Chương 33: 33-Joy

Amelia stifles a giggle as she watches her partner look down at her bulk, then up to the door of the waiting tram car as she seems confused by what she's seeing. Because she wont fit. Perhaps a few days ago she would have, but her adipose rarefaction has already swelled her out almost a foot horizontally, matched only by her vertical growth keeping her even vaguely egg shaped.

Even still, the 'mon looks like an overstuffed plush toy, her arms slightly too short, –the joint creating a divot in the flesh– and her front dragging on the ground at random times.

It's clear Chansey had tried to ignore it, which was easy in the forest where there was nothing to compare herself to, but now that they're in a city the realities of her size came up in less than five minutes after entering its limits The trainer does let out a snort as Chansey wraps a band of psychic energy around herself at her thickest point and tries to shove in her gut, but the pillow-like fluff just deforms around her grip.

She's growing fast, there's no way to know how large Chansey will get, but Amelia is assuming she'll be well above average, maybe even as tall as a full grown blissey, but even at those extremes she's growing quickly. If it begins to taper off at the normal rate she'll be full grown in just over a month instead of six. The trainer steps forward, placing an arm on her partner's puffy back.

"It's not that far. We can walk if you'd like?" She offers, but Chansey shakes her head with a sigh.

"Chan." She says, unbuckling her backpack with yet more telekinesis and stowing the straps.

"Chansey chan chan. Ansey." Amelia blinks, hesitantly reaching for her pokeball.

"... You sure? I thought you didn't like it in there?" She asks.

"Chan." Chansey corrects with a roll of her glowing eyes.

"Chan chan an chans."

"Alright, if you say so." She says, fiddling with the ball for a second to activate the recall function.

"So I'll just carry your– oh." She's cut off as the bag floats over to Amelia and her right hand is quickly closed around the top handle. Immediately after, Chansey taps her own flipper against the aperture of the ball and disappears in a flash of red. The trainer glances down at the ball as the red glow fades. Taillow had also retreated into his ball, the first sight of power lines crisscrossing above them was enough to send him hiding away again. As well as the exhaustion of their first day training.

So Amelia is alone for the first time since the journey started. There's a pause at the thought before she sees the tram driver's patient gaze as he waits for her. So she quickly clips her ball into her bandoleer, grunts as she struggles to lift Chansey's bag, and shimmies through the admittedly quite narrow door of the tram and into its crowded interior, followed by the familiar call of 'welcome aboard Miss Joy' from the driver as she does.

As she tries to move herself and her bags and find a place to stand without bothering anyone, the trainer wishes all the more she had Chansey's psychic abilities. She pauses to thank someone as they move out of the way for her. Never has she seen a member of the chansey line use psychic energy so ubiquitously, even some psychic 'mon use less telekinesis for day to day problems.

It's not hard to understand why, unless the 'mon learns the move naturally, any psychic move uses a bunch of esoteric pseudo-math to do even the simplest things. And Amelia is painfully aware of how difficult it is. When she was younger, she'd been determined to be the first Joy to gain psychic mastery, ignoring –of course– the fact that in all of her family's history there have been zero records of a Joy gaining even the smallest shred of psychic talent. She'd checked.

There might be a bit of wiggle room with some of her more distant cousins, but Amelia had to do a 'family tree' assignment for school a few years back, so she knows she can trace her matriarchal lineage directly to the beginning of her family's history. Which, while cool, makes it near impossible for her to have the DNA of anything more than a boring old Joy.

"Excuse me?" A voice calls from her left, bringing Amelia out of her musings to see a middle aged man rising from his seat.

"Would you like a seat?" She half stutters a refusal, but knows just by looking at him that he'll insist. Also, she does want the seat. So instead she smiles.

"Oh! Thank you sir." She chirps, carefully maneuvering herself and her luggage around the kind man and sitting down while he quickly grabs a pole to avoid falling over as the tram goes around a corner.

