Near the middle of Goldrenrod sat a large business park, containing several tall and spiritless office towers. They rose like prison spires to entrap the workers streaming in and out at any hour of the day. The park as a whole was nicer, cordoned off by the rest of the city with a long walking trail and was graced with speckled patches of grass and trees. Carefully contained in concrete barriers, of course, lest they escape.
Persephone wavered back and forth on her view of the space. On one hand, the large, isolated space was big business stealing precious land from the rest of the city. On the other, it quarantined the drab salarymen working here and prevented their depression and exhaustion from overwork from infecting the rest of the city.
In the middle of the park sat a rather modern building, stretching five stories tall— a healthy head over the others around it. Large letters were on proud display several stories up the building's side, announcing its owners— "FLOATSAM GROUP".
The name rang a bell to Percy. It was one she often heard attached to big discoveries in Pokémon science. The type of stuff that was often sensationalized into scientific worthlessness. But for that reason, she usually just rolled her eyes and ignored the news, learning nothing new about the group. She'd been promised time travel too many times to care that they'd certainly, for sure, found genetic evidence that Celebi were capable of it and that it would be available for consumer use in as soon as two years.
It was here that Kona took Percy the next morning, with Haedys cradled defensively in her arms. Kona strode into the clean lobby like he owned it (and perhaps one day he would), bypassing the security receptionists with little more than a glance that imparted his right of passage. He'd been forced into somewhat professional attire for once, and shockingly he'd hardly even complained. He was in an eerily good mood.
They rode the elevator up to the third floor, where Kona flung open the door into a small lab. Everyone present instantly looked up from what they were tampering with. Two unfamiliar faces were configuring a large, sleek white device in the center of the room. There was a small platform to stand on, and then several robotic, arm-like protrusions that rose around it and all curved around the center. At the head of each was a bulbous prong that Percy immediately imagined poking whoever stood in the center.
An unfortunately familiar face was standing at a control console which overlooked the device. Cayenne frowned at Kona's entry, quickly averting his gaze from Persephone, and nodded.
"The aurascope is just about ready. It will only take a quick scan to confirm my current theories. But the details will tell us how difficult this situation is," he stated matter-of-factly, jumping straight to business before Kona could say anything.
Kona grinned widely. "'Difficult', my… temporary subordinate? You mean how ample the opportunity!"
That earned him two dirty looks at once.
"Hey, uh, right here remember?" Persephone cut in dryly. "Whatever weird benefit you're getting out of this, I'm here to get it fixed, so, yeah, difficult."
He sighed, relenting. "Yes, yes, of course. First and foremost… You two! Is the device ready?" Kona called to the two staff-members calibrating it.
"Just about, sir," the smaller man called back, adjusting his coat. He hesitated, eyeing Percy warily. "We usually only use it to examine Pokémon, though. I'm not sure if-"
"I contacted the manufacturer last night," Cayenne abruptly interrupted him. "It's certified for human use. There's just usually little reason for that. With no elemental synthesis occurring, human aura is rarely worth observing."
Both of the staff members gave Cayenne a surprised glance before twisting the device's arms once more each. They stepped back.
"We should be good, then. Even so, I'd start with the Misdreavus."
Haedys suddenly realized she was the center of attention and sank deeper into Persephone's arms, burrowing so deep against her chest that she was practically invisible. "Mi," she offered in feeble protest.
Percy frowned, looking down at the slimy thing bundled up against her. She'd started developing a tolerance for it, at least so long as it was through her shirt. She loosened her arms some, forcefully exposing the ghost.
"Come on. It's not going to hurt." She paused and looked up to the researcher. "Wait, it's not gonna hurt, right?"
He shrugged. "Don't think so?"
Not reassuring, but it was all she had to work with.
"See? It's gonna be fine. They're just gonna look. It didn't hurt last time someone 'looked', right?" she asked, a hint of vitriol seeping into her voice as she sent a glare towards Cayenne. The man winced and looked away.
Haedys pouted, refusing to meet Persephone's gaze, but the point made it through. Even though they were trapped in a human place and surrounded by people who wanted to prod at them, they probably weren't going to be hurt by anything.
Begrudgingly, the Misdreavus slipped from Percy's grasp and followed the unspoken instructions to float into the center of the machine. From the center, she watched everyone nervously.
