After a few minutes Dawn had fallen asleep again on the floor of the room. K.O. sighed and carried her over his shoulder with some difficulty back to her room. K.O. was about half Dawn's size, but he wouldn't let Grovyle even move from his pile of hay, and Mandy was the same size as K.O., but she was basically on fire. Thankfully, Dawn wasn't very heavy. She was actually quite light, which made K.O. worry a bit.
He laid her down in her hay bed again with her little bear in her hand. She looked peaceful, but her side bandage needed redoing. K.O. carefully used the move "Scald" on some bandages and then took off the ones on Dawn. By the time he had re-cleaned the wound, the bandages were just warm. He bandaged her up carefully and was surprised to find her still asleep. "Get some rest kid, if you plan to hang around a bunch of nut cases like us, you're gonna need it." He shook his head and sighed as he walked back to Grovyle's room.
"All right, you nut cases, let's discuss why we are going to drag a little girl, who can't even remember her own name, into the mission of a life time that is the most dangerous thing any of us could ever do?" K.O. asked as soon as he entered the room.
Mandy was the first to respond, "Because I've faced tougher things when I was a human child around her age."
Grovyle was shocked. "HUMAN?" he asked. Mandy was, in all appearances, a normal everyday Chimchar. Then again, she could do magic and sorcery. "How did you turn into a Chimchar then?"
Mandy sighed, then explained, "I'm not the first human to turn into a Pokémon, ya know. There are others, even in books. There was David, the Torchic, for an example. He led a team of Pokémon to save many lives from his own kind. Then there was Nicholas the great, he was a Pansage. He lived among Pokémon for so long that he turned into one. He lived as a king of his Pokémon friends and ruled justly as well as protected all he could. As for my transformation, let's just leave it as I'm a guardian who was just trained by magic users before ending up here" Mandy then left for her room.
"They may be little girls still, but they are tougher than most have given them credit for." K.O. noted. "Remember, they may look like children, but in this world, no one knows how much knowledge they could gain from just what we think is a minute. Dawn has already shifted at least a dozen times from when we ran into her. One minute she's a fully grown warrior, the next she just a little girl who wants to know who she is. It's just how she is, it's how she reacts to all of this that makes it all so unreal." He was as calm as a lake on a clear day.
Grovyle smirked and then, in a way, just drifted off to sleep with that smirk on his face. K.O. smiled at that. There were too many questions, and not enough answers in this life, but at least K.O. had his theories on them, and that was good enough. For now.