Garde turned most of her attention away from her daughters when she felt them finally fall fully asleep. She turned her power to making sure they stayed asleep for the night, before giving the rest of the people at the table the all clear.
"Garde will make sure they stay asleep."
"More abuse of psychic abilities," said Samuel Oak, tone belligerent. "It's not like that's proven to be a terrible idea already."
"Fuck you Oak, we all know that it's been fully disproved. I keep up on the latest discoveries and studies in Psionic research. For obvious reasons."
"Not when we're talking about the kinds of things I saw happen in front of me just a few hours ago!"
"All of it was only when done badly. When performed by highly skilled and experienced psychics, willingly, and well documented, it was proven to be completely safe."
"I'm not sure anyone here qualifies for any of that anymore!"
A feeling of indignation swept through the room, matched in the faces of the two human women.
"You know Garde was fully qualified by the time we became Champions, and she's kept up her qualifications."
"Obviously someone at the certification office was giving preferential treatment to the youngest ever Champion and her partner, because our daughter is insane in a way that could have only happened because of psychic surgery!"
"Enough." Ashely Jenny was worried sick about her daughter, and the shouting match wasn't getting anything done. "Passing blame and shouting aspersions isn't helping anything. Our daughter is unwell in ways none of us could have ever imagined. I don't know about Asami, but I know I called her by her name when our relationship first started."
"You obviously can't have, or she would have known her name isn't Red." Samuel Oak was still well past angry and somewhere in the orbit of furious.
"I did, Oak, in fact, I'm pretty sure there's video evidence from that one time we tried force her to make friends." Ashely couldn't help the shudder that passed through her at the memory. "She always sort of froze when I did it, but I always thought it was just her not liking her name, so I switched to a pet name. It stopped happening, so I left it at that. Could it be her mind was literally freezing to cope with the identity issues?"
Garde sent out a pulse of agreement, followed by knowledge and understanding about a pair of peculiarities she'd observed in her younger daughter's being since conception, but had never taken a close look at until now.
"What?"
"Obviously, you must have somehow left it there at some point."
Denial spread through the room. Understanding of the true nature and age of the oddities. Their existence was an impossibility, and no psychic could ever hope to try and do what had, apparently, naturally occurred in their younger daughter, and to a lesser degree, their oldest.
"They were there from the moment you noticed she existed? In the womb?"
Before there was even a mind.
"I will assume your competence and ability for now, because I know you, or thought I did, remember what you're capable of, and because anything else is useless at the moment, but I will get Alakazam here to take a look."
Anger, understanding, worry, grief, self-loathing.
"Hey, none of that. You know Azula and Luna, the moment they could they closed their minds so tight not even stray thoughts leaked out. We published a paper on synergistic innate and cross mind mental defenses and the superior results the method produced based on the way they did it. Independent psychic pairs later confirmed our findings, if perhaps to a lesser degree than what those two managed. You couldn't have known something was wrong without mindraping them open or mindraping them when already extremely mentally compromised."
"That was you?" Both Samuel Oak and Ashely Jenny were a smidge surprised, doubly so after they spoke at the same time. Asami wasn't surprised, it'd been a paradigm shift breakthrough in Psionic defense for those skilled enough to manage even a part of it. It'd caused a stir in the law enforcement community when psychic criminals became even harder to crack than they'd already been. Everyone else had been interested in general because the psychics wouldn't stop very loudly raving about it.
"Yeah. I'm not a full on psychic like she is, but I have enough of it that with Garde's help I can get a taste of the world. The only reason she's managed to get in at all is because pretty much her whole world shifted under her, rearranged it in a way that she found pleasing, and kept being distracted enough for Garde to keep her defenses down."
"Back on topic," Ashely said.
"Err, yes. Well, after everything that happened they were surprised enough, and Azula satisfied enough with, well, everything, that they let their guard down. I was piggybacking off Garde, and we only got a glimpse, but guys, it's big. If you want to get confirmation from your Alakazam you better do it now while their defenses are still down, otherwise you're not going to get anything out of them"
"Damnit. It's too late to manage that. Transfer services are down across regions this late." Oak seemed to deflate on himself, before rallying. "Fine. What did you see?"
A brief exchange between Asami and Garde had the former taking the lead. "I don't know how, but there's something in her that was there from the very start that, well, put plainly, says "Red". A central part of her being is some sort of psychic structure or organ that says so." She shook her head in amazement. "It's unlike anything we've ever seen or heard about. If she hadn't been psychic it would have driven her to being a person known as Red, regardless of anything else. Most likely she'd have taken it on as a nickname. A lot of her personality seems to have developed from it and the other thing as the cores."
"You saw her this morning, I know you saw what she's like when she's fighting. It comes from there, apparently. We have for as long as Garde can keep them asleep to get to the bottom of this, after that the only thing we can do is ask them to let us see inside of them, and I don't know how that would go."