"Huh. Clever for her age. Fire it up before she changes her mind," the other researcher noted, tapping a pen against the side of the device. They paused and planted it against their cheek pensively. "Or should we restrain her?"
"I don't believe that will be necessary. Please remain still, Haedys," Cayenne quickly responded, tapping at a sequence of buttons on his console. "Activating."
The device suddenly emitted a loud whirring. The arms all sprang to life, twisting and coiling around Haedys in mechanically smooth motions. The prongs started to vibrate intensely and glow a deep, ethereal blue.
"MII!" Haedys squeaked in alarm, rising several feet higher into the air and glancing frantically back and forth at the prongs now surrounding her..
Persephone felt fear spike in her chest, and it took all of the trainer's willpower to return a reassuring look in spite of that shared terror. She did, though, and fortunately that small piece of solid ground amid the tides was enough to stop Haedys from breaking out of the machine. Instead the Misdreavus she rapidly flitted from side to side, recoiling every time she accidentally flew too close to one of the shifting prongs.
"Still, still… Stay still, please," Cayenne directed, scowling as he leaned over the console. His eyes were narrowing, and his expression growing increasingly dumbfounded as he stared at the screen. Reacting to that, the researchers cast each other wary looks and walked over to peek as well.
While they examined the results, Percy stumbled forward until she was just outside the perimeter of the whirling arms. She reached out towards Haedys to try and reassure her Pokémon, before one of the rotating arms abruptly slammed into her hand and knocked it away.
Haedys stared out at her from the device, wide-eyed in terror. They locked gazes and she let out a low whimper.
She didn't like this. She didn't like this one bit. It was loud, and bright, and so, so close. It felt like it was going to strike at any moment. Like a predator Double Teaming around her before pouncing.
"It's not," Persephone promised her in a whisper. "It's just a machine. It's not gonna touch you. You just need to hold still, and it'll… uh…"
Unsure how to finish that thought, she turned and glanced back at Cayenne and the researchers. She was greeted by the worst possible thing one could see when receiving a medical scan: three experts crowded around the results and staring at them in abject horror.
Unfortunately that thought carried across to Haedys, and it was enough to finally break her faith. With a cry, she watched the arms' movements a moment and found the perfect opening to dart between them and escape the circle.
The device abruptly emitted a shrill beep, and all of the lights turned red. Detecting its target had left, the whirring quieted and it began to slow.
The baffled researchers hardly reacted, only sparing a quick look to make sure Haedys hadn't broken the device on the way out. Percy prepared for the ghost to dart into her arms again, but Haedys never arrived—instead the Misdreavus flew up to the console to join them in marveling at the results.
Before even approaching the console, Persephone received the secondhand knowledge that Haedys had no idea what she was looking at. But once she hurried up the steps to inspect it for herself, she was able to have no idea what she was looking at for herself.
The primary chart on the screen was a technicolor orb with a white core. The majority of it was a lavender gradient that expanded outwards, but there were flecks of all different colors within: sizable purple regions, bits of orange and brown, darker blacks. A set of bar graphs along the side seemed to represent the prevalence of these colors. The real deviation was that the white core looked like it had been blasted apart, with chunks of it flowing off the orb in one direction, and many them seeming the wrong shade of white as they approached the edges.
"I-is this bad?" Persephone finally stuttered out, feeling the air of discomfort radiating from every expert in the room. "What the heck am I looking at?"
There was silence a moment, the three researchers in the room shifting their weight awkwardly and sharing looks as if wordlessly arguing who had to explain it. But the moment looks fell on Cayenne, he sighed and pointed to the orb.
"This is a rough visualization of her aura output. The white part is typeless aura, which all living things emit. The reality is complex and not well understood, but very roughly think of it as 'life force'," he explained.
"And all the colors?"
"Typed aura. Humans don't synthesize any, but most Pokémon synthesize at least a little bit of all, or most types. Her typed aura looks normal. Mostly Ghost, a decent chunk of Psychic, and then bits of everything else. But her typeless aura…"
"Was shot," Persephone said through a nervous inhale, pointing at the shattered white in the center.
Cayenne squinted. "…No, her aura has not 'shot'," he muttered. "Don't take an aura visualization too literally. The problem is that it's entangled with a foreign aura." He pointed at the bits of off-shade white. "And we can all guess who's that is."
