Hailey didn't have a lot of experiences to compare things to, that was half the point of this hair brained adventure, actually go out and see something even if it was what others would consider mundane. A simple, though vast, flower field was like an explosion of sensation compared to 27 years of off white hospital rooms, only interrupted by someone wheeling her into a carefully manicured courtyard for a short while. The colours, the smells, fuck anyone who called it simple, basic. To her, it was magical.
But even magic can wear thin if you keep looking, so the question was, what now?
It wouldn't be hard - even for her - to wheel back into Floroma, hit the PokéCenter or just bother some passerby for a phone or dex or whatever, and call the hospital. They'd send someone to bundle her up and cart her back. Hell, maybe Carita herself would show up to grab her. She could get her into a yelling match in public, really break the icy facade, might be worth a laugh. There was some temptation to it, but not much. After this stunt they might just attach one of those GPS bands to her, have an alarm set to go off if she ever got further than a block away. Or maybe they'd just shame her, cluck their tongues, then it would all go back to normal. Barely alive, barely noticed.
She'd nearly… that night had gotten a lot colder, damper, than she'd expected. It was still unclear how she'd gotten so dry again, must have been a move from Pomona, but that wasn't exactly her expertise. What to even do? There had been such high odds that she'd have gotten stopped or stuck before even getting here, she never planned for what came next. It was… too hard.
Sure, she'd looked at other places before deciding on the Meadows, but to hit any of them she'd have to go back through Jubilife, and could she even handle the Ravaged Path twice, let alone whatever else might be past it? There was also the matter of supplies. Water was water, but chips, candy bars, and pretzels could only keep you going for so long, and it wasn't like she had the money to get more.
No money, no ID, no companions, no help. Even if she didn't starve to death out here, how much more could she really push her luck? Years of saving it up and she had to have exhausted it just to barely survive getting to the next town over. One little call and she'd be back. Maybe for 50 years, more likely for five or less. If being medical mystery didn't do the job it had threatened to hundreds of times already then she'd probably just waste away till she was the same colour as the paint.
Hailey rubbed her face, just as bony and unpleasant as always. Making decisions, another thing she didn’t have a lot of experience in. Well, might as well count up what was left before committing. Maybe there was a days worth of food or so left to play with.
The rather pathetic remains of her vending machine raiding turned out to not be that interesting. Two 'fun sized' bags of mostly crushed chips, a half eaten Moo-Moo Milk Chocolate Bar, about one and a third bottles of lukewarm, plastic tinged water.
They all looked pretty pathetic next to a actual wicker basket, apparently stuffed with food.
She had to blink a few times, but it was still there, sitting next to her chair. When had it appeared there? It even had a red checkered cloth covering the top, like something out of a cartoon. Had Pomona left it? She must have, who else had been within 100 meters of her in the last 12 hours? Had she just forgotten it though? She did seem a bit 'airy'.
So that was one inexplicable thing showing up, but it wasn't all, something else was missing.
Chips, water old wrappers, everything was there except the most important. The camera. Confusion had risen when she dug through the bags, growing to panic as she patted herself down in case it had slid into her clothes, followed by frantically turning the chair back and forth to try and see where on the ground it had fallen. But it hadn’t. That stupid yellow hunk of plastic was gone, the sole proof she had ever achieved anything in her entire life was gone.
And the basket was here.
The correlation was obvious, even to someone who'd never set foot in a school room. She'd had the camera, Pomona appeared, Pomona left, she no longer had the camera, and a strange basket had been left beside her.
Hailey tried to control her breathing, another attack right now would probably be the end of her. Maybe the purple spectre hadn't forgotten her basket, maybe she left it for… some reason, and she'd tucked the camera inside. For safe keeping.
It was surprisingly hard to lean over the chairs side and heft it up, it turned out to be a weighty little thing. She must have looked positively whimsical sitting there, on a flower strew hill, under a tree, with such a fairytale ready basket laying on her lap. If only someone had taken a picture.
Despite all the build up, the contents were not miraculous. It wasn't stuffed with gold coins or precious evolution stones or anything like that. Sandwich, sandwich, fruit wrapped in paper, sliced vegetables placed in baggies, sandwich, and no camera. Her head swung back, hanging over the rear of the chair. She wanted to scream, throw the basket off the hill, but knew she'd barely shift it off.
Hailey had always known Pokémon didn't like her, even if no one could tell her why. The way they refused to meet her gaze, answer when she talked to them, acted like she didn't exist. It had taken her a while to realize it wasn't just rudeness, there was something truly unnatural at the core of it all. There was something about her, deep inside, that was purely repugnant, to the degree they'd rather choose to just not see her than acknowledge it.
For years, Carita was the only exception, but she didn't give her much credit. She was to stubborn, to proud, to let… whatever this was, get in the way of her duty, and that was all that mattered to the doctor, duty.
Thảo had been an interesting experience, but it didn't mean anything. It took her partner brow beating her multiple times before she noticed, and she'd surely already forgotten the girl she spent hours pushing in the wheelchair.
Then there was Pomona. She'd spent even less time with her, well, conscious time at least, but that strange Mon had approached her on her own. No coercion, no partner to point her out. Then she'd left as suddenly as she came, somehow pilfering the most important object Hailey owned while ‘forgetting’ her picnic supplies. It didn't make any sense. It made her… must be angry?
You couldn't just sit by when someone took something from you.
There was still work to do before she went back.
