It is green and lush here. Prairie, wildflowers, blue sky with fluffy white clouds. Birds with hats, over there.

The birds yell at him. "MURKROW!"

Weird hat bird magic hurts. He retaliates with perfectly ordinary Scadrial magic, slamming all of them with a wave of fear that doesn't work, why doesn't it work?, and shooting metallic pellets at some of the nearer weird hat birds.

They do not appreciate the metallic pellets! They scream at him and attack him some more.

Well, he can take arbitrary amounts of injury and dull or turn off pain, so this should not be a fight he loses. Scraps of metal, coins, anything suitable as a weapon gets fired into the flock and pulled back to be launched again.

Well, the hat birds can and do fly. They chase him.

The ball makes him sleepy and not very cognizant of time passing or his body (failing to do its customary amount of) existing, but he is not literally unconscious.

They talk. To each other, not to him, in a language he's never heard before.

They peer at him. They don't seem to speak those languages. One of the teenage girls says something and then walks away.

I'm psychic. I can't keep this up for very long, though. Your trainer thinks you might be psychic, too; can you do this yourself?

The psychic translates this. The talkative girl puts in, "Pokémon are non-human creatures, like the Murkrow that attacked you. They're almost all named after the sounds they make."

"Human," Rashek says in their language.

"Naw, come on, tell me," says the boy who caught him, "before Joe gets too tired to translate and I have to put you away."

"Can't be convinced? Because she's literally right; you can't keep me. If you try to throw that at me again then you will fail. If I have to, I will defend myself."

Rashek laughs. "Completely. It does make it sound like there's an obvious way to make Larry want to disclaim all ownership, but don't worry; I won't use it."

"Three of those made sense. What's a legendary 'mon?"

"Unique, likely fictional, potentially immortal, very powerful Pokémon."

"You're not going to give me to anyone," Rashek says. "Traditionally, one can only give things that one owns."

"Semantics aside, what Larry meant was whether I was trying to con him into handing me the Pokéball currently associated with you," says Bella. "Which I don't want. Even handing it over long enough to release you would mean boxing one of mine for the duration."

"Maybe this is just because I don't know how Pokéballs work, but if that happened couldn't someone else capture me?"

"People don't normally throw Pokéballs at humans, and if you dressed less outlandishly and didn't pick fights with wild 'mon you'd look like a human," says Bella. "Right now you are attached both to your Pokéball and to Larry. If you take the ball, or damage it, he can replace it and put you in a new one if he wants, which I assume you'd just as soon skip. Meanwhile, you're taking up one of his slots and I assume you have no intention of helping him win the guild tournament next month."

"That's what people use Pokemon for? I'm sure I could find more than enough monsters to fight if for some reason I wanted to, and I'm certainly not doing it on your behalf. You would be better off with literally any Pokemon."

"I'll show you the place," sighs Bella. She walks, slowly and carefully, to the door of the building; there, she tosses one of her Pokéballs, which yields a horse that is on fire and seems remarkably unconcerned about it. The girl swings herself up onto her creature's back and does not catch fire.

It's at the door of a wooden building, and nobody else seems concerned either. It's probably just an illusion. He follows her out, but keeps a little distance from the horse just in case.

"You might not have as much luck on that, but if you're willing to get something cheap, maybe." She points at a rack of something that is presumably cheap; Rashek obviously can't read the labels.

He is in fact good at clothes. He selects things that, to the limited extent possible from the rack, end up looking like combinations a nobleman on Scadrial might wear. A very, very eccentric nobleman.

"I can do that." Gold is the only conventionally valuable material he has on him, so he takes off a relatively large and ornate ring (the contents having been transferred to other storage, of course). "How much would you estimate this is worth here?"

The cashier tallies up the set of clothes he's picked out, and then says, "I can give you these and four thou in change," she says.

"I don't think I will. Thanks for your help; the situation with Larry could have gotten a lot messier without the translation idea."

"You're welcome - oh, one question first. Just how legendary a space human are you?"

"Only mostly. For instance, I'm not even probably fictional."

"I don't actually know whether I count as powerful by whatever scale you use on this planet. Does it have a name, by the way? I did lose to that flock of Murkrow, if that helps estimate, but I think I could probably win if I went in knowing they were dangerous."

"Planet's called Earth. And they were reportedly numerous and pretty high-level for wild unevolved Murkrow, but regular humans, directly attacked like that, would've been dead, and a weak to average wild 'mon would have run off or fainted versus that many opponents. My team could take the flock, based on Larry's description, but not without casualties."

"How did you manage to be very long-lived, then?"

"I'm still not sure I want to describe how my abilities work. But it's an intersection between two unrelated powers, neither of which is transferrable."