Persephone recoiled, staring again at the orb and then at the machine. "Are you saying my aura looks like that, too?" she demanded.
Cayenne shrugged. "Most likely. Won't be hard to check." He gestured to the machine.
Persephone shuddered, imagining something spiritual in her core fractured into pieces, and begrudgingly slinked towards the machine. She took her place in the center, and as it began to whirr up again, she noticed that Haedys was still hovering over the console.
The ghost was staring at her own aura chart with all of her anxiety having turned to fascination. Apparently she was far less bothered by what she'd seen than Percy. Or perhaps she just couldn't grasp the chart's meaning.
"So, what's with all the faces?" Kona asked, stepping forward with a frown. "We've seen this before! Bonded trainers can aura-lock with their Pokémon. I know you've seen it," he said to Cayenne.
"That looks more like two interlocking pieces. Two easily separable aura patterns. This looks more like someone ran two Tangrowth through a washing machine," Cayenne responded bluntly.
Persephone grimaced, but didn't respond to that. For once, she was being a good patient, standing still while the machine whirled around her and narrowly avoided prodding her with its sensor-arms. The device made her hair staticky, and she swore she felt a strong tingling in her stomach. But that might have just been paranoia.
She practically bounced off of the platform when the whirring fell to a rest, hopping up to join Haedys in inspecting her own chart. The result was nearly identical, save for the absence of colored splotches. She winced, instinctually clutching at her own sternum as if to feel for the shattered aura.
"So now what? Can you… " Persephone grimaced, her next words seeming naively optimistic while staring at the eviscerated-aura graph in front of her. "…fix it?"
"And can you replicate it?" Kona quickly interjected.
Cayenne's eyes narrowed, his irritation obvious but what had caused it less so. "Thus far I have exclusively looked at a graph confirming the phenomenon. Those are both incredibly broad questions to be answering on this little information."
He shut his eyes and sighed, turning to Persephone first. "With your auras this entangled, it would be an operation of surgical precision to separate them. I'll need to make a few calls to confirm if our equipment is even suited for that, not to mention finding someone qualified in this domain. That type of operation…" He grit his teeth. "No, I can't do that personally."
Persephone recoiled a bit, twisting her lip at his odd reaction. And then flinched again as she suddenly felt Haedys nuzzling up against the crook of her neck. The Misdreavus was deeply apologetic, hiding her face in the same motion. Sighing, she reached up to awkwardly pat the ghost's head.
Cayenne moved on to Kona next. "As for replicating it, we'd need to first understand how it happened. We'd need to test for adverse effects. And we'd almost certainly need to find a way to produce the effect in a less… inextricable manner."
Kona raised a finger to his cheek and tapped emphatically a few times before flicking it upright. "Well, it seems the course of action is clear, then!"
Every other person in the room— Haedys included— stared blankly at him.
"Percy dear can stay in the lab guestrooms for a few days and we can test that connection to determine any adverse effects…" Persephone opened her mouth to protest, but he flung out a hand to interject. "And in the meanwhile, you can look into the information or expertise you need to get them disentangled."
Percy shut her mouth. Then thought for a moment and reopened it. "I'd prefer the plan where I'm not your labrat," she protested.
Kona didn't even flinch, just grinning widely at her. "And I'd prefer the plan where you aren't consuming the time of multiple highly-trained professionals and utilizing state-of-the-art technology for free." He gestured towards the aurascope. "We get the data, you get away from that oh-so-icky-Ghost, and Cayenne here gets to do those aura experiments he loves. Everyone wins!"
Cayenne practically hissed, staring daggers into the boy. But Kona stared back with the smug smile of someone who knew they were untouchable. Practically steaming, Cayenne offered Persephone an apologetic glance, which she quickly scorned. That creep was the last one she needed sympathy from.
"And what do these tests consist of?" Persephone demanded, watching the lunatic skeptically.
Kona waved a hand. "Oh, nothing too outrageous. We just need to determine the limits of your link, any adverse effects. How far apart you can get, if anything harmful can transfer from one of you to the other…" He clapped his hands together and looked expectantly at the other researchers in the room. "I'm sure we can cook up a proper schedule of tests, yes?"
