They sit together as ice cream melts way too fast. Turns out running around in body-covering black clothing in the middle of summer was actually really tiring! They made it about far enough from the theater to take refuge in a cafe.
"It's too hot not to get ice cream."
It's a place Maggie's been to on a few occasions. The lacquered black platter that had been brought to their table has six mochi on it, two each of blue, white, and pink. It's her favorite thing to get because...
"The colors are sort of like sylveon, the way that Kalos eevee is," Maggie says. It's the cutest and best eeveelution. Not like the Ecruteak Theater would ever accept it, though, even though just having eeveelutions is their thing, because they just have to be as boring as possible as always.
"Or milotic! It's a very nice set of colors."
"Milotic?" The species is unfamiliar to Maggie.
"Milotic are a kind of beautiful pokémon from Hoenn. Oh, you should see Seraphina. She's my m- uh, milotic. Her scales are pink and blue and this cream-white color. They're these serpentine water pokémon that live in lakes and rivers, and they have these long whiskers and tail fins."
Like dragonair? Maggie imagines a dragonair with dragonite whiskers and a stripe of pink layered over the blue and white. The thought makes her giddy.
"I'd love to see that."
"Yeah, I'll show you sometime," Lucy says flippantly. Like it's just a rattata or geodude. Then she's back to talking about faraway rivers and feebas, and Maggie looks down, feeling shy.
It's all so natural to Lucy. These rare pokémon, they're just hers, as easily as any trainer could have a pokémon. Just talking about them makes Maggie feel like she's stumbling upon a world far bigger than her own, an imagination greater than her own sleepy town, but Lucy isn't flustered at all as she takes one of the light blue mochi and pops it in her mouth. Pale hair, pink lips, blue mochi… for all Maggie knows Lucy might have been a milotic herself.
"Hey, eat your mochi, it's melting!"
"Right!" Maggie yelps, struck out of her daze. She takes the other blue mochi so the ones on the plate are symmetrical again. Biting through the sticky rice coating, the ice cream is twice over cooling, once from the temperature and another from the minty bitterness of the rawst flavoring.
Maggie tries not to cough on the rice flour. She asks, "Do you have more pokémon?"
"Other than pichu, I have a drifloon and a starmie."
Another foreign pokémon! Impressed, Maggie asks if the drifloon's also from Hoenn.
"No, Sinnoh. Drifloon is- she's not-" Lucy winces suddenly, then straightens up, which is confusing. She says, "My mom's a coordinator," which is even more confusing.
She elaborates, "Drifloon's a pokémon found in Sinnoh, but this one's from Johto. My mom is... she does contests where instead of battling pokémon you exhibit their characteristics, advancing the study, breeding, running and maintenance of pokémon, that kind of thing. Mom's really good so she gets to go everywhere, and a few years ago some breeders near Olivine City gave her Drifloon's egg. Since she's famous, and all that."
Exhibiting, performing- oh, famous. Like the kimono girls. Maggie takes one of the two remaining mochi. Pink is red bean. It's old-fashioned and Maggie's least favorite, a grainy sweet that sticks in her throat, a pink flower exposing dark blood underneath.
But Lucy wasn't going to be like her mom. She was going to be a trainer.
"But the gym challenge in Johto says you're supposed to use pokémon that are from here so it's not like that kind of thing matters anyway. The Goldenrod Gym won't let me even use my starmie because it was caught in Unova. Out of my pokémon, I really only can use Pichu and Drifloon."
The laws about what pokémon are allowed here are so annoying... they're part of the same reason why Azalea Theater is so tiny in comparison to the Ecruteak Dance Theater. Because the Ecruteak Theater was there longer, so even if they made certain choices like use a jolteon for Raikou even though luxray obviously was better for it, everyone thinks it's traditional and therefore better.
Lucy leans in close. "So what are you going to do? Are you going to go back to that no-name theater?"
Truthfully? Whatever Lucy was doing is way more interesting than the dead-end dreams Maggie had for herself. She was a traveling trainer with rare pokémon, while Maggie was stuck in Azalea seeing pokémon on rare occasions. So what if Maggie's a casual that'll be starting at age fifteen. Lucy is an entire year younger than Maggie but she's so cool.
"I guess I'll be a trainer," Maggie says.
