>>58112282
>By this point, you were both used to these oddities yet still baffled each time.
>You weren’t sure whether to bet more on the memories being fake or if you’d inherited them up from an actual Lucario somewhere in the cosmos.
>You watched the outline of Conrad through the window blinds.
>The lawn more got louder and quieter as he neared and passed the room’s windows.
>Yesterday, you were more nervous than he was.
>And it wasn’t from the near-death experience of dancing around a miniature kaiju.
>You weren’t so anxious about crowds as a human, that you were sure of.
>Not to say you like being in crowded spaces.
>Nobody would say that.
>But you nearly had a panic attack.
>Those pokédex entries weren’t kidding, that much unfamiliar aura really can stress a lucario.
>How much of your old brain had been rewired during the transformation?
>Or worse, purged?
>Aggron didn’t seem wholly gone, but she certainly wasn’t all there either.
>Kat was aloof but cognizant.
>And different for sure. She said she was always zeraora.
>What was she like before, you wondered.
>Was she some bubbly, happy-go-lucky lady last month, or did her personality drastically change?
>…
>You weren’t you anymore.
>No point in deceiving yourself.
>Parts of old you existed, yeah.
>But combined with the new, you were someone different.
>Not as much as the others you’d seen thus far.
>Thank God.
>The braviary and marshtomp you met were little more than animals.
>By dumb luck, you may have survived this Century-defining event.
>Not survived, but drawn a lucky straw.
>Not feral, and with an amazing body and an intact mind.
>Would you have jumped in to get Aggron and her kids out of there if you had the same human brain as before?
>Well…
>That was an unanswerable hypothetical.
>But you might not have.
“Aw, dang it.”
>You hadn’t turned the computer on.