Draco: I'm back at it again. Halfway through the Delta Episode, lots of conversations on Life Energy, Zinnia is still being a cryptic little bitch. Knowing the whole context, I'm not gonna say she's in the wrong, but she could have been a little more straightforward about things instead of playing the omniscient. And I keep thinking about Magearna, because I've never had the opportunity to make use of Magearna yet.

I also wanna go into a little more detail about how everyone's interacting with each other for Cynthia's book, so I figure an addendum will hit both points.

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Meteor Falls, Hoenn

"You ran into the Wishmaker and you didn't tell me?"

May sighed, lowering her Super Rod as she reeled in her line. "Last time I saw you was shortly before the incident that Cynthia thinks was me running into the Wishmaker," she insisted. "You vanished off the top of the Pillar, and I never saw you again."

She turned to find a familiar figure in a ragged cloak standing there, with a Whismur at her side; in response to her comment, the girl only smirked. "Oh, Champion," she teased. "If it's that easy to lose you, I'm starting to think you're all just brute force and good conscience."

"Well..." May made sure Zinnia wasn't in her backswing before throwing her line out again. "...It's not like I was seeking you out."

Zinnia's face fell. "Oh. Um. Really?"

"Not a hundred percent sure it was the Wishmaker, really," May added, turning back to the original topic. "I mean, the whole I wish I would hook a Sharpedo, something starts glowing, there's a Sharpedo on the end of my line circumstances are pretty convincing. But I'm not a hundred percent sure." Her gaze fell as Zinnia came up at her side. "Honestly, I think Archie and Shelly might've gotten closer to her than I did. There was a picture on her desk of the two of them with a Pokémon that looks a lot like the image in Cynthia's old myth books. And the new girl in the chat room has some photos that raise a whole lot of questions."

"New girl?" Zinnia echoed.

"Long story," May admitted. "But she's been sending us photos of Jirachi with timestamps over the past month and a half. She says a meteor fell in the region, but what's that supposed to do?"

"You know," Zinnia mused, "they say she's supposed to wake up when the stars fall, and then quickly go back to sleep. But with a Mythical Pokémon like that, I kinda wonder if there's maybe more to it. Maybe her 'going back to sleep' is just her moving around, and the meteor made things appealing for her to stay for a while."

"Maybe," May admitted.

A Magikarp nabbed the bait of the end of her line; May let it break off and swim away before reeling her line in again.

"You're not here to talk about the Wishmaker, are you?" May observed as she cast it.

"Well, you were right in thinking I was gonna get upset about the Princess," Zinnia admitted.

"Watch which Princess you're talking about," May pointed out. "The Sea Princess is a bit of a touchy subject."

"The Alolan one," Zinnia insisted. "The Mechanical Princess. With the Soul-Heart."

"I mean, it sounds like Infinity Energy," May admitted. "The way Selene described it, that sounds a little too familiar to be a coincidence. But with Magearna being such an ancient Pokémon, we can't be sure. And... I'm not in a hurry to find out."

Zinnia turned to her. "Why not?"

May snapped around to look at her. "Well, for one thing, she didn't have any control over how she was made," she snapped. "I'm not about to hurt or possibly kill an innocent Pokémon for the possible sins of her creator." Then, turning back to the water; "And for another thing, it's not like we can change what's already happened. If that is Infinity Energy powering Magearna's Soul-Heart, it's been powering her for hundreds of years. There's nothing we can do to unmake it." She reeled in her line again. "Better it be put to a use than left to waste."

She cast the line again, and silence fell, save for the roar of the falls.

Aster was the one who broke it, turning to Zinnia. "Mum?"

"...Did you really never look for me?" Zinnia asked. "Even a little bit?"

"Well, I was a little concerned when you weren't there after I got back to the Sky Pillar," May admitted. "There was a hell of a shockwave when the Sky Demon took off. I was half scared you'd gotten knocked off the top. But then Aster gave me your note, and I was pretty sure you weren't dead, so I relaxed."

Zinnia sighed. "Didn't make such a good impression, did I?"

