Instead she experiences appearing in a grassy field! It's unmown, full of wildflowers and occasional shrubs, and gives way to trees and denser shrubbery in most directions.

She did not think that cryptid was pretty enough for teleportation, wow. Okay. Time to start walking towards civilization. Since she doesn't know which way that is, she goes with whichever way the ground slopes even slightly downward, in hopes of finding a river or at least not going in circles.

A creature approaches her. "Shinx!" it says.

Man, this is apparently her day for running into cryptids. "Hello. Are you going to be shockingly powerful too?"

Her danger sense goes off.

She doesn't have the physical ability to dodge the resulting electric shock, though, so it's not very helpful.

Then she will spend a few seconds on the ground, contemplating the unpleasant sensation and the horrendous irony of what she just said, before trying to get up and fly away. "Owwww, why?"

"Shinx!" says the Shinx, and it shocks her again.

This thing is awful. She keeps trying to run and/or fly away.

It doesn't chase her. She makes a getaway.

There's another one over there in a tree and it doesn't like her either though.

Something very weird and wrong is going on. If she can get away from the one in the tree too, she tries getting altitude.

It tries to zap her but it misses.

Hey, there's a person walking his... weird... beaverchipmunk monster.

Okay, that's arguably even weirder than the rest of this, but at least he's more likely to talk to her. She flies toward him. "Hello! Do you speak English? I had a magical accident, I'm very lost."

He says something back to her which sounds like it includes the word "hello" but also seems to direct the beaverchipmunk monster to spring at her in a flying leap it should not reasonably be able to make.

She sees it coming a few seconds in advance and jukes left, yelling "Why did you do that!?" She tries again. "English? Parlez-vous Français? Uh, Espanol?"

He says something else, laughing, seeming to think this is a good time. The beaverchipmunk monster keeps attacking. It's perfectly visible to danger sense, but it's startlingly strong and quick, looking more like a movie monster than an animal when in motion.

Her wings aren't optimized for manuverability, and it's been years since she did swarm patrol. If it's as good at biting as it is at leaping, it can probably do her a serious injury.

Yup.

Chomp.

It drags her to the ground - it weighs more than forty pounds - and pins her.

The human, who looks delighted with the proceedings, grins and throws something at her head, and then she's in a sort of - sedated, bodiless state where the passage of time does not seem terribly important.

Timeless oblivion has been the best thing to happen to her since she got her coffee, which she lost in the shuffle and didn't even get to finish. What thoughts she manages to have drift around the theme of how she totally should have starscaped a shield or a sword or something, no matter how cute that creature was.

When next time matters again, she's on the floor in a circle of curious teenagers.

At least there are no more aggressive cryptids-or-something. She stands up, keeping her hands in an "I'm not hostile" gesture, and starscapes her dress uncrumpled. "Does anyone speak English?" Also now she's holding out a little globe, with the continents outlined as best she remembers them. "Where am I?"

There are actually a couple cryptids-or-something present - a this and a this - but they're standing behind teenagers and not attacking her.

The teenagers are talking about her without addressing her, though one is looking at her and her globe with concern rather than participating in the conversation.

Maybe the concerned one is willing to try communicating across the langauge barrier. She makes eye contact, points at herself, then at the globe's northeastern US. Then she holds out the globe for the teenager to point at.

Concerned teenager doesn't point at the globe, but does interrupt the conversation. She doesn't seem to get a very receptive reception.

She pulls out her phone, discovers she has no signal to run a translate app. Maybe pictures will work? Next time any of them looks at her, she makes a big piece of paper with a little comic-strip depiction of events. Picture of America, labeled with the American flag and with a little Margaret on it. Picture of the mirror-snake girl attacking her. Picture of Margaret in a field, looking surprised and with a little question mark over her head.

The conversation becomes slightly more animated and involves gesturing at Margaret and her phone more. Concerned teenager leaves.

Maybe she thinks she can find someone multilingual or good at charades, though given Margaret's luck today she's not going to count on it. She keeps trying to communicate with pictures, and by pointing at herself and saying "Margaret".