"Why?"
"Because, as you so tactfully put it, our daughter is insane. I'd normally disagree on principle, but it's hard to do when she's a paranoid psychic with issues of megalomania, self identity, and delusions of grandeur, except of course, that I'm not sure they're delusions when she and Luna are one of the strongest one on one battlers in the damned region already, and there's zero indication of her slowing down anytime soon. Did I mention paranoid? Luna would maybe let us, because she has less issues, but Azula? I can't picture a situation in which she'd let us in her mind outside of a medical emergency."
"But why does she have so many issues then? She's eight and unless you've somehow forgotten to mention a series of traumatic events, identity issues aside, she should be more stable than this."
The uncomfortable grimace from Asami and Ashely, as well as the feelings of discomfort radiating from Garde, did not give Samuel Oak hope that his day would get better.
"For some time now we've had this feeling that she knows more than she should, you know, beyond what should be possible with a gift as strong as hers. She was too… much. Of everything. By the time she was five she was behaving like a miniature adult with occasional bouts of childlike behavior thrown in."
Ashely took over, "About three years ago she went out early in the morning and forgot to leave a note. Asami was beside herself because she disappeared for hours without a trace, called the police, it's actually how we met. We're actually not sure that she didn't do it the way she did on purpose to get us to meet."
She shook her head. "That doesn't really matter in the end, what matters is that she went to the local school and essentially mind controlled her way through people there into testing out of school, bypassing every rule and regulation in place to get her way, and leaving behind some teachers with lasting psychic directives with regards to the way they taught their classes, all of this without realizing she'd done it."
Asami took over at this point, "That's when we started seriously training them. No, shut up," she bit out when Oak started to protest, "We know she's not a pokemon Samuel, but what would you have us do? Her gift was out of control and the only people safe from it at the time were Garde and I."
She took a deep breath. "So we started training her from there, as well as restricting her to the house unless Garde could be there to keep her from doing things without realizing it. I'm honestly surprised it only took a year to get her to fully seize control of her power, but she's always been good at impressing us. That's when they fully closed their minds. We kept an eye on her for a few months just in case she slipped up, but she never did. She took very well to Ashely too which was good. We didn't even have to make an effort to keep her from influencing her."
"Anyhow, I contacted the school and she passed the tests they gave her fairly as far as we could tell, so I let that stand since she was kind of a danger to others at the time, and well, perfect scores on everything but History? The papers she gave me were a clue, I suppose. Pokemon Trainer Red was filed under the name, everything else was official. Didn't give it a second thought."
"Yes, no point in wasting her time if she could do that at age five. Can't even blame you about not making a bigger deal about the name at the time, since she was five. That kind of thing is to be expected." Oak said.
"I digress though. We didn't know what to make of it, but the way she handled herself and understood things and the purpose behind them was too smooth. Too easy. The way she was very familiar with some things and completely clueless about others, it was puzzling. We've bounced theories pretty much since we noticed. Garde and Ashley had the right of it, it seems. A past life she nearly fully remembers."
Ashley was startled at that. "Well, fuck. What do we know?"
"It's hard to decipher, the memories don't seem to translate well, though from how integrated they are to the rest of her, and how so much of her personality developed from it, obviously she's managed nearly full access to them over time. No idea for how long. What little Garde can make sense of them, it was fairly normal life at first, followed by living in a pretty nasty situation, then plagued by worsening mental issues, pre existing as well as caused by her living conditions, that went untreated for too long. There's more, but it seems fairly disconnected from her and even more indistinct than the rest."
"Shit."
"How did she die?" Ashely's voice trembled as she asked the question.
"She doesn't remember, thank fuck." The relief in Asami's voice was as palpable as the actual feelings of relief coming from Garde.
"Well, fuck." Samuel Oak could not say this complete fucking clusterfuck was anyone's fault but circumstance. If she'd been less powerful a psychic or less skilled the problems could have been addressed before they'd gotten as bad as they had, and wasn't that a quality problem to be complaining about? Oh no, my daughter is an extremely powerful psychic, woe is me. "What do we do?"
"The only people I trust her with are all in this room."
"Agreed. She's too much of a target. Daughter of two Champions and powerful in her own right. So many people would love to get their hands on her. I'll begin work on psychology degrees, if people ask I'm doing comparative analysis on human and pokemon psychology. It'll cut into what little free time I have but this is too important. I'll take time away from my other projects if necessary. I suggest doing the same, that way we'll have as many hands on deck as we possibly can."
"You'll be of limited help so far away. Perhaps a move?"
"I have ample space in my facilities in Pallet, and my laboratories are state of the art, we could use them if we ever needed to conduct tests on her, or if the worst case scenario were to happen, treat her. I hope we never have to, but the option will be open that way."
"I think that may be for the best," Ashely said.
"We'll coach it as a chance to get to know you better."
"Then it's decided, we'll begin preparations as soon as possible."