Welcome to Gaia! ::

"It's been a trip" were probably the words that stood out from Crystal's farewell as she waved goodbye. The three sisters' heads were spinning, and so too was the Primarina, Monique figured. Where had it come from? Was its purpose to enforce that in that reality most organisms had mermaid tails?

Those were questions beyond Monique's pay grade. Her mind might trip if she did not figure this out. The sisters nervously walked behind her, just gawking at everything. It was Kai's first time not under a Dome or underwater in her life, after all.

She walked back through the entrance to the Dimensional Research Lab. How would Burnet react? How much time would seem to go by? It felt like forever ago since she had slept under Munna's Dream Mist, and yet it really hadn't been.

Burnet looked like she had seen a ghost, though then again, disappearing through a chamber and reappearing through the front door was probably the best equivalent to a magic trick she'd ever pulled off.

"...Crystal went off somewhere, but if she's resting... She earned it." Monique was still trying to catch her breath. "Burnet, I'd like you to meet Kasumi and Kaimana. And this Primarina stowaway," she smirked. "There's a story to this one. Sit down..."

Burnet eagerly grabbed a notepad as Monique took a seat on the couch, flanked by the two sisters, her arms around them. She was not going to let go as long as it took to tell their story. They'd spend the next hour talking, the professor scribbling every morsel of information she possibly could. If Burnet had thought she would not hear about ammonia, mermaids, or even that beast thing at the end, she was wrong. The sisters—even shy Kasumi, who slowly opened up over the hour—were willing to just talk and talk and talk.

Perhaps it was Kasumi who felt the most relief after going to get a donut from the other room. The donut was sweeter than she was used to, but at least it was designed for her body. That was more than could have been said for virtually any item of nutrition she had consumed back in the Ammoniaverse.

Eventually, Monique let out a huge sigh. "So... Burnet, do you have any questions for us?"

Monique sighed. This was something she had not thought about; ironically, she had forgotten that others had forgotten. Her mind had once been like a snapped tape, unable to remember after a certain point—that was, until an encounter with a certain castle on stilts...

"Do you have any spare pads of paper?" she asked. "One for each of us?" Burnet went and fetched short stacks of loose-leaf copy paper from the office printer.

Monique, not wanting to draw attention to her own situation while Kasumi and Kaimana were in more critical and delicate mental states, wrote her own note on the paper. "My memory stopped until I saw something like this... a Faller in its own right..." Her note was accentuated by a drawing of what looked like a castle turret on stone stilts.

Monique nodded. That story sounded plausible, but then again, everything about the tapu were folk tales to her. The Smog had obscured the Light and killed them off in her world, after all.

"Oh my, that had to be something. Holes in the sky..." Monique drifted off, thinking about it. "Girl, that feels about right."

The thought of Auntie Wilokia set her mind toward the next chapter of her big island trip. "Well, umm... I've brought them home, but now I'm not sure what to do. I doubt Auntie Wilokia has room for all three of us, and they need to decompress and figure some things out on their own." She squeezed Kasumi and Kaimana reassuringly, emotion seeping back into her voice. "I'm not ever gonna let y'all be alone, though, you knooooow that."

Burnet's whirlwind departure left the three sisters to contemplate their own next steps.

Monique let out a breath, a long one. She knew she needed to get on her trip. Her jaunt into Ultra Space, while important and essential, was merely a sideshow.

"Where are we going next?" Kasumi quietly asked. "Pani...ola?"

She recognized that sort of voice, that apprehension. That suddenly the world had grown thousandfold. Their lives had once played out under one dome on one island. Now Alola had four of them, and there were myriad other major regions in the world, with ten times the number of known Pokémon species if not more. Not to mention the rest of Ultra Space.

"It's over here," she gestured. A large map of Akala was pinned to the wall. "We have to take Route 4 to get there. I know you must be tired... We'll stop there for the night, okay? Maybe Auntie Wilokia can help you get adjusted."

Monique wanted to as well. She didn't care if she had to sleep on the floor. She wanted to hold her sisters as she slept, like she did when she was a little girl. Finally, she had them again.

The three sisters walked along the streets of Heahea, broad and welcoming, their heads seemingly on a swivel. There was so much to take in. The buildings were a size and scale that was New Po-esque but in far better shape and of much sturdier construction, housing a myriad of shops and tourist. For Kasumi and Kaimana, who had only ever read of Pokémon Centers in old pre-Dome books or maybe once or twice seen them in old films on equally decaying tapes, the situation was surreal. Who, except maybe an Orre badlander or someone from a truly far-flung part of the world, would gawk at a Pokémon Center like it was a rare object?

Before leaving Heahea, the three came upon the Tide Song Hotel, which stood majestically at the end of its own circle with a fountain beckoning guests closer. Even this—and Monique knew it wasn't even the Hano—looked luxurious and opulent to the sisters. Not even King Faba, his reality indeed strained by the demands of post-Dome society, really had anything that compared.

The pavement ended and yielded to dirt and patches of grass, heralding the beginning of Route 4, which was teeming with small Pokémon and even a handful of Trainers. Kasumi—still recovering from her experience with reversed nature—especially was breathing in the fresh air, but she was also clinging to Monique, not used to having wild Pokémon around her at all. Kai, always a bit more assured and way more independent, didn't seem nearly as fazed.

"This is..." she muttered, trying to put together the words. "...Amazing." No wonder Momo wanted to rescue me and bring me here, she thought. It's...like...paradise? Most of the species were unfamiliar to all the sisters, only a handful having existed on Poni pre-Dome or having been seen by the Sheriff of New Po.

"Pika?" A noise came from behind them, reminding them to stop gawking at everything. Monique and Kaimana were first to turn, the more timid Kasumi doing so a minute later. A yellow tail was poking from underneath. Is that...? Kasumi tried to pull out what that was out of her jumbled mind. She'd seen it somewhere. The tail poked out for a moment before retreating into the bush. "Chu..." Then its ear leaned out, evidently attuned to the noise the women had made.

Monique was a bit quicker on the draw. "That's a Pikachu! ...Which reminds me I have a Pichu." She reached for her belt and pulled out the Poké Ball containing little Hālena to show them. "Pi pi!" the Pichu chimed in. She turned her head toward the bush. Did she notice the member of her evolutionary family?

"How many Pokémon do you have?" Kasumi worked up the courage to ask.

"Well, Kalama came with me, but then..." Monique started counting on her paws. "I have a Camerupt, a Castform, a Crawdaunt, a Honchkrow..."

"A what now?"

"Oh right." Monique sighed. Even Kaimana's world probably had limited biodiversity given the whole water thing. "You know there are, like, a thousand Pokémon out there, right?"

The sudden invasion of Pikachu caught Monique off guard, and it particularly scared Kasumi, who clung to Momo's arm like it was a life raft. Even Kaimana—new Water-type instincts still imprinted on her—briefly flinched. The Pichu, though, seemed to be basking in all the attention.

"Yes, that's my Pichu," Monique replied, seeing the man and suddenly the trailer. "...But what do you mean by dropping them off? What is going on here... Pikachu daycare?"