Some of the pictures get more of a concerned reaction from the remaining teenagers than others but they do not seem to recognize the flag, the question mark, or the globe.

The most concerned of the teenagers returns with an additional teenager whose hair does not seem to obey the law of universal gravitation, and Margaret hears a voice in her head.

Hello, can you hear me?

Okay, if boys can be telepathic she's a lot more lost than she thought. "Yes! I'm very lost, magical accident, where am I?" She tries to mentally broadcast the meaning of this utterance, in case that's how this works.

Talking aloud - is that talking? - doesn't help. What do you mean magical accident?

Yes, that was me talking (what else would it have been?). I mean I was attacked by a giant snake with a mirror for a head (mental image) (did the mental image work?) and was suddenly here instead of my home city.

 Turns out keeping a linear train of thought is harder when she isn't speaking aloud.

Everybody thinks you're a Pokémon, maybe a legendary, but Bella thinks maybe you're an alien or something. I can get pictures but stick to the essentials, I can't keep this up for long.

I don't know what a Pokemon is. I'm a modified human, probably not from this planet. I need to learn the local language.

I can't do this long enough to teach you the language but I can tell them you said that. He speaks out loud.

Does anyone respond in a way that sounds like they might be volunteering for language help?

Okay. Anything else you need to know? And what was that ball thing that knocked me out?

Bella might be!

That was a Pokéball. Some people still think you're a Pokémon, since humans can't be caught in them, and the guy who caught you is annoyed about the possibility of not getting to keep you.

Keep me? What does he want to do with me?! 

It does not require a psychic to notice the sudden terror and hostility in her body language.

Calm down! If he has to put you in the ball again you're not gonna be able to learn the language, says the psychic.

Right, yes, language now freaking out later. Has anyone said they're willing to teach me?

Bella's going to try. Larry's agreed to leave you out of the ball for now as long as you don't attack anybody or anything.

Larry's either paranoid or obnoxious or both, but she nods. I won't attack anybody. So, language? Maybe start with basic grammar if we don't have much time, vocabulary will be easier to do by pointing at things.

I'm just about out of steam, Bella thinks she can make some headway without me, says the psychic. I'm going to go take a nap.

He leaves. Bella motions Margaret away from the thinning cluster of curious teenagers.

Margaret follows.

Bella's followed by one of the monsters, which docilely sits beside her when she plops down on an armchair. She holds up a finger. "One," she says.

Margaret doesn't see any point in teaching Bella any English, since nobody else here speaks it, so she repeats back "one", and solicits two through ten with similar finger-gestures. Does this language in fact use base ten?

It does!

"My name is Bella. Your name is -?"

"My name is Margaret. Your name is Bella."

"Your name isn't 'hello'?"

Margaret chuckles but does not have the vocabulary to explain. "My name is Margaret. Hello isn't name."

Bella nods. She pulls out a notebook and writes out an alphabet. Then she turns the notebook so Margaret can see and starts pronouncing letters.

Having an alphabet will help a lot. Margaret's arm acquires a scroll with a copy of the alphabet, annotated with English pronunciations. Then she tries spelling "Bella" in it.

She's pretty close; Bella corrects her.

She can come up with a spelling for her own name later. For now, more vocabulary! Nouns and verbs and yes and no and who/what/when/where/why.

Bella can't always tell what she's getting at but tries to cooperate with Margaret's interests.

Yeah, communicating abstract concepts is hard, even with the ability to draw pictures quickly. If Bella wants to decide what words to do next, that's fine too.

Bella names objects! She places them in grammatical context and sometimes spells them if Margaret doesn't pronounce them right.

Margaret is very appreciative of this; she learns quickly and consults her notes a lot. She can keep going for several hours; Bella will probably get sick of it first.

Actually, Bella's not the first person to get sick of it! Larry, the fellow who caught Margaret, wanders over after less than two hours have gone by. Margaret does not have enough vocabulary to follow the resulting tense conversation.

She tries to distract herself from her nerves by reviewing vocabulary words. It's not very effective.

Bella and Larry have a heated argument!