He was met with weird looks, but slowly the researchers nodded along. Kona looked back to Percy and stuck out a hand for a shake. "Right, so. Are we in agreement then? I can get you the forms and everything, Licklicky-split. You'll have a place to stay, three meals a day, and your little 'problem' looked at."
Synchronously, Persephone and Haedys turned to glance at each other, equally as skeptical. Human and Pokémon alike, both knew better than to trust Kona here. But what option did they really have? Would anyone rever devote this kind of time and resources to their situation without getting something out of it in return?
Persephone sighed and turned away, scorning his hand.
"It's a deal."
"And here is where you'll be staying!" Kona said, flinging a door open and gesturing in grand aplomb.
The room failed to live up to his introduction. Four beige walls, fluorescent lights, and a white bed. A few small amenities were provided in the form of a desk with a lamp, and a single bookshelf lined with what Persephone could only assume was a generic collection of so-called "classics". And mercifully, a wall-mounted TV at the foot of the bed. The room barely had enough space for its contents and from what she could tell, peeking through the doorway on the far wall, the bathroom was the same way.
"Right. And I didn't just check in to an insane asylum?" Percy asked wryly, throwing her bag onto the bed as she did. The soullessness of the décor had her worrying about that, and she had been claiming to talk to ghosts…
Haedys had promptly made her way over to test the pillows. One bundle of fabric fell against the other, and she collapsed contented onto herself. The pillow had met her— admittedly low— softness standards.
"Not yet, Percy dear," Kona responded with a sickening sweetness. "But we'll see where things go."
Persephone grumbled, taking another glance around the place. She was about to collapse onto the bed when she noticed something hidden in the corner that made her wrinkle her nose.
"Is that a camera?" she asked accusingly.
The head of the device had been twisted upwards to point at the ceiling rather than the room, and a little indicator sat colorless at the base of where it mounted to the wall. Kona followed her gaze up to it and shrugged.
"Well it would seem so! It's off though, so don't worry your pretty-little-head." He danced his fingers upwards as if to reach out to her head, but thought better of touching it. "Poor building security shall not spectate the ceiling today."
Whatever reason they might have had to record people in the guest rooms before, he was right that it was twisted into uselessness now. Persephone stared at him skeptically for a long moment before relenting and falling onto the bed.
"Can't I at least stay somewhere with a window? If I'm not crazy now, I'm gonna be in here," Percy protested.
Kona rolled his eyes, the upper half of his face not matching the smile on the lower half. "We're not a hotel, dear. Overnight study participants are rare— and they almost never stay for more than a night. You're just so special."
Persephone opted to ignore him, flopping over onto her stomach instead and pulling Haedys' pillow closer to her head. She idly poked the side of the Misdreavus's face, kicking her feet. Haedys stared back at her with vague confusion, briefly trying to decide if she liked this attention or not.
"Settle in. Someone'll come for you soon," Kona said. Persephone wasn't facing him, yet she could somehow read the scowl from his voice alone. It seemed that ignoring him could actually break his veneer. She pocketed that information for later, as she heard him shuffle out and shove the door shut behind him.
Persephone rolled back onto her back and pouted, Haedys mimicking the expression instinctually.
"Well this sucks," she aptly nodded.
Haedys agreed. These lights were too bright, and too fake. When could they leave? This room had nowhere to explore, and few places to hide. Maybe beneath the bed?
She rolled over and tumbled to the floor, her fall halting inches above it. Before she could peek under the bed though, her gaze became transfixed by the fluttering of the bedsheets above the floor.
Persephone snorted, glancing down towards her Pokémon. "What, you jealous?"
Haedys let out a small squeak of protest, shaking herself from the brief hypnosis. False fabrics like that were just… strange to watch. They didn't look quite right. But now that her attention had been drawn to it, the effect had worn off, and she continued her venture beneath the bed. It was darker down there, easier on her eyes.
What happened now?
Persephone frowned, finally pulling herself upright. "They're gonna do… science stuff, and hopefully get us fixed soon. We just have to participate in whatever tests they want, until then."
Haedys knew that. She meant what happened next.
Percy blinked, tilting her head at the door in lieu of a line-of-sight on the Misdreavus. "Uh… I dunno. I'll finally start my trip properly, I guess? Finally get Elle to trade me Smeargle for real."
