"Are you okay to fly for about an hour and a half? Ninety minutes?"

"Yes, unless your Pokémon is very very fast." Which she suspects is not the case, since she hasn't strapped herself on or deployed some sort of windshield.

"She is, but we can go slower."

Up up and away.

Likewise! She can keep up for an hour and a half even if they're going a hundred miles an hour, flying alongside the bird and far enough out that their wingsbeats don't interfere. She can even check out the terrain they're flying over.

Bella gradually speeds up the bird till they're going eighty, and she's crouched low on the bird's back to avoid the worst of the wind.

The terrain is mostly rural, an even mix of wilderness mayhem and farm rectangles, dotted with little towns - most of those have walls, or at least clearly marked borders - and crossed by the occasional railroad.

They land in a big city where many railroad tracks converge, which is large enough to have skyscrapers, and suburb-villages around it after some greenbelt. The bird stops right in front of a house.

Margaret lands next to the bird. "What do I call your mom?"

"Renée." She opens the unlocked front door without knocking, casually puts the bird away over her shoulder while calling, "Mom?" and adding to Margaret, "She might not be home."

"Okay." This house is cute.

It is! It's a cute house. A little kitschy in some of the decor. Bella lets her long stripy mustelid out and he gambols about and flops himself onto the sofa. Bella heads for the bookshelf.

Awwww, floppy Pokémon. Does the bookshelf by any chance have any simple children's books?

It does, in fact! It has lots of copies of some of them. Bella grabs one, which is about a yellow zig-zag-tailed creature looking for apples, judging by the illustrations. She reads it to Margaret, pointing out words as she goes.

This is a good source of vocabulary and also helps with her spelling. Margaret asks occasional questions and takes some more notes.

Bella goes through the book twice, answering questions when she can, and then gets another one. This one's about a little boy getting his first critter; it's a red-orange fire dinosaur thing.

"Children that small can be safe with fire Pokémon, not get burned? Or is it just a story?"

"Well, they shouldn't touch the fire. On this kind. My fire kind it's okay if it likes you."

"Because it can make the fire cooler?"

"It's not cooler, it just doesn't hurt if a Rapidash - or a Ponyta, what they are before they turn into Rapidash - likes the person touching them. If I hold a thing to measure how hot things are - a thermometer - it will say it's hot."

"It's hot but it doesn't hurt? Interesting. Do you know how it does that?" The answer might very well be "magic", but she doesn't actually have the word for that.

"I don't know."

"Okay." And then she remembers a question about verb endings she had had during the flight and goes back to language-learning mode.

Bella teaches her the language diligently.

Eventually her mother comes home! They have a conversation a bit too fast for Margaret to follow that is clearly about Margaret.

She picks out what words she can, more for language practice than because she expects to be able to understand a significant amount. Bella will presumably summarize anything she needs to know afterwards.

"She says welcome and that you are very cool looking and that dinner is delivery because she wasn't expecting us."

"Thank you for dinner and for letting me be here. And for saying I look cool. Bella has been very kind," Margaret tells Renee.