Margaret gives up on studying and watches them. She looks as nonthreatening as a cat-eyed vaguely reptilian woman can be reasonably expected to look. 

After a lot of heated argument, Bella picks up the creature that has been sitting by her all this time, displays it from several angles to Larry. He shakes his head. She puts it in a Pokéball and pulls out another one, a deer with treebranch antlers. He inspects this creature.

The creatures are very interesting when they're not being extremely aggressive. She's not sure if Bella is trying to make a point or offering him the creature as a bribe to go away or what.

Eventually, after more, less-urgently-heated conversation, Bella gives Larry the Pokéball that contained the deer and accepts a Pokéball from him. She sighs.

Okay, so it probably was the bribe thing. Now Margaret feels bad about causing Bella to give up her tree-deer.

Does Larry at least go away now?

Yep. Larry goes away. Bella lets out a lapsize black mammal with gold markings, hugs it, and resumes teaching Margaret the language.

"Thank you." Margaret goes back to learning.

If Bella keeps the black mammal out, after a bit Margaret will ask (haltingly and with slightly awkward word choice) whether she can touch it.

Bella says yes and holds out the mammal. It is quite docilely petted when Margaret touches it.

Pet pet. Aww, it's fuzzy. Back to langauge lessons. 

After a while she gets hungry. She doesn't want to impose on an already very helpful stranger for food, so it's going to be disaster-movie style. Hmm, better warn her as best she can first since she doesn't know about magical girls.

"I will food. I will not wings ten, fifteen minutes, make food, wings again." 

"...what?"

She doesn't know how to say "don't be alarmed", so she says, "I'm okay" and takes off her wings.

Alright maybe she spoke too soon, not having wings is unbalanced and weird and generally unpleasant. She needs to steady herself for a moment despite sitting down, but after a bit she smiles again. It's pretty fake.

"- what!" Bella pulls the Pokéball assigned to Margaret off her belt.

"I'm okay, it's good," she says reassuringly. "I did that, I" she checks her notes, "I wanted that".

"Why?"

"Can only do . . . some things. Not all things. Want do food, not can do wings." She points at her arm, adds "I do this, okay?" and makes a small strawberry vine grow out from between two scales.

"I can feed you!!"

Apparently this is more unnerving when you haven't seen it in movies, what a surprise. "Okay." The vine disappears and she looks relieved as she puts her wings back.

"What food do you eat?"

They haven't done names of foods yet, so this gets a picture of various food items. Several fruits, several vegetables, bread, cheese, pasta, cake, bowl of soup. She deliberately leaves off meat; she doesn't want Bella to think she wants to eat Pokemon. It might well we taboo, and even if it isn't she'd rather not.

"Okay. Come with me." She puts her small mammal away and heads for the door; at the door she releases a unicorn which is on fire, and, unharmed by said fire, vaults aboard.

Oh wow, fire unicorn, that is so awesome. She takes to the air, low enough to follow the unicorn and be easily visible herself.

Bella looks a little nervous when she takes off, but doesn't say anything. She trots on the unicorn down the street for six blocks, turns left, and finds a restaurant.

Oh, that was a shorter trip than Margaret was expecting, given the unicorn. She lands and follows Bella in, hoping the restaurant staff won't be irreparably confused about a nonhuman-looking customer.

Bella puts the unicorn away and picks an outdoor table. There's a menu. Bella orders two things, picking for both since there aren't exactly pictures.

That will be better than random guessing, yeah. Can she get a few more vocabulary words while they wait for the food? 

Sure. Now she can hear what forks and knives and glasses and plates and the tablecloth and the menu are called.

Excellent! She also listens to the people at nearby tables, picking out a word here and there and looking at what they're eating.

They are eating vegetarian food, looks like, no obvious meat about. Salads and veggie-cheese sandwiches and a frittata over there and bowls of noodle soup.

Bella has ordered what seems like a creamy potato soup and some battered-and-fried veggies and a fruit salad and a rice ball full of bean stuff for them to split; she also gets a dish of nondescript food that might be kibble, and lets out her small mammal to eat some on the floor beside her.

