon?"