Prof. Labsafetyfail politely just tells me where to go without strongarming me there through a cutscene, so I’m fine heading over there instead of seeking to escape the railroad.

But, I’m passing that bubbly spot, so let’s fish up a pearl.

OR I GUESS CHINCHOU???

It lives in the depths beyond the reach of sunlight. It flashes lights on its antennae to communicate with others of its kind.

Alright, I then head toward event flag and Lillie is spikyboxing something about Nebby using splash but my cat steps on the screen so no exact transcript. Anyway oh noooooooo Lillie did they peer pressure you into learning how to battle?! Tell me who did it and I will battle them for you! And bring back their head.

Lillie: Heh… I was just acting like Bonnibel.

…I’m…I’m the one peerpressuring Lillie. I have to murder myself now.

You…you always seemed to end up getting hurt, Nebby. So I never really liked Pokemon Trainers or thought that I would want to be one myself.

AND THAT’S OKAY.

But when I see Bonnibel and Hau…

Lillie. Sweetie. Hau isn’t a real trainer.

It’s like they’ve thrown open some door that I always thought was closed… They stride straight through it into the future…

At this point Nebby, the asshole, floats over to where I’ve been standing and makes her realize I’ve been behind her the whole time. And probably with my fixed ditto grin, too.

Lillie: Oh! Um, oh, Bonnibel. Hello. I feel like it’s been a while since we last met.

It has! Also I met those guys you were running away from twice and they say they’re here to save pokemon and I feel like that’s a good thing but then last time people were all “what if not abuse pokemanz?????????” it was a plot about how they were a bunch of evil liars, so yeah.

Th-there’s a laboratory here that studies the dimensions, did you know?

Not any details!

And the professor is waiting to meet you!

Is this that female one who actually runs the place or are we talking the guy who doesn’t understand how labcoats work.

How…how were your trials? It must be quite trying to do three in a row.

It was no problem/It was really tough

I gotta admit, Lillie – It was really tough I started off trying to coddle my pokemon and now they’re fainting left and right as I charge onward. I mean, it’s faster than going all the way back to a pokemon center to just faint and throw down a pittance. But I’m feeling pretty bad about that. I think I’ll make another attempt at being halfway decent.

I would think so… But still! You made it through all three! I think that explains it. The reason you look so content and understood by Rattata there, I mean.

I…uh…think that may be because I only just got Rattata out of the box rather than putting him through them all.

She heads inside. Because she is polite, I am not cutscene dragged along and so I am the one that walks myself in. I head in, go up the elevator…and that asshole who can’t work a labcoat immediately traps me in a cutscene. Is it really that much to ask to just be allowed to talk to people? Now I’m stuck standing next to this idiot while he waves.

Kukui: Hey there, honey!

I am not affiliated with this man.

Someone talking to Lillie turns. Oh, hi!

Kukui introduces her as Professor Burnet and claims he is married to her. Lady, why have you not taught him how labcoats work.

Burnet: You’re Bonnibel, right? Lillie told me about you.

I will give this game some credit. I don’t know what happened to the people to blame for the previous plotlines where NPCs ignored the main character – beatings, firing, murder, whatever – and I don’t know if it was a manager crushing down the impudent writers or a writer’s revolt against incompetent management, but the omnipresent cutscenes at least don’t seem to be playing out like my avatar is invisible. So, whichever side hired the assassins, thank you. You did god’s work.

She said you were the reliable sort.

But speaking of speaking of me – am I? “Reliable” can mean a lot of things, I suppose. Bonnibel certainly hasn’t stuck around Lillie, not for lack of my trying, but when she was needed, she acted – so, you could say she’s someone you can rely on when something’s happening. “Brave” seems a bit more on-point, though.

Burnet: Three months ago… I found Lillie lying on a beach. Cosmog in her bag also unconscious.

(…I mean, I’ll take it over the previous writing, but yeesh proofreading. And the Nebby/Cosmog thing just keeps illustrating what I mean when I talk about how the capitalization creates a situation where people start using the species as name while still only meaning the species and it turns into a giant mess.)

Anyway, after dropping that bomb Burnet just shifts to noting Hau isn’t here today and Kukui explains he’s out on his own and what was the kid here every other day what other day the whole time I’ve been here this place has been blocked and Hau never left the island before dammit game why are you doing this.

But he’ll be the real deal someday… He could even become a hahuna, just like old Hala before him!

I got into this a bit in the comments – I do not like “blood will tell”. Hau has done jack shit to deserve this praise. The only way to interpret this is that he’s so inherently great that even not taking things seriously he’s just so much better than everybody else, and there are few things I hate more than that.

Fucking Hau then runs in with spikyboxed glee: You really think so?!

No, Hau. Fuck off.

Well, yeah, I really do.

Ignore the idiot who can’t work shirts, Hau. You’ve clearly found your profession in pokemon cuddling – I mean, your pichu evolved and as far as I can tell all you did was lose a lot, which generally lowers friendship.

Burnet: Good to see you again, Hau! It’s been a while since I last saw you.

So why were you confused he wasn’t there? And did you go visit him because he said he’d never been off his island.

Kukui: Anyhow, I brought Bonnibel here because I wanted you to tell her about some of the mysterious phenomena here in Alola.