She was never super into meat anyway. Everything is tasty; her favorite is the fruit salad despite the unfamiliarity of the fruits. "This is good food, thank you."

Some of the fruits are totally unfamiliar, but others could be weird cultivars of ones she knows! "You're welcome!"

When they finish, she watches Bella pay to get a sense of how money works here and how much things cost.

Bella pays electronically, so no joy there. She puts away her critter. "I want to feed my others too," she says, "but they only give one bowl free here, I need to buy them food. Okay?"

"Okay. How much was our food, how much is critter food when not free . . .?"

"It was 2,000¥. Pokémon food costs less money, I can feed them all for 1,000¥ for the day."

"Okay." She notes this down separately from the vocabulary and follows Bella to, presumably, somewhere that sells Pokémon food.

Yup. Bella buys a bag of Pokémon food, takes it outside, produces a little travel bowl, and feeds her other four Pokémon in sequence. In addition to the little black one and the fire unicorn and the weird bipedal cat thing Margaret has already seen, she has a fuckoff huge bird.

Margaret jumps back a bit when the bird comes out, then stares at it with a mix of scientific curiosity and unsophisticated "woah that's big".

"That's a very large Pokémon! Can you go places on it?"

"Yes I can!" She scritches the bird.

"Good. Flying is good."

"Yes it is. I think maybe we should fly to my mother's house. I was traveling -" she gestures helpfully; she's not sure if Margaret has "traveling" - "but while I'm teaching you it may be easier to be in a house."

Awww, that's super nice of her. Margaret has some thoughts on paying her back but hasn't had a chance to act on them yet. "Okay. Going to your mother's house sounds nice, thank you."

"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.

"I wasn't expecting her to really find a legendary!"

"I think I am not what she was looking for but I am . . . very strange. And from very very far away."

"Close enough," says Bella.

Renée goes to put in a delivery order.

"Can you tell me more about legendaries?"

"Legendaries are... Pokémon there is only one of."

She's not sure how to ask "like mutants, or like the last of a nearly extinct species" except by saying "Because they're the first one like them, or because they're the last one and the others are gone?"

"...first," says Bella, "but they... stay first, they don't make more. And might not be real - people don't see them much."

"Oh. If they are real, where do they come from? Or do people not know?"

"They might not be real. But if they are real - they don't die."

"Oooh. And you think humans could learn how to not die too?"

"That's why I look. But they might not be real and you are real and interesting, so I'm going to stop looking and figure you out first."

"Okay. I can't share what I can do, or explain all of how it works, but I can talk about it."

"Maybe that's enough to get somewhere!"

Margaret nods, and starts explaining magical girls, with occasional pauses to look up or solicit a word. 

Bella takes notes and tries to help with the language till dinner arrives. Dinner is dumplings full of veggies and tofu, and rice, and seaweed salad.

Magical girls: they're always girls, somewhere between six and sixteen. They get this visual thing and the ability to change their bodies. If they make enough changes, they get magic and the ability to change their clothes. Margaret's magic does what it does; other girls she knows of do this that and the other thing. The more you conform to a certain aesthetic the better your magic gets. Swarms are a thing and this is what they are like.

Dinner is delicious and she is appreciative, though the seaweed salad takes a bit of getting used to.

"Who gets to be one?"

It's more likely if you have relatives who are magic, but it's possible for any girl and guaranteed for none of them.

"Can you make it more likely with... blood transfusions?" She explains those.

"Hmmm. . . that doesn't work on Earth, but maybe here it would take someone from impossible to possible?"

"It's been tried on Earth?"

"Yes but I don't know the, what's the word, details." It's good that she's a biology major and not an economist or a city council member or something, but if she had known this was going to happen she would have studied magical girl biology in particular a lot more.

Bella nods. "- do you sleep?"

"Yes, the same as other people. Maybe eight hours a night."

"Couch okay?" Bella pats the couch.

"Yes, the couch is great. I'm going to make a thing, okay?" Margaret pauses a moment, then acquires a big fluffy blanket draped around her shoulders.

