"Pokémon come in lots of shapes and sizes, and, as Maya just demonstrated, with all sorts of abilities. Humans have shared this world with Pokémon for thousands and thousands of years, as far back as we have records, but we still don't know anywhere near everything about them. Most Pokémon live in the wild, some live with people as friends, and some partner with trainers to battle each other, whether for prestige or to get stronger and help people. Pokémon and their trainers work together to help out when natural disasters hit, or to mine ore, or to build houses, or anything else, because there's no end to the things humans and Pokémon can accomplish together with a strong enough bond.

"Any questions so far?"

"What kinds of abilities? Do all of them have magic like that? Why battle and not, like, date? Do I need a pokémon to be safe around here?" 

"In order: Lots! It ranges from physical movements stronger than muscles alone would allow, to elemental punches or bites, to healing, to telepathy, and so much more. They all can do something, usually several things, not usually the same things. Most pokémon want to battle but not all, while pokémon and humans interested in dating each other are comparatively less common and there's occasional stigma. And finally no, not if you stay safe in a city and stay out of trouble, but otherwise yeah totally."

"Ra-raaa..."

{Sable, I think she was not asking about pokémon/human relations, but rather the human trainers.}

Sable blushes. "Aaand you probably weren't asking about pokémon-human dating. Oops."

"No, actually rishathra just makes sense, especially if you don't have to worry about cross-species fertility. A little surprised that not everyone's on board with that but I guess it could be hard to establish consent through the language barrier? And huh, interesting that pokemon have an inherent competition or conflict drive, that's funky! All of them? Really?" 

She hop-skip-jumps over to Sable's side and runs a hand through her hair with a shy smile. "Um. Sorry if I'm a little intense, alien culture and all." She opens her arms. "Do you do greeting-hugs here?" 

"I do, not everyone does, more common among girls than guys."

She hugs Audrey cheerfully.

"Also, rishathra? It sounds from context like that's a word for interspecies relationships, but I've been staying out of your head since I don't know how you feel about that, so I didn't grab the exact meaning as you said it. As far as consent, I cheat, psychic human and psychic pokémon."

"You can read my mind??? Whoa, cool! That's only very vaguely possible using advanced techology on my world and you have to, like, implant a chip in the person's brain about it to even give them basic controls for a computer - totally wicked!!" She grins and bounces up and down.

"Definitely don't scan me just casually, but I definitely want to see if you can sort through my memories sometime and try and retrieve stuff. And yeah, it is. From a fictional book series, where I come from there's only humans who are smart."

"Oh wow. That's wild, a world without pokémon." Sable smiles warmly and shakes her head in wonder.

"Al-ra alts?"

{Are there other creatures at all? Or only humans?}

"Oh! Good question," Sable replies to her partner. "Maya wants to know if you have other creatures at all, even non-sapient ones."

"A ton of non-sapient creatures - we call them animals. Some of them we mostly leave alone, some of them are pests that get into garbage or ruin crops or bite people, some of them we domesticate and live with even though they're not very bright, some of them we domesticate, kill and eat. In between the two options there's things like eggs and milk and honey. There's been some recent studies on tool use in cows so there's a lot of investment in trying to make lab meat these days, which is just starting to come down in price enough to be affordable. Unfortunately a lot of people on my home world have texture sensitivities to vegetables so it's hard to go wholly vegetarian, but a lot of people will eat a tasty meat substitute preferentially over meat - falafel's big where I come from, so are persine wraps, but people like meat so a lot of them go on eating animals despite their ethical misgivings."

"Wow! That's fascinating. We've got synth meat too; the last big breakthrough was a bit before I was born, when they figured out how to use a combination of pecha berry solution and... something to do with Ditto cells, I think, to stand in for the immune system. It's pretty common these days. We need it, too, honestly, because there are a lot of mostly or exclusively carnivorous pokémon."

"That makes sense. I'm glad they're not eating each other if they're smart about it." 

Audrey stretches and smiles. "So, what do we do about me now? I assume there'll be some exception handling process for "sudden appearances"?"

She reaches into her purse, rummages around, and pulls out a small wallet. "It looks like I still have my ID, so that should help?"

"Mhm!" She bounces a bit. "Wild kids wander in from the woods or mountains sometimes, kids who got raised by pokémon, and the pokécenters can handle that, so I'm sure they can handle you too. We'll just have to go back to the city and talk to Nurse Joy about it."

"Tsa ra-ral tsaaaall."

{It is not like you will be able to focus on training for the rest of the day anyway, darling, with a New Friend to make.}

"Maaaaya! You're not wrong but do you have to say it like that?"

Sable responds out loud, completely forgetting that her and Maya's psychic channel hasn't been extended to include her.

"What did she say?" Audrey wiggles. 

She opens her wallet and starts going through the cards casually as they walk. 

"Hmmm. This seems to be my conspiracy wallet. I think this is my conspiracy purse as a whole, actually. How old is this Nurse Joy person?"

"Um. She pointed out that I'd be too caught up with New Friend excitement for us to manage much more training today."

"Oh, but conspiracy wallet? You have conspiracies back on your world? Open ones that are known to exist, to the point you can talk about a conspiracy wallet, rather than villain Teams that run around stealing people's pokémon?"

"Yeah! They're partially open organizations, usually with ordeals to join and be initiated, and they collect people with common causes. The ones I'm in are childrens' conspiracies, for the protection of children from adults and their enrichment as people. I've just been kicked out of one of them for turning twelve, but I have another that's keeping me until I'm sixteen. The identification cards I have on me in this wallet are... I made a promise to not show any of them to anyone too old to be in on the conspiracy, because adults talk and you have to be cautious of people's privacy around their conspiracies. If the breach of trust was serious I could be thrown out of the conspiracy over it. Naturally it's safe for me to share the information from the first one, the one that's kicked me out - they knew I was going to age out and didn't confiscate my cards or anything - but the cards for the one I'm still in shouldn't be shown to anyone over sixteen if there isn't a pressing need."

"Well, lucky me I'm fourteen then. Wow, conspiracies to protect children from adults! That's so great! Here we just have pokémon journeys, and it's kind of assumed that if you need to get away from bad parents you go on your journey a bit early and then don't go home after."

Audrey nods along. "Makes sense! A little hard on someone who's bad at communicating with Pokémon, but definitely better than nothing."

"Yeah, it'd be rough if you had to befriend your starter from scratch, but usually if you hang around a 'center you can usually find an older trainer to help you catch a starter from the wilds around town."

She starts walking down the trail, back toward the city.