Nova, of course, could not understand Pokémon speech, nor could he read their feelings the way some rare Trainers claimed to. He wanted to pick Purrloin up and pet her — to comfort her in the simplest way he knew — but a single look from Sprigatito stopped him cold. The Grass Cat's stare carried exactly the kind of warning that made a person reconsider their decisions.
Purrloin did not cry for long. She scrubbed at her face with both front paws, rubbing away the mess the tears had made, and then turned back to her bowl with an expression that could only be described as determined. She ate as though the food had personally wronged her and she was settling the score.
Even Growlithe, who had been steadily working through his own meal nearby, paused and looked over. He had never seen anything eat like that.
Where did that guy find this one? Growlithe thought, watching with cautious respect. She's intense.
What happened next was the last thing Nova expected. Sprigatito pushed her half-eaten bowl across the floor, sliding it toward Purrloin without a word.
Nova stared.
Was this the same Pokémon who had been glaring at Purrloin with barely concealed irritation since the moment she arrived? Was she actually showing kindness to a temporary housemate? If this was what Sprigatito looked like when she was being generous, then perhaps she deserved a second look entirely.
Sprigatito's reasoning was her own: Take it. Take all of it. Just stop trying to take Nova.
Had this been the Purrloin of a day ago, she might have had no interest in the offer at all. She hadn't come here to compete with anyone, and she had no plans to. But now, sitting in front of the best meal she had ever eaten, Purrloin found herself unable to simply accept the gesture.
We're both cats, she thought, looking at Sprigatito. But you were born into this. A kind Trainer, a warm home, food set out just for you. And I ended up following a thief through back alleys. How is that fair?
Purrloin had not always been a criminal.
She had started life as an ordinary kitten, born in a cramped and forgotten corner of an old part of the city — the kind of place that showed up on no map and was remembered by no one. She had two siblings in the same litter. She had never learned whether they were brothers or sisters, and she would never find out. Their father was absent from the start, and their mother was not the kind who stayed.
Her mother spent her days hunting Rattata in the back streets of the old district. She could be out from dawn until dark and would remember her three kits only occasionally — sometimes returning with a scrap of food, sometimes not returning at all.
Purrloin's earliest months were spent almost entirely hungry.
When the kittens grew large enough to be more burden than litter, their mother drove all three of them out of her territory. There was not enough food for four, and that was the end of it. From that day forward, Purrloin never saw her siblings again.
She did what countless Pokémon born in the margins of cities learn to do. She wandered. She dug through rubbish bins. She raided Pidgey nests when she found them unguarded. She sat near food stalls and made herself look small and appealing, eating whatever scraps were tossed her way — food that humans thought cats would enjoy, and that cats most certainly did not.
Her early years were spent enduring flavors she had no name for except bad.
Then, one afternoon, she scratched at the security lock of a shop she had been eyeing and felt it give way beneath her claws. She pushed the door open and walked inside.
After that, she stopped worrying about food.
Getting into buildings became as easy and natural as walking down the street. But that particular talent did not stay quiet for long. Word spread through the neighborhood the way it always does in those kinds of neighborhoods, and soon enough, more than one local gang had started taking an interest in her. There were at least two small but ugly conflicts over who was going to end up with the lock-picking Purrloin.
She ended up going with a petty thief — not because he was the strongest or the smartest, but because he was the first one willing to spend some of what he stole on a bag of Sitrus Berries for her.
That was the first Berry she had ever eaten.
Her adolescence tasted like sweetness.
It did not last.
Leaning on Purrloin's ability, the thief's ambitions grew steadily larger. His jobs got bigger, his risks got worse, and eventually, after one particularly bold and record-breaking night, the Security Officers caught up with him. He was wanted and arrested before the week was out. As his accomplice, Purrloin was found guilty too, and sent to a Pokémon correctional facility.
The food there was not good. Dry, bland, with the persistent smell of old fish clinging to every bite. But it was served on time, every day, in amounts that were always enough.
Purrloin ate the fishy cat food without complaint. Getting full every day was not something she had always been able to count on.
The only interruption to the routine was being loaned out on occasion. A Trainer would come in, fill out the paperwork, and take her for some job that required a Pokémon who could open things that were supposed to stay closed.
She did not enjoy being loaned out.
Everyone who borrowed her treated her like a key — useful, impersonal, returned when the job was done. A Pokémon with a serious record and a Rank A classification was not the kind of Pokémon people softened toward, no matter how she looked. If a Trainer was decent, they might offer her something edible during the job. If they were not, she would spend the entire loan period sealed inside a Poké Ball and ignored, let out only for the moments her ability was needed.
It did not matter much, in the end. The loans were brief and infrequent. They changed nothing about the fact that she would spend the rest of her life in that glass room, eating dry food that smelled like the sea floor.
Her young adult years were spent in exactly that smell.
She had expected the rest of her life — however long that was — to be the same.
And then today, she had eaten something like this.
More than that: someone had set a bowl out for her as though she belonged here. Not as a borrowed tool. Not as a means to an end. Just as another Pokémon sitting down to a meal.
That was why it felt so unfair.
You grew up in something like this, Purrloin thought, watching Sprigatito. The food you consider ordinary enough to push aside is the best thing I have ever tasted. And I'm supposed to feel nothing about that?
She could feel, now, the sharp and irrational heat that had been flickering from Sprigatito's direction since she arrived. She understood it. She recognized it. Because the exact same feeling had caught fire somewhere inside her, and it burned just as hot.
My jealousy beats yours.
If Nova had set down the last of the dishes and turned around in that moment, he would have seen something odd. Beneath Purrloin's existing Master Key Ability, something new had appeared — a second Ability that had not been there before.
It was one whose name he would have recognized immediately: Jealousy.
Pokémon never ceased to surprise.
Nova had no idea that a simple bowl of cat food, set out without a second thought for a temporary guest, had quietly set off something new. He was a transmigrant, and his feelings toward Pokémon were shaped less by this world's history of disasters and more by the years he had spent as a fan in his previous life. To him, every Pokémon was extraordinary simply by existing — a kind of miracle that his old world had never produced.
The system he carried pushed him to plan carefully, to be selective, to build a team capable of going the distance. For Pokémon whose natural potential did not fit that path, he had no choice but to keep his distance. That was just reality.
But his attitude was still different from most people around him.
He had not grown up watching Pokémon Tides tear through cities. He had not seen a Legendary Pokémon lose control and reshape the landscape with its power. He had not lived with the fear that made many in this world keep Pokémon at arm's length.
So when he looked at a Rank A criminal Pokémon, he did not see a threat or a liability. He saw a particular individual with a particular story, and he kept his judgment where it belonged.
Purrloin had come to help him. That was enough. He would take care of her properly while she was here.
For Purrloin, it was a feeling she had no name for. In all her years of wandering streets, eating out of bins, picking locks for people who never once looked her in the eye — nothing had ever felt quite like this.