"That's really cool."

"Thanks. I can talk more about how it works in the morning."

"I'll get you a spare pillow."

When the spare pillow is gotten Bella trots up to her own room.

Now that there's nobody to be alarmed, Margaret takes off her wings again. This lets her sprout a little pitcher plant, minus the liquid parts, and fill it with pearls embedded in her scales and then removed by feel. When she's filled her container with variously sized perfectly round pearls in every color pearls come in and some they don't, she seals off the pitcher, picks it, goes back to her normal form and pajamas, and passes out with it tucked in a pocket.

In the morning Bella fixes scrambled egg (the egg is poured out of a carton, rather than being cracked into the pan) and porridge with nuts in it.

Mmm, porridge. Once she has the name for the scrambled eggs, she asks what they're made of.

"There's a Pokémon that makes things yea big -" She gestures; the egg is bigger than an ostrich's. "- called eggs." She points out the Pokémon depicted on the carton, with an egg peeking out of its pouch. "There is a white part and a yellow part inside but this is both mixed up."

"Some animals at home do that, but the eggs are much smaller." She gestures the size of a chicken egg. ("Animals" is a loanword from English, since this place doesn't have them.)

"Oh, and I made you a thing." She takes the plant-box out of her pocket, where she was careful not to delete it while converting her pajamas back to a dress, cuts the lid off with a fingernail and holds it out.

"A thing?" Bella takes it gingerly. "Those eggs don't sound very useful, you'd need more than one just to make breakfast for a single person."

"Inside the plant," she clarifies. "They're called 'pearls' in English. And yes, you need two or three, but chickens make a lot."

"I think Chansey do five or six a day." She inspects the pearls. "What are these? They're pretty."

"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".

"I don't know how to sell shiny objects but maybe I can figure it out." She transfers them into a little plastic bag.

"Okay. You wanted to talk more about magic yesterday?"

"Yes, I want to know all about it! You can make shiny things, you have wings... you started out regular human?"

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.

"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?"

"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."

"A doctor will probably laugh at me if I bring you in and say I want a blood transfusion," Bella grumbles.

"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.

"- want to, uh, kiss them?" She kisses her hand demonstratively.

"Yes, kiss them. And not other people. That's all the head changes, if I did not forget one."

"Why does it do that?"

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."

"...hm."

Renée gets downstairs and collects some of the scrambled egg Bella made and eats it quickly and heads off to work, hugging Bella goodbye.

"More words?" suggests Bella.

"Yes, please!" More words! So many words.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

That does all sound super useful! "I should decide what job to get," Margaret remarks when one YA protagonist is contemplating the same question.

"Do you have a job at home?"

"Yes! I use lots of math and my magic to know when lots of people might get sick, and help the government make sure they don't. Oh, I didn't tell you what my magic is, did I? Every magical girl gets an extra power."

"An extra one? What's yours?"

"Future things. I can tell when something bad is going to happen and what kind of bad thing, and I can see where things are going to move sometimes, and sometimes I say true things I didn't know before I said them."

"If people ask I will tell them you're dragon/psychic."

"If I am a Pokémon those are the right types."

"You seem like probably not really a Pokémon, but you do go in a Pokéball and humans here don't, even psychic ones, so I'm not sure what's going on there."

"Maybe we can learn how to let all humans go in Pokéballs, maybe that will be useful."

"It'd... get complicated."

"Would people start thinking each other were Pokémon? I was thinking, someone gets hurt, put them in a Pokéball, get to doctor, no time for them so they can't get worse."

"That'd be nice, and maybe that'd be what happened, but it'd just be a little too convenient to get people out of the way, I think?"

"Oh. Yes. Maybe we should not try very hard to make it possible, then."

"And think about what to do if someone gets anywhere on it without help. But I think it will be pretty easy to pass you off as a legendary Pokémon. With clothes on for some reason. Some Pokémon have parts that look sort of clothes-y but not like that."

"The clothes are important to the magic; the more they look a certain kind of pretty the better my magic is. --It's strange that that still works here but it does."

"Why's it weird for it to work here?"