"Damn. I will keep looking for legendary 'mon and ask them, then, I guess."

"Where does one look for legendary 'mon? If they're in the habit of granting favors, I might need one to send me back."

"I haven't found any yet. I'm planning to check Lake Valor next, see if I can find Azelf."

"The former, basically. But I've already checked Lake Verity as thoroughly as I could, so if the lake guardians exist at all they may require something I don't know about to show up."

"Are any of the legendaries psychic? Those would probably be easier to look for."

"Yeah, actually all three of the lake guardians are reputed to be psychic, among other legendaries, pretty common."

"Good. And once they're found, you talk to them, throw a ball at them, or nobody's ever gotten that far?"

"I wasn't planning to capture a legendary 'mon, unless it seemed to be obviously not as bright as they're supposed to be. It seems disrespectful. I'd try to talk to them. Some people have ambitions to capture legendaries, though, or Larry wouldn't have made such a fuss about you."

"Thirty-foot blue what?"

"Snakes. Long, narrow reptiles, head is mostly mouth. Or mirror, in this case. One of those appeared out of nowhere and swallowed me. Instead of the inside of a snake, I found myself on a planet full of other wildlife with bizarre powers."

"...Reptiles?"

"I don't really keep track of the blood temperature of Pokémon. But anyway, I don't know of any Pokémon with mirrors for mouths. Seems like that would make it hard for them to eat."

"I haven't necessarily memorized all of the hundreds of kinds of Pokémon, so there's also that."

"I mean, you need at least one to safely leave town - you might be able to manage alone but nonlegendary humans can't - and even if you stay in town there's Pokémon-related stuff everywhere, so, yes, they're important. How much information do you need attached to your list?"

"Sure, but if you just wanted a list of names or something I could call that up on my Pokétch. Sounds like you want a library. Lucky I know where one of those is too, huh?"

"It is indeed."

So they depart the clothing boutique and she gets on her flaming horse again and rides same down the street and over a few blocks. Library! It has books!

Bella finds other books and reads with a Pokémon curled up across her lap being scritched behind the ears.

"You about done?" asks Bella, when he's gone through his books.

"Didn't think so. You seem confused enough about Pokémon that I'd be surprised if they existed where you came from. Must be boring."

"We do have some animals, but they're rarely more intimidating than you'd think from their size. And you have much more variety here."

"Hundreds and hundreds. There are songs. I still remember most of the words to the Electric Pokémon Song."

"Just hundreds? We have more, probably at least thousands of species. But not very many matter."

"Then I guess it's arguable if we really have more variety," shrugs Bella. "Anyway. You're going to go legendary hunting?"

"I think I have to, if I'm ever going to get back. I think Sendoff Spring might be a place to start; there's supposed to be an interdimensional portal of some kind."

"I haven't been there yet, but it sounds worth a try."

"The Pokémon are Giratina, Palkia, and Dialga." He slides over a book at a relevant page. "They're supposed to be able to handle interdimensional travel, so they sound like my best bet. Are you looking for any characteristics other than 'legendary'?"

"Immortal, but they're basically synonymous."

"Dialga does time, so that at least sounds more relevant than willpower. The only problem is that none of them are psychic, so they'll be harder to identify if I do manage to sense them."

"Why are psychics easier to identify?"

"I don't have any psychic-type 'mon myself so there's no easy way to check - Dusk has enough latent potential to use a psychic attack, but he's dark-type so that probably won't help. We could go ask somebody at the guild to make sure your theory holds."

"That would probably be a good idea. The ones we're looking for aren't psychic type, but if it's about potential then they've probably got plenty."

"I don't think psychic 'mon of the sort that will be around the guild house are telepathic," Bella mentions, heading for the library exit. She takes out a different mammalian quadruped, this one with antlers and leaves, to ride back. "Or we'd have used them to translate instead of Joe. They aren't smart enough. But if we're just checking your ability to sense psychic 'mon specially we can compare Lina's Chimecho against any of mine."

"Worth a try. I can't sense them now, by the way; whatever the Pokéball does makes it look like it's not here."

"What about Branch?" She pats her tree-mammal.

Nod, nod. "Branch is not the brightest of 'mon, to be fair."

"The psychic ones have to be the ones with more complex minds, usually. That'll make it inconveniently harder to test. Still worth doing, of course."

"Uh, not necessarily. Being psychic type doesn't make a 'mon smarter. The Chimecho we're about to see isn't going to win any contests."

"It's not so much intelligence that I can sense as it is complexity. But variance within species could be larger than the difference between different species' averages; I wouldn't know yet."

"Huh. We'll see. It's not smart for a Chimecho or for a 'mon in general, anyway."