Remembering that, she twisted her lip and instinctually reached for her phone. Elle was heading towards Goldenrod too, wasn't she? Maybe that was a problem Percy could work on while she was here.
She'd pulled the phone from her bag and was scowling at the single bar of reception on her home screen when she felt that bubbling in her gut. The sadness and anxiousness wasn't hers, which meant it was Haedys'. The Misdreavus seemed to sense in turn that she'd noticed it, and squirmed deeper beneath the bed as if that would help her hide from her bonded trainer.
What happened next… for Haedys?
Persephone frowned, her shoulders tensing at the emotions behind the thought. She felt an unavoidable guilt— all her own— realizing she was the source of that deep nervousness radiating from the Misdreavus. Haedys truly believed that Percy might abandon her when this was all over.
The young woman sighed and shook her head. "Relax, Haedys. Misdreavus aren't really my style, but you grew on me, I guess. I'm not gonna kick you to the curb or something. You can stay with me."
Thinking back on it, Percy realized it was a bit odd how the ghost had grown on her. She'd always found Ghost-types pretty icky, and the gooey, screeching Misdreavus wasn't a particular exception to her tastes. But even beyond her own Haedys, thinking back it was a struggle to understand the distaste she'd held. Ectoplasm was weird, but at least it didn't shed everywhere like a Pokémon's long fur. And the mischievous demeanors, and eerie aesthetics? Eh. In retrospect, what harm did a bit of mischief and spookiness do?
Before Percy could dwell on it too much, a wave of foreign relief washed over her chest and pulled her out of her thoughts. A happy ghost squeak emitted from beneath the edges of the bedsheet, and Persephone felt a smile force its way onto her face. It was quite literally impossible for her not to be in a good mood at that. Her simple reassurance had been enough to cast back Haedys' fears like shadows.
Grand Ho-oh above, she shouldn't have been given this much power over anyone.
Persephone sensed something else before it happened, and quickly leaned aside. Just in time for Haedys to pop out from the opposite side of the bed and lunge at her with a sudden cry. Even having foreseen it, Percy couldn't help but flinch as the ghost ended inches from her face, big red eyes staring deep into her with a mischievous grin etched beneath them.
Percy smirked, and gently shoved Haedys away. "I thought I told you to do that to other people," she protested, though she was snickering as she did. Haedys read that as tacit approval and giggled alongside her.
The giggling faded, and they fell into a peaceful quiet. For a bit just lying there at peace felt good. Sure, everything sucked at the moment. But it was easier to relax now that it felt like the problem was being addressed.
The twist of a knob and the door abruptly opening eventually ruptured the peace. Smiles vanished as they both registered Cayenne standing there. He awkwardly adjusted his visor at the merriment vanishing in his presence.
"We've got an short-term plan in place," he informed them both curtly. "We want an initial interview with you to get an idea what symptoms you've observed. And while someone handles that, a survey of Haedys' abilities to see if she displays any unusual properties."
Persephone raised an eye at him with almost comical exaggeration. She plucked Haedys from the air and held her close, as if Cayenne were going to suddenly snatch her from across the room.
"Yeah. I'm not letting her out of my sight around you," Percy told him bluntly.
Cayenne shut his eyes and let out a small groan. He sighed and shook his head. "Fine. Change of plans, then. I'll conduct your interview while someone else surveys her abilities. Is that acceptable?"
Persephone growled at him but paused to gather Haedys' opinion before responding. She wasn't comfortable with leaving Percy. Especially not here… something about this place made her deeply uneased. It was like the bad places that mom would speak of. But, if it helped Percy get better sooner…
"Fine," Persephone grunted. "But it had better be somewhere with a window."
Cayenne obliged her request, and Persephone soon found herself in an office with a tall window overlooking the rest of the business park. It was relatively sterile— harboring mostly only the work essentials— but it somehow still felt more personable than the guest room. Pepper greeted them energetically as usual, crouched in an empty clay pot on the windowsill like it was a fort, soaking in the sunlight. Cayenne had claimed the desk and dragged over an extra rolling chair for Percy to sit in. She had fallen into a compulsive rhythm of rolling back and forth impatiently.
From there the older man launched into his barrage of questions, pertaining first to how she and Haedys had been bonded. Persephone recounted the tale in all of its absence of explanations, finding Cayenne's response inscrutable. He just continued to tap away at his keyboard, taking myriad notes on even those details which Percy deemed downright dull.
