"Sorry, sorry! I wasn't ignoring you — I was on a mission in the mountains all day, and there was no signal out there."
"In the mountains all day? You're only just getting back to the city now?"
Nova had been practising this particular skill for years. He kept his voice perfectly steady.
"Of course! You think catching poachers is that easy? They move across the whole mountain range — it takes everything you've got."
The silver-haired girl on the other end of the call was clearly not buying it.
"Really. You, with all the energy of a Slaking, trekking across mountains on foot? If you actually had to go that far, you'd have ridden Arno the whole way and barely broken a sweat."
"Don't talk about me like that—"
"Anyway. Can you come back this month?"
"What's wrong? Do you miss me?"
"Yes, I miss you. So can you come back?"
She said it plainly, without any of the deflection Nova had been prepared for. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He had walked right into that one.
"...I was just kidding." Her voice lost a little of its edge. "I just don't want to go alone this year. For the anniversary. It's too quiet on your own."
Ah.
Nova looked at her face on the screen. Her eyes weren't quite meeting the camera.
She always carried herself that way — composed, steady, the kind of person who could walk into a bad situation without flinching and come back out as though nothing had happened. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that the girl named Aresdra Cortana had only just turned fifteen last month. She was still a kid. She just rarely let it show.
"Of course I'll come back," Nova said. "I've wrapped up most of what I needed to do here in Goldenlight City. I'll get an airship ticket first thing tomorrow."
"Do you have enough money? I can send you two hundred Alliance Coins if you need it."
"...Did you save that from skipping breakfast again?" Nova frowned. "I'm not taking it. I'd rather figure out the ticket myself than spend the whole time knowing you're going hungry."
"I'm hungry right now, actually. Buy me something."
"It's eleven thirty-seven at night. Your dormitory is locked down. No delivery is getting through those gates. What are you planning to eat — the night breeze?"
"You could at least pretend to feel sorry for me. Let me have this one."
"Come up with something more convincing next time. That had no effort in it."
"Tch. I'm not arguing with you. I have class tomorrow — I'm going to wash up. Goodnight."
"Goodnight. I'll see you the day after tomorrow, barring any—"
"Stop." Her voice went firm at once. "Before you board an airship, you do not say that word. Not even close to it."
"Alright, alright. I'll see you the day after tomorrow, full stop."
"Good. Goodnight."
The call ended.
Nova sat on the bench for a moment, the screen going dark in his hand. A quiet melancholy settled over him — not quite sadness, but the particular feeling that came from seeing someone's face on a screen and knowing it wasn't quite the same as being there.
He supposed it really was, in a sense, just seeing an image. Not the person herself.
Nova had arrived in this world roughly ten years ago. He used the word roughly because his memories of that early period were unreliable at best.
The transmigration had not been kind to him. Whether it was the process itself, or the result of compressing over thirty years of life experience into a six-year-old body, the Nova who had first appeared in this world had been, in plain terms, barely functional. He hadn't been able to hold a conversation. He had wandered, confused and directionless, until someone found him and brought him in.
This world, at least, had a welfare system that handled situations like his. When a clearly troubled child with no apparent family turned up on the street, someone would eventually step in. After several rounds of unsuccessful inquiries — no missing child reports, no family, no record anywhere — the local officer had placed the boy at the Exeggutor Orphanage.
The director was a decent man, and the caregivers did their genuine best. But a children's home was still a children's home, and the adults could only stretch their attention so far. A child who couldn't keep up with the others, who sat quietly in corners and stared at nothing — that kind of child tended to attract a certain kind of notice from the other kids.
Because no one knew his name, they called him Silly. It was not a kind nickname.
The unspoken rule was simple: if Silly ended up with a bruise or two, he wouldn't say anything — and even if he tried, it would go nowhere. But if something happened to one of the others, there would be questions.
It went on that way for two years.
When Silly was eight years old, a new girl arrived. Her name was Aresdra Cortana. She was of mixed heritage: her father had been a celebrated mountaineer from the Asgardian Alliance, her mother a native of the Norlandia Alliance with the same restless love for high peaks and difficult routes. When Aresdra was seven, her parents had been killed in a mountain accident. With no family to take her in, she had been placed in the nearest orphanage.
She looked different from the other children, which was reason enough for some of them to make her unwelcome from the start.
But even so, whenever she saw someone going after Silly, she stepped in. Every time. Without fail, without being asked.
It continued for two years.
Then, slowly, things changed.
By the time his body reached ten years old, something had started coming back. Perhaps the effects of the transmigration were finally fading. Perhaps a ten-year-old's mind was simply better able to hold what a six-year-old's could not. Whatever the reason, silly began to remember.
His name was Nova. He had been a thirty-something office worker with nothing remarkable on his record and a bedroom full of Pokémon merchandise that had earned the genuine envy of every collector he knew. He had not been exceptional at much in his previous life — but he had known the Pokémon world thoroughly, and he had made it through every deadline, every difficult stretch, by simply not quitting.
With his memories back and a decade's worth of patience, the idea of being pushed around by children his own age suddenly seemed considerably less likely.
The caregivers at the Exeggutor Orphanage noticed, not long afterward, that the most troublesome boys had become strangely well-behaved.
They had their reasons.
Nova's years at the orphanage were mostly a blur in his memory — noise and hard floors and small indignities — except for one image that stayed sharp and clear regardless: a girl in a white jacket, always showing up when it mattered.
He threw himself into his studies with everything he had. The discipline from his exam-heavy previous life, combined with everything he remembered about the Pokémon world, made the coursework manageable. He entered the Harmony City Junior Pokémon Tournament and took the gold medal. The prize money, together with a city scholarship, gave them both a way out.
Nova and Aresdra left the Exeggutor Orphanage together and moved into a place of their own in central Harmony City.
That was also why he had politely declined when someone had suggested he continue his formal schooling. The situation was straightforward: there was enough to support one person through education. Not two.
Before they turned fourteen, they had scraped by on scholarships and league subsidies. But after finishing middle school at fourteen, the costs of further study would have gone beyond what either of them could manage together. One of them needed to work full-time. That person had to be Nova.
He did not resent it.
What Nova felt for Aresdra was not easy to name. It was not the way a boy cared for a girl he liked. It was not quite the way a brother cared for a sister, either — they shared no blood, and the bond hadn't grown from shared family or ordinary childhood memories. It was something that had started in a place where neither of them had much of anything, and had grown into a kind of steadiness that didn't need a label.
In some ways, Aresdra was Nova. And Nova was Aresdra.
Two people who had held on — and in doing so, had made something real.