So are we getting back to what’s up with Lillie?

Burnet: I’d be happy to! The mysteries of Alola, huh? Then you’ve got to mean…

LILLIE TELL ME WHAT’S UP WITH HER

the Ultra Wormhole!

Uh. No. Not unless it’s relevant to Lillie. Or Zinnia just hopped through it, I guess I’d care then too.

It’s extremely rare, but sometimes a hole opens in the sky over Alola.

Okay. So I think that objectively this is pretty cool. Maybe I’m just tired from the asteroid plotline of the last game, which involved way too much of people not making sense. Or that it led to a whole lot of legendaries just popping out of holes instead of really seeming like they were part of a storyline.

It appears that this rift leads to a different and unknown dimension.

Also speaking of, Pokemon’s actually had far more interesting references to that than the two Hoenns plotline. From the beginning, it was referenced with ghost pokemon, although it was unclear if that was just people’s speculation or even an outright debunked myth. Porygon Z, while usually talked about in fandom as being what happens when a virus wrecks your virtual pokemon, is stated to have been an attempt at making something from our world that could cross over into another dimension. So hey, let’s do this.

Burnet: The reason that people think there may be a mysterious dimension is because of the legends of fearsome Pokemon appearing from the Ultra Wormhole.

That…doesn’t sound very legitimate.

It’s very weak as proof, but I can’t ignore it.

! Well, as long as we’re saying that this is a longshot scientific investigation and not “a guy said a guy saw a pokemon and it was like whoa and that is definitely proof”, I’m totally find with it.

There is also plenty of evidence already in the Pokedex for the existence of different dimensions, right?

I really hope you don’t mean the stuff I just referenced, given there’s also a load of evidence that the pokedex should not be taken as seriously as evidence for anything, ever.

Hau: Fearsome Pokemon…?

Thank you Hau! Yes, let’s keep our focus on what matters: dangerous monsters that could kill us all, and that also I may be able to use to kill everyone I don’t like.

Burnet: Even normal wild Pokemon sometimes attack people, right?

Look I don’t know how you do it in Alola but literally every other place to ever exist, that is all wild pokemon do, nonstop. Children are kept trapped in their villages by patches of grass cultivated across the only exit.

But the Pokemon that appeared from the Ultra Wormhole went way beyond that.

Are we talking like mass murder or just, again, the normal attack everyone at all times thing every other region has.

They were called Ultra Beasts. And they were feared. If the stories are to be believed, the guardian deities of the islands fought desperately against them. But like I said, it’s all legends and folktales. It’s hard to know how much is true.

Jesus christ lady your gods are objective fact and I just met one, surely you can do better than “who knows”.

But I would be very happy if I could somehow unravel the mysteries of the Ultra Wormhole by studying the dimensional disturbances!

Or like…we could just find N, and ask him to ask one of the guardian deities, who really do not seem that hard to meet, what happened, and then we’d know.

Wait, we don’t even need to do that! We’ve got a talking pokemon RIGHT HERE. We take Rotom to any of them, Rotom translates for us.

She just ignores me and keeps talking.

We’ve recorded several known relationships between Pokemon and different dimensions in books. You can find them on the bookshelf in the lab.

Alright! Free to actually look around. Let’s obey the NPC and check the books.

Bronzong:
It brought rains by opening portals to another world. It was revered as a bringer of plentiful harvests.

Huh, did not know that.

Giratina:
This Pokemon is said to live in a world on the reverse side of ours, where common knowledge is distorted and strange.

Did know that.

Palkia:
Its total control over the boundaries of space enable it to transport itself to faraway places or even other dimensions.

Huh. Apparently I only remembered Diamond’s entry, which is just about space distorting. Taken as a whole, the entries are actually quite contradictory – Diamond says its existence distorts space while Platinum claims it’s constantly making space more stable, which is then repeated for all of the fifth gen. Meanwhile, Pearl claims It is said to live in a gap in the spatial dimension parallel to ours. It appears in mythology. and HGSS is the entry we’re seeing here.

…and that’s apparently it! Really?

There’s another bookcase, but there’s only one readable thing on it and it’s about the Interdream Zone that exists between reality and dreams which I believe is that dream mechanic I never actually did anything with and so means nothing to me.

Alright, let’s chat with Lillie.

Lillie: You want to know what happened three months ago?

YES.

Well, I’d wanted to learn more about Nebby… I mean, about Cosmog. So I decided to come speak with Professor Burnet. But I got lost along the way…and ended up wandering about until I collapsed on the shore…

Okay. That wasn’t much of an explanation, and now I’m unclear why the professor even mentioned it out of the blue before barreling on to the dimension thing.

We then change scene to look at the professor talking to some assistant.

She listened to my story, staying up all night to hear it. And then she even got her husband, Professor Kukui, to lend me his loft to stay in… And she told him to help me investigate Nebby’s origins, too. Professor Burnet has been so kind, and she’s still helping me try to find a way to get Nebby back to its own home…

I like that her main contribution was to order other people to deal with it and Lillie’s totally *_* over that.

She’s been like…like a real mother to me.

OMINOUS.

Well, on that note I think it’s time to pass out for the night.