As he continued to ask more prying questions, only to be slapped down time and time again by Percy's complete lack of understanding for how the incident had occurred, she began to grow more and more bored with the ordeal. Her position in her chair twisted and turned at increasingly strange angles, and she began kicking the floor to roll herself freely back and forth across the room. She could sense Cayenne's growing irritation with her restlessness, but beyond the squint of his eyes, he never voiced it.
"Okay. Let's move on to symptoms," he finally said, his voice nearly betraying a sigh. "For these questions, just let me know if you've observed any of these effects, and we'll dive deeper afterwards. Understood?"
"Yes," Persephone groaned impatiently, having thrown herself backwards over the armrest and nearly tipping the chair from the off-kilter weight distribution. "Just ask whatever."
"Have you observed any dietary changes, such as desiring to eat more or less, or different things?"
"No." She leaned further back, the chair tilting further.
"Have you observed any newfound phobias or sensitivities, such as an aversion to certain Pokémon or general light sensitivity?"
"No." Further, the chair bending like a tower about to collapse.
"Have you observed any changes to your sleep quality or schedule?"
"N-" Persephone nearly blurted out another no by instinct, before remembering her difficult mornings and restless nights recently. Those had started right around…
Thud!
The chair finally gave, the wheels propelling it sideways to crash into a wall, while its occupant slammed into the ground on her side. Cayenne hardly even reacted at this point beyond casting a disapproving glare.
"Yes," Percy groaned, not bothering to get up from the ground. The ground was nice— it was impossible to fall further.
Cayenne's keyboard clacked briefly as he noted that and moved on.
"Altered emotional state, including general mood shift, rapid mood swings, newfound panic attacks, etcetera?" he continued, unable to see her beneath his desk.
"Sometimes," Persephone responded half-heartedly. She was still distracted dwelling on the fact that she was slowly turning nocturnal because of this and hadn't even noticed. A discomfort the next question didn't aid.
"Altered sentimentalities, such as unexpected shifts in opinions or preferences?"
It took Percy a minute to even parse that question and what it was asking. A shift in opinions? What opinions? Opinions of the situation? Opinions of Haedys? Of Misdreavus in general? Of course her opinions hadn't changed.
A small pit formed in her stomach. That wasn't really true though, was it? Just an hour earlier she'd noticed how quickly her aversion to the ghost's gross little quirks had vanished. She'd was laughing at the stupid little pranks— as if there was anything funny about just screeching at people!
Persephone swallowed and grabbed the feet of her collapsed chair, pulling herself upright with an air of unease.
"No," she asserted.
It was normal to grow accustomed to your Pokémon like that. It was normal for her opinions to change about all of the things associated with them.
Cayenne paused, watching her carefully. But apathy seemed to win out and he dropped the topic, moving on like there had been no strange reaction.
"Any conventional symptoms, such as physical fatigue, nausea, soreness, coughing, etcetera, etcetera, you know the drill?" he continued.
Persephone shook her head. "No," she muttered. She restored her chair upright and sat down, too perturbed to be restless this time.
"Okay." In spite of the negative-answer, Cayenne's face drew tight and he typed away at his computer for a long, quiet moment. He looked at Persephone with renewed interest before asking his next question, though she was too distracted to notice.
"What color ribbon is Haedys wearing?" he asked with the exact same intonation as the prior questions.
"Blue," Persephone answered distractedly.
Squinting curiously, he nodded and typed away. He turned and grabbed a stack of cards from the desk beside him and held one up to her. A picture of a plump, blue berry was printed on white. Even distracted, Percy recognized the Oran instantly and felt her mouth water a bit. She could practically taste the sugars.
"We're going to do a quick exercise," Cayenne explained. "Tell me what berry you see on each card."
"Oran," she answered. "…When are we getting lunch?"
"After this," he responded, drawing and flipping another card. "And this one?"
Percy squinted at the yellow berry, only growing hungrier as the fantasy of Sitrus danced across her tongue. "Sitrus. The heck does this have to do with anything?"
"Okay. Now that you get the idea, we're going to continue. But this time I'm not going to reveal the berry to you until after you guess what's on the other side," Cayenne explained, ignoring her question entirely and holding up the empty, white side of another card.