"If--what is beauty, for the magic--is in me, why is it the same for all magical girls? If it's in my world, why is it the same here? If it's in all worlds, why no magical girls here? Maybe I brought it here in some way. Nobody knows how it started in my world, a few hundred years ago, it could have come from somewhere else."

"All the magical girls look the same?"

"Not the same the same--if you copy someone directly that does worse than for the person who did it first. But the same--general thing? People's own opinions don't matter, what other people are doing doesn't matter, there are people who have jobs helping magical girls with their clothes and some are definitely better than others."

"The rules are, hm, skirts are better than pants, lots of little things help, doing the same thing in lots of places helps, like how I have lots of these--" she points at her various opals. "Bright colors that match helps, I know more things but not the words."

"Huh. That's... weird. Nobody knows why this is?"

"No. People say, maybe this maybe that, nobody knows for real. Did I tell you about 'swarms'?"

"They came up briefly."

"Okay. Swarms started appearing not a lot of time before magical girls did. They start as little black things, this big," hand gesture, "and get bigger, and if nothing stops them they come together into monsters bigger than a person, and keep getting bigger, and want to destroy things. Ones that start in the ocean or where nobody sees them can get really big, maybe house size, we call them 'Kaiju'. Magical girls fight them, if they have useful fighting magic. That's another way getting magic changes your head, is it makes you want to fight swarms."

"How much?"

"The less human you look, the more you change--I'm less human than lots of people. You can tell if you ask a big group before and after, or if you're good at thinking about your thoughts."

"Hm. Why'd you change this much?"

"All the changes were things I wanted to be. And I like looking like this, it's--nice."

"Is it?"

"Not people thinking I'm a Pokémon, but usually, yes. This shape and having wings and scales feels . . . correct. Different magical girls feel different about it. Some want to stay close to human, some want to be a single specific way, some are happy any way they look."

"Huh. I wonder if most people would be like that if they could."

"Some people stay all human even though then they don't have magic!" Margaret knows it takes all sorts, but she finds those people pretty strange.

"Okay, that's a little strange. I guess if they were really scared of their minds changing."

Shrug. "Yeah. I did my scales in ten seconds after I got starscape. I already knew I wanted it if I got a chance."

"Is it hard to do?"

"What, making changes? Sometimes. You need to know what the change will look like, so changes on your inside parts are hard. They say healing an arm or something is easy, because you can say, "make it like the other one", but I haven't been hurt bad, so don't know."

"You say things to the magic?"

"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?"

"All the cities in the whole world? I think they have meetings sometimes, but not really a government... there's a regional council, and the Elite Four but they're not really a government, more like, uh, emergency services. Uh, you need to have your 'mon well controlled in city limits, you can't battle them anywhere that isn't outfitted and insured for the grade of attacks they're going to use - little scuffle battles in the street aren't a big deal but if you start slinging fire or something you need to be in a real arena or out in an undeveloped area - leaving city limits on foot without a team is own-risk, you're responsible for what your 'mon do - so please don't go around doing anything, you are currently legally my Pokémon."

"Those are good laws. I won't do anything that could cause a problem, I don't want to make trouble for you. What are the Elite Four?"

"Champion trainers."

"So their Pokémon are strong and trained well and good at emergency response? Okay. I did emergency response work for a couple years when I was in school."

"What kinds of emergencies? How do you handle them without Pokémon?"

"The swarms I mentioned. Magical girls fight them, some with magic, some with, I don't know the word--" she makes a picture of a stardarter firing one of its darts. "Magical girls can feel swarms, and I could tell where they would be before they started. For fires and weather and things, normal people respond with special equipment."

"Some kind of dart gun," Bella identifies, scrutinizing the picture. "Huh. That sounds harder than doing it with Pokémon but if it works."

"Some animals can be trained to do emergency work, and other work--dogs and a couple others." Pictures of some dogs. "But we don't have Pokéballs, and I think maybe Pokémon are easier to train? So it's people and machines for most things."

"What makes dogs hard to train?"