"It's no trouble Miss Joy." He responds after a small wobble. Settling in, Amelia struggles to stack her two bags before looking out the window across from her to watch the scenery clatter past. She's happy to be a nurse, but that doesn't mean she has to be a Joy to do it. Plenty of people outside the family go to school to become nurses. Which Great Grandma Mimi still grumbles about sometimes, but she's just old fashioned. One concession to Mimi's point, as Amelia does have to admit the…

cosplay some of them do can be a bit creepy, even if she understands the thought process. But, outside of her own clan, the world has a bunch of cool families. From psychics who've cultivated and mastered their skills over hundreds of years, to dark type families that can trace their heritage back to ancient ninjas and assassins! But Amelia? Other than being mildly easier to heal with healing moves, Joy's don't have anything special.

She sighs, leaning back as she looks out the windows and tracks the stops so she doesn't miss hers. Would it be too much to ask for her family to have something cool? —-- –_– —-- Tanya pushes back the pressure telling her to rest with the stumbling awkwardness of trying to use experience in one skill to imitate another. Leveraging her experience in moderating sleep to this similar task, to… unreliable results.

It took some doing, but she'd gotten used to the strange 'aware yet not aware' contradiction that feels uncomfortably close to the gap immediately after death, carefully making note of all the differences in the experience. For one, it's not cold.

She's also significantly more aware of her surroundings, though she'd been more internally focused trying not to fall deeper into that strange stasis for the majority of the trip, only extending awareness to her surroundings as things stabilized and the ball began to rock and move as Amelia stands from her seat. Sensing the outside world is likewise… strange, as the words to describe how she senses it escape her.

She does not see, yet she's aware of what things are and where they are in relation to her, same with vestibular proprioception, despite lacking an inner ear she's perfectly capable of determining which way is down and shifts in acceleration vectors. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Tanya watches through the slightly confusing haze as Amelia drags their bags off the tram, looks up at a street sign, then rounds a corner and is suddenly standing right in front of the double doors of a relatively large pokecenter, a large pokeball sign above the entrance.

Seeing they've arrived at their destination and there won't be any abnormally small pieces of public infrastructure, Tanya pulls herself fully from her stupor and tries to figure out how to extract herself from her ball like she's seen several 'mon do even in her limited exposure to the wider world.

Remembering the last time she was in a ball and not wanting to break her government ID, she's perhaps more cautious than she needs to be, incrementally adding pressure as Amelia walks through the sliding glass doors and into the foyer. Eventually something clicks within the ball and Tanya feels the singularly strange feeling of… flowing from an incredibly small space, her body coming back to identifiable sensation as it takes form and shape from the amorphous mass of energy inside the ball.

Blinking her eyes several times to shake it off, the 'mon looks around to get her bearings from a more familiar perspective and watches the nurse manning the front desk turn around with a tray of pokeballs freshly removed from the pokecare machine and notice them across the room.

"Oh– Amelia!" She shouts over the shoulder of the customer as she bangs a tray of balls on the counter and hastily hands them back over to her customer before abandoning her post, rushing around the counter toward them.

"It's so good to see you!" Amelia gives a slightly awkward smile as she looks between the nurse and the slightly confused customer before stepping forward and opening her arms for a hug.

"Hi Aunt Vee, good to see you too." She says, final words gaining a slight strain as her aunt accepts the hug with vigor.

"You've gotten taller!" The older Joy laughs, before pulling away with a wide smile.

"Just give me a sec, I've got some patients." Amelia nods as 'Aunt Vee' spins around and instantly her demeanor transforms. Face rapidly transitioning to pleasant neutrality and hands clasping at her waist, she gives a shallow bow of the head to the baffled looking man.

"My apologies for the interruption sir, thank you for waiting. Your Pokémon are fully healed, we hope to see you again." She says with a calm smile, waving goodbye in a well practiced motion.