Persephone stared blankly at him, neglecting to answer for an uncomfortable moment.
What was this supposed to test, whether she was freaking psychic? She was tempted to just half-heartedly guess Oran again, but she knew that whatever tests they were running her through were probably relevant. She skimmed through all the berries she knew off the top of her head, names flitting by through her mind until her tongue lit up with the taste of one.
"Colbur," Percy guessed, practically salivating at the thought. But before she could entertain the fantasy for too long, her chest tightened and she swallowed nervously. Why did it suddenly seem so delectable a flavor? It had never been a favorite before.
It was just because she was hungry. Definitely just because she was hungry.
"And this one?" Cayenne asked, setting the card down without revealing the proper face.
Persephone repeated the mental exercise, until she could faintly feel a spicy tinge on her tongue at the thought of a certain berry.
"Occa," she answered hesitantly. She was fully expecting to go zero for three on this stupid exercise.
Stone-faced, Cayenne set it down and pulled another. Persephone practically gagged as she guessed, "Jacoba."
Cayenne set the final card down and leaned back, stealing a troubled glance towards Pepper in the windowsill. "Fascinating," he whispered as he flipped the three cards upright.
In order, they showed a Colbur, Occa, and Jacoba berry.
Persephone blinked. "…I'm… psychic?" she asked, dumbfounded.
Cayenne raised a hand to rub his temple in exasperation. He massaged himself for a moment before finding the patience to reply. "No, Persephone. But you were correct in your answer before— Haedys is currently wearing a blue ribbon. Which begs the question: why would you answer that, when she was wearing purple last you saw her?"
It took Percy another long moment to connect the dots. At which point she squirmed nervously in her chair, shoving it backwards until the wheels bumped up against the wall. "You were telling Haedys the right answers," she realized.
Cayenne shook his head. "Feeding them to her, actually. Which might have something to do with your sudden interest in lunch," he mused, glancing up at the clock.
Persephone fidgeted another moment, nearly knocking her chair over again in the process. Something about this was distressing, but she was still scrambling to figure out what. She already knew they were passing thoughts back and forth, right? So why was this-
"I assume you realize the implications of this," Cayenne interrupted her panicking. "You two appear to be exchanging information at all times, entirely subconsciously." He looked over his typed-up notes and hummed. "Perhaps more than information even, based on your prior answers."
Subconscious. That was it.
It was one thing to feel Haedys' pain, or to get weird and foreign emotions stirring in her stomach. To read her Pokémon's clearly delineated thoughts. But Persephone hadn't even noticed some of these things until Cayenne had drawn her attention to them. Things in her head that had changed around without the slightest trace that anything had moved.
It was small stuff now. Petty stuff. But if this continued, would she still be herself in a week, a month, a year? Or would only Haedys remain?
"I'll let the guys downstairs write up their own findings, but from what I'm hearing, the effect appears bi-directional. Hard to tell without having done a baseline test, but Haedys is apparently performing exceptionally well on basic intelligence tests for a practically-wild Pokémon," Cayenne continued, oblivious to her internal panic.
"How do I stop it?" Persephone asked, her voice a desperate whisper.
The silence in the room was palpable, only the faint hum of the air conditioner filling the space. Even Pepper was suddenly tense on the windowsill, breaking from her sunlight-induced euphoria to stare warily at the terrified-looking girl. Cayenne's shoulders had tensed and he glanced aside grimacing. It seemed he'd caught on to her fears.
"I don't know. Aura is heavily tied to thoughts and emotions, and yours are… heavily intertwined." He sighed. "I'm working as quickly as I can to get this all fixed."
Persephone was silent a moment, before swallowing and nodding. Soon. It would be undone soon, before anything serious could happen. Before she could change in any way from it. What was it Kona had said? Something, something, best equipment in the region or something?
Cayenne was watching her with a strange pity, and Percy was too lost in her own head to even snarl at him for it. The older man adjusted his visor and stared awkwardly at his notes. His gaze sharpened, becoming business-like again if only to break the tension.
"I'd like to expand some now on the symptoms you answered yes to before," he continued as if nothing had happened. "Get into the specifics. Are you ready?"
Percy nodded a bit too eagerly, finding herself leaping at the opportunity to get out of her own head.
Or was it even her own, anymore?