"Sometimes they don't understand what you want, or are thinking about something else, or are too scared to do things."

"Those happen to Pokémon sometimes too..."

"Then maybe you just use them more than dogs because there are more kinds. Dogs can help blind people or rescue people from accidents or pull loads or guard things but they can't fly or make fire or be psychic."

"Maybe. I'd need to try training a dog before I knew if it was a lot harder. I don't even know much about training the species I've never happened to have."

"How different are the ones you have from each other? Dogs are different from each other but I think Pokémon would be more so."

"They're different but I think a lot of it is individual personality. I've read a book or two on each species but found a lot of the advice just wrong for mine."

"That makes sense. What are your Pokémon's personalities like?"

"I traded away my Sawsbuck for you, he was a sweetheart but really not bright. Zag's my smartest, he's curious about stuff and figures out what I mean faster than the others. Dusk's really affectionate and sometimes skittish, and Fireflower's proud and dignified and bitchy, and Juu's sort of - professional? - and Rachis is really food-motivated and sometimes acts up for attention."

"They sound pretty great. I'm sorry about your Sawsbuck. I'd be happy to help you get him back if you know a way I could."

"Six is as many as anyone can hold, somebody'd wind up in the computer anyway."

"Oh. What stops you from holding more? Is it a law or you just can't?"

"Just can't. Some people can't even hold six. They test you with rentals when you're a kid, it's usually more like four."

"I wonder if I could hold one. Probably not, but it would be interesting to try."

"Probably not, since you seem to count as one."

"I'll still like to try it sometime. Maybe Pokémon could hold each other if they knew how to try. Science, yeah?"

"Maybe! I can let you try to borrow one of mine but I'm not sure if I'd have to release you first or not, and if I would, I might need a new ball afterwards to get you back so nobody else catches you - sometimes they don't re-use."

"Try doing it without releasing me, and wait on trying it with?"

"Yeah, all right." She hands Margaret a Pokéball.

"Am I supposed to do something with it?"

"Try to like... accept the 'mon as a gift? It's Juu, if that helps you conceptualize it."

This is Juu, she has gotten it as a present, what a nice present. "It doesn't feel like anything?"

"Me either, I think I still have her." She holds out her hand. "So it looks like you can't, at least not till I disengage you."

"And that should wait." Sigh. "I should get some sort of job and not sleep on your couch and eat your food forever. But I don't know what jobs there are or if I would need, what's the word, papers that say who I am."

"Identification. Usually for people around our age it'd be a trainer card but you obviously can't get one of those... You also don't have to worry about the couch or the food, it's fine."

"Maybe I can help you look for legendaries."

"Maybe, though I don't think we've exhausted the potential represented by you alone in your status as not technically a legendary."

"Yes, I definitely want to try more things with that. Do you still want my kind of magic if you can get it?"

"...I think so but I need to think about it, and maybe discuss the side effects more when you've had more practice with the language to be really sure I understand them all."

"Makes sense. What else do you want to do before then? I probably shouldn't go places without you yet but I can practice the language with books when you're busy."

"I need to do basic 'mon maintenance but I can do that without getting too far from the house. The traveling was all about finding legendaries, I can skip it while there's something more important to do."

"Right. What are the more important things? Do you have experiments you want us to try or do you just mean waiting while I practice the language some more?"

"Mostly the language, but also following up on anything you wind up being able to tell me about your technology that we ought to have here, or using your magic if you psychic something that needs handling."

"Alright. Hmm, technology. You have cellphones, do you have the Internet? It's a big group of computers that any computer can talk to and put words and pictures and moving pictures where anyone can see it."

"Yes, we have that."

Margaret lists some more recent innovations, mostly in medicine but a few in consumer goods and electronics.

Bella hasn't already heard of all of them, and looks them up when she's sure she has the description close enough to find the right thing on a search. Usually there's a local equivalent, even if it's implemented differently.

"I'm a little surprised how close our technology is. We could have been hundreds of years different either way. I guess we don't have anything like Pokéballs, so you're ahead."