"Oh, er." The man stammers, then returns the wave as he begins to quickly walk for the door.

"... You too?" Tanya notices that Amelia has taken the same posture as her aunt, and neither says anything until the instant after the sliding glass doors close behind the customer, then the full fledged nurse drops the act. Rounding on her niece, she hurriedly beckons for her to follow as she begins speedwalking toward a door marked 'employees only.'

"Come on. Come on!" She says, crossing the rather large foyer in quick time and pulling open the door.

"Before anyone else comes in! Chansey!" She calls through the door as the duo follow.

"Could you take the front? Amelia's here!"

"They're here?" A distant voice echoes back, followed by steady, unhurried footfalls as Tanya and her partner are waved through the door, revealing an average sized chansey exiting an unmarked door who looks at them, smiles, then gently waves.

"Well, hello there you two." Tanya waves back, then presses herself into the wall a bit to allow the other chansey to pass into the main room. Walking down the corridor and entering 'Aunt Vee's' office, Tanya finally sees a name plate revealing her real name to be Venessa, momentarily distracting her from the nurse's constant stream of chatter.

In the three minutes she's known the woman, she's jumped between no less than fifteen topics, easily fluttering between confirming the 25 hours they've scheduled for their residency at this center, talking about Amelia's mother, talking about the job, then back to some story or another about something a six year old Amelia did. On. And on.

Tanya leans on her hard won skill in appearing engaged and attentive even as she's sorting though the river of nonsense for pertinent details and tossing the rest, which allows her to confirm that nothing of value was said in the several hundred words spoken. Until finally she sits down at her desk, pulls out two sheets of paper, and hands one to each of them. Scanning it over, Tanya sees it's a log sheet to track her hours and a standard academic honesty and liability agreement.

"Here ya go! Just sign at the bottom."" The nurse says, offering two pens with her other hand.

"We'll have more than enough time to catch up and both of you after you've had the time to clean up, you look like you were lost in the forest for a week." Amelia looks up from her page indignantly.

"I did not get lo–" She starts, but stops herself with a squinting glare at her aunt's wide smile, then takes the pen and signs her name. Doing the same, Tanya recaps the pen, places her log sheet on the desk, then has a thought and looks up to her partner.

"Would you mind asking her if she knows of any hotels nearby?" She asks, then glances down at her bulk.

"... something in walking distance?" Amelia blinks, then recaps her own pen.

"Good idea." She nods before looking back to her aunt.

"Hey Aunt Vee? You know about any hotels–" The nurse interrupts with a scoff, as if incensed by the very idea as she rummages around in the drawers of her desk.

"Amelia, hon, we're family." She laughs.

"I'm not letting my niece waste her money on some sad hotel somewhere. I've got a spare bedroom that's just gathering dust, you can sleep there." She makes a triumphant hum as she pulls out a ring of keys and hands it over before pulling out her wallet and pulling out some money.

"Employee bathroom with a shower is the third door on the left, and there's this wonderful restaurant around the corner I eat lunch at every day, get yourself cleaned up, eat something, then come back in an hour and a half so I can finish up your school stuff and show you around." Amelia pauses, taking a second to process the abrupt shift in plans as money is shoved into her hands.

"Auntie, I have money–""Bap-bap-bap!" Venessa cuts her off again.

"I don't want to hear it! I can practically see your cheekbones despite the dirt. Shoo!" The two are then hurriedly shooed out of her office, leaving Amelia in the hall seeming slightly off balance. She looks down at her partner.

"Sorry, I told you Aunt Vee was…" She pauses, then changes the subject.

"So, what do you think?" Tanya tilts her head slightly, then shrugs and heads toward the showers.

"It lightens our logistical load, it was given as a gift, and it would be rude to refuse the hospitality." She says simply. There's a pause, then Amelia slowly starts to follow.

"Well…" She muses.

"I guess that's one problem solved..."