Food she might now have, but you needed more than that under the hot, hot sun. The question was, where to get some water? Look for a public fountain? Those could tricky to use when you couldn't stand. She could always roll into a Center and ask someone to fill her empty bottles, but the problem of noticability remained. There was always finding a stream, but that had the same issues as a fountain, and could you count on the fact that it would be clean? Hailey wasn't exactly a Ranger after all.
The answer presented itself as she rolled back into Floroma, at one of those cozy little pastel painted houses with their yard full of flowers. Out front of a lilac domicile was a woman sanding in pajamas and hair curlers, one hand on a cup of coffee, the other on a hose. Now she just needed to not sound like a crazy person.
"Hi there!" There was nothing wrong with that, but her brain insisted on analyzing every dip in tone, stupid brain. "Ah, nice… morning? Good morning, yes."
The woman startled, despite the rattling of the hospital chair on pavement, Pokémon weren't the only ones she was good at sneaking up on. "Yes, I suppose it's nice? Sorry, do I know you? I don't have my glasses on."
"Oh, no, just a traveller." Well, if she couldn't get a good look at her then no reason to give her a police sketch. Now, how to present this simple and normal request. "I was just… wondering, if, maybe, I could use your hose. S-see, I'm out of water but I need to chase this… well, someone, a Pokémon, grabbed something important to me, so I… don't have time to go get some new bottles, yeah." Perhaps if she'd gotten more visitors over the years then she'd be able to lie without stuttering.
A bark of laughter was not the response she expected to get. "Oh they grabbed something did they? My, they must really like you, usually wilds don't play so hard to get. Sure, come over here, I'll fill you up."
The transition from road to garden path wasn't the smoothest, but Hailey managed. With the hose was turned down to just a dribble she started filling.
"So, who's the culprit? A bug type, Wurple maybe? They're shy but just as mischievous as the rest of their kin. Plus, they love the flowers."
"I… don't think so? She didn't seem… buggy." Had she even seen a Wurmple before? Not a lot of bugs in the medical business.
"Didn't you Dex em?" She was looking at her again, she just knew it, and from much closer now.
"Mine’s, ah, in the shop. I… ah, rolled over it by accident."
"Ooof, rough luck. Well, you got a look at her right? What did she look like?"
"Purple, mostly, from what I remember. Lots of purple, dark eyes, floating… oh, she also had this weird yellow mark right smack in the middle of her face."
"Purple and yellow you say? Well, ain't that interesting. Ain't that just interesting."
The bottles were filled up, but the woman was still standing next to her, just watering the gravel now, a look of deep thought on her face.
"Why interesting? Should I be worried?" That made her jump with a little start.
"Huh? Oh, no no, probably not. Y'see, Floroma, well, we're pretty famous for our flowers. I know, obvious right. And where there's flowers there's Grass types, Bug types, Water types, even some Ground types. It's what people expect, but it's not all we've got and if I had to guess, your little thief was probably one of our little local secrets. Damn strange for one to turn thief though, damn strange. Tell me, have you ever heard of a Drifloon?"
It was shaping up to be another beautiful day in Floroma as Hailey wheeled her way toward Route 205, which made her curse the hospital even more. If she was going to be stuck in one place her entire life, why couldn't it be nicer than downtown Jubilife? Speaking of the city though, there was no direct route from Floroma to Eterna, at least if you were in a hurry. You had to take a train from Floroma back to Jubilife, then catch a connection, minimization to avoid damaging natural habitats probably.
Despite that, 205 was far busier than 204 had been. Drawn by the flower fields, tourists abandoned their busses to wander the path by the river, there was even a small beach up against the blue water. Not much sand, but the water was clear and deep enough you could dive in, or presumably you could. Hailey couldn't swim but if it wasn't then all those people jumping were getting one way tickets to a skull fracture.
It was a lively spot, even a cursory glance showed couples and families sitting by the bank, eating packed lunches, cuddling under big umbrellas, and any time someone got a bit too rambunctious in the Ponyta-play or a bit to handsy for all ages hours, the shrill call of a whistle would sound out to get people back in line. The lifeguard was a Floatzel, or maybe a Buizil, one of the two, they weren't the easiest to tell apart. Probably pretty good at their job if they were able to keep an eye on things while continuously chatting up a small gaggle of be-suited gals that hung around her tower chair. As a water type, the two piece bikini she was wearing probably only made her slower in the water. Clearly it was only there for ‘other’ purposes.
Why was she even thinking about that? It didn't matter, what did was that she knew what kind of Pokémon that was, but she'd never heard of a Drifloon before.
That wasn't to unusual, especially for her. There were… well, tons of the buggers around, you couldn't be expected to keep track of all of them could you? That’s why they invented Dex’s. But the way the lady had spoken about this kind, well it implied they weren't well known in general. According to that brief conversation, they drifted across the land, avoiding cities, yet something seemed to draw them to Floroma. There were apparently innumerable stories and rumours about some one or another spotting them floating amongst the flowers, or hovering near the great wind turbines at sunset, only to inevitably vanish as the storyteller drew near. Certainly not the result of the person having a drink or three first, so they always claimed.
More salacious were the stories of the girls that did get close to them, who talked to them. To a one they were bound up tight in a ethereal embrace and carried away, never to be seen again. Or so the stories said, always from a friend of a friend though.
Drifloon.
And now one of them had stolen her camera.
Hmmm.