"Well, those are derived from apricorns - I mean you don't need to pick an apricorn anymore to manufacture one, but we had the example to go by, do you have those?" She pulls up a picture of an apricorn.

"No . . . is that some kind of plant?"

"Yup. Grows on trees. There's a few different cultivars."

"Woah. We don't have any plants that can do anything like Pokéballs. I would have said it was impossible without really high technology, before I came here. I wonder what about me and Pokémon makes it work that isn't true of humans here. And if it would work on a normal human from my world."

"I don't know if it's apricorns being special or Pokémon being special or both, but if you don't have Pokémon you'd certainly never have noticed anything like an apricorn. I don't know why you count as a Pokémon though."

"Do you think a doctor or a scientist could figure it out? Would it be a good idea to ask one?"

"There's scientists who'd probably love a look at you, should I start hunting for some who'll talk to us?"

"I'd like that if it's okay with you."

"I'll look some up." She navigates the internet from her watch.

Margaret watches, no pun intended, to get used to the UI. 

Eventually Bella has a list of a dozen random scientists she can send a copy-pasted email about Margaret to. "Anything in particular you want me to highlight?"

"Whatever you think is best. Probably none of them will be able to get me home."

"Probably, but you never know." She types.

"Yes. The best would be if I could go both ways and our worlds could trade."

"That would be ideal! I wonder if you can live longer if you spend time digitized? Pokémon do but there are diminishing returns."

"As in, time in a ball counts less for aging? That sounds cool, though I would miss things while I was in it. Unless I could do it instead of sleeping. Does that work for mon or do they need to sleep out of the Pokéball?"

"What brought it to mind is that you might care less about missing things than about catching whenever somebody manages to invent portals or whatever. Mon can sleep outside of Pokéballs but don't need to unless they're out a lot."

"I think it would depend on how likely portals or whatever seem to be and how much time I could expect to get, but yes." Also on the odds of Bella dying and her Pokéball getting lost in an attic for centuries or something, but that's a bit morbid and also paranoid.

"I'll ask for ballpark estimates from anybody who thinks it can be done at all."

"Thanks. And we can try the sleep thing tonight, see if I feel rested after being in a ball instead of sleeping."

"Sounds good."

"Okay. What next? I can read more if you have other things to do."

"Do you have, like, ideas for ways to use your powers that don't require a bunch of people already believing you they exist?"

"The easiest thing to do a lot of is valuable living materials, like the pearls. And I could make plants from Earth that you don't have here, and maybe plants from here. Maybe parts of Pokémon, if there's a kind that has valuable antlers or something."

"In time I will return."

"Huh. Apparently I'm good enough at this language to get prophecies in it now."

"There are parts of Pokémon that command high prices but, like, mostly on the black market unless it's just fruit or something that falls off anyway."

"I'm afraid that's about all I can think of; most magical girls do stuff that doesn't involve their powers at all."

"Really? Huh."

"Yeah. I use my powers at work, but I would still be able to do my job without them. And even the magical girls who do have jobs that center on it, it usually involves other people knowing about them."

"In a way where passing you off as a Pokémon wouldn't close the gap?"

"I could probably do something useful with the danger sense while being passed off as a Pokémon; I would just need one person who I could pass warnings to."

"How do you deploy the danger sense, do you have to be personally in danger or anything?"

"It's always on, and detects anything above a certain amount of likely to harm me--I don't know the exact likelihood--within a range of a few hundred feet."

"Harm you how much?"

"I can tell how much, and notice even if it's only slightly--like getting hit by someone who doesn't mean it."

"That really should have a use but I'm not immediately coming up with anything good. I guess you could detect wild mon within city limits but nobody's going to pay us to have you do that without a better idea of what's going on..."

"What are the barriers to people having a better idea of what's going on, will they just not believe a Pokémon can do that?"

"I mean, it doesn't sound out of step with things 'mon can do, but it isn't a specific known thing, and the usual result of a sweep for wild 'mon in city limits is that there isn't anything so it's a particularly easy thing to try to scam."

"The obvious solution is to find somewhere more dangerous that needs the same thing, but that's not the best idea for obvious reasons."