Luz kept up her smile, but something tugged at it just a little.
All these folks with Hero's Auras, practically none of them willing to own it, damn near all of them shady or broken or full of painful secrets. Why was that, anyway? And how much more ironic could you get than Luz, eager to be a hero, with no such aura herself? No, once the Blacklight Crisis was over, she'd be reduced to showy battles in the Colosseum, relating stories of her time in Team Spectrum, and waiting for something to go badly wrong enough to be interesting.
She hadn't asked anyone yet if it would be possible to send her away from Cibus to somewhere that needed her, after all this.
They might say no.
"I look forward t'seein' plenty more boldness from ya, Kate," she said, with a bright chuckle. "I believe ya when ya claim it. As fer the badge..."
Luz passed it to Kate with a gentle under-arm toss. Let's see what her reflexes were like four drinks in.
"Everyone gets one. We used to communicate via Diyem's telepathy, but he's been cut off since our enemy started gettin' serious. My host is mighty keen to find out what you know about yer last moments with Diyem. We reckon he might've been attacked just as he was recruitin' ya. Anythin' y'can tell us would help us put the pieces together."
Kate snatched the badge out of the air, fumbling it for a second before clasping it tight with both sets of claws as she raised it to her eye. The Dark-Type played around with the badge before it suddenly snapped open and a screen of light filled a void opened up by the top and bottom halves. The blank air suddenly lit up with images of Pokémon's heads and runes in neat boxes to their left and right, and even though her own literacy had always been a bit shaky, Kate could see as clear as day that they were
Varhydian runes.
The Sneasel stared blankly and reflexively opened her mouth to ask how such a thing could be possible, only to think back to the earlier comment about the Spinda barkeep having orders translated. Was something similar afoot here too? If 'glühwein' had struck Luz as strange, it would be hard to believe that her world somehow used the exact same writing system down to each rune happening to represent the exact same words and ideas...
"They certainly don't make badges like
this at home..." she murmured. "But as for Diyem, I wish there was more that I could say, but admittedly things are a bit hazy. I don't know how long it's been since I talked with that Charizard, but after he pulled me under his wings, I wound up floating in some sort of haze surrounded by some sort of barrier. I couldn't tell up from down when I was that place, it was like falling without feeling yourself being pulled down. The entire time, there were these weird things- creatures without features floating around in it that were watching me, or maybe guarding me somehow. So it's admittedly hard to say how much of that was real and how much of it was all in my mind."
The Sneasel paused and frowned a moment, before sipping at the remains of her drink.
"... I don't know if it's the drinks getting to me or not, but there actually
are a couple things I remember," she said. "I know that right when the tremor hit, right before he pulled me under, he looked spooked. And that right before I staggered out of that haze and came to in this town, I was suddenly flung from the barrier and saw this room full of strange gray and silver contraptions..."
The Dark-Type glanced back at the badge's display, before she shook her head and carried on.
"Or at least I think it was a room. Again, I realize that it all sounds ridiculous and, it could've just all been a bad trip," Kate insisted. "Since after
that, the last I remember before getting up was pinwheeling through the air and seeing the ocean go by below me. Not sure just what room I could've seen if that really all happened."