"No, you didn't," May replied bluntly. "First you showed up outside my house in Littleroot, acting like you knew me when I had no idea who you were, making vaguely threatening comments about my hometown and my neighbor. I go to invite him to the star show, and I find out he's gotten robbed." She let the Magikarp nibbling at her line pass without trying to hook it outright. "Then you showed up in Granite Cave just when I was looking for a Meteorite Shard, and made some awfully suspicious remarks about the job I was there to do, sounding vaguely Unovan about the whole thing." Once the Magikarp had departed, she reeled her line back in. "And then, when I go deliver it to the guys who need it, you show up and start making some very insulting remarks about the people who are trying to save the world."

"Yeah, at cost to another," Zinnia retorted.

"What other?" May snapped, lowering her rod as she turned to the Draconid. "You've never provided any proof about that. You tell us there's another world out there, that we're gonna endanger some other world if we warp that meteor away instead of letting it fall on us. But you don't have anything to back you up, you don't show us anything to prove that you're not just rambling. And another world that's just like this one? With another Hoenn, but one where no one's ever heard of Mega Evolution and Primal Reversion isn't a thing? Where the war in Kalos never even happened? What next, are you gonna tell me Red and Blue were marking paper maps instead of filling out Pokédexes? Or Suicune hangs out in the Bell Tower instead of running around two regions? Or maybe that some Kantonian dumbass runs all around the world and solves everything from Team Rocket to the frickin' Darkest Day, and everyone else is just Contest stars and Trainer PR models?"

Zinnia sighed. "May..."

"I'm not saying you had the wrong idea," May insisted. "Honestly, I'm glad we got the result we did. Calling on Rayquaza for its Mega Evolution, breaking up that meteoroid instead of sending it off to possibly come at us again way in the future. Even if I did almost Mulch my suit when that Starcomer popped out of the triangle, I'm glad I got that encounter." She shook her head, turning away. "But... You could have just said that. Hell, you could have just said If we break it instead of warping it, the pieces aren't gonna be big enough to hurt anyone, and everyone would've been on board with it. We could've loaded up the rocket to explode instead of using the Link Cable."

"And you would have been fine with that?" Zinnia asked. "With using a rocket full of that abominable energy?"

"The Infinity Energy was already there," May replied. "It had already been harnessed, it was loaded into the rocket, and if me and Steven hadn't been there, it would have taken out Mossdeep City because Courtney and Matt couldn't handle Maxie and Archie seeing the errors of their ways. All you did was make them put it in something else instead. And Mulch themselves because they thought the world was going to end."

She turned to face Zinnia again. "Stopping people from using that energy is not going to bring back the Pokémon it came from. You know that, right?"

Zinnia didn't respond.

May moved a little closer to the nearest fall before casting her line again. "You know," she mused, loud enough to echo around the falls, "I wouldn't say no to a Crawdaunt."

"You expecting the Wishmaker to hear you again?" Zinnia asked.

"Not when she's flying around Lental," May admitted.

"What's Lental?" Zinnia asked.

"It's a-" May cut herself off when something hooked hard on her rod. "Well, at least the actual fighters waited until I wasn't having a serious conversation," she muttered, trying to reel in.

Zinnia saw an ominous pincer poke out of the foam as May was wrestling with it. "Uh, May...!"


Draco: Smart people know better than to seek out wish-granting entities. Lucky people manage to make requests of wish-granting entities for something that doesn't blow up in their faces.

So, regarding Cynthia's book, I wrote the VIth Edition (read: Kantonian to Kalosian, with no one past Zygarde) as the named Trainers and Rangers coming to Sinnoh, visiting Celestic Town, and contributing to Cynthia in person, so Cynthia (and sometimes Dawn) would occasionally react to the notes. But when I got back to writing this, I wanted to have a little more in the way of reactions, so I've been going forward from there as Cynthia having set up a chatroom after each respective interview, and everyone checks in every so often to see what sort of new encounters have happened, and offering their two cents, maybe sitting in on the interviews by remote if things interest them. Which was a convenient headcanon to have when I decided to implement New Snap.

I got sucked into a Discord chatroom like five years ago and called it off in less than a month. I only ever used the text chat, but I remember there being options for voice and video calls, so I'm fairly confident in saying everything I've written so far works if all the options are presented.