Chapter Text
Lumine wants to scream. Ever since she started her journey in the region of Teyvat to look for her brother, it’s been nothing but trouble brewing left and right. She never expected to bump into the infamous Fatui of Snezhnaya in Mondstadt. After receiving her first badge, while heading out of the gym she had bumped into La Signora, a harbinger of the Fatui.
Now, she isn’t new to the workings of the Fatui. Everyone knew they were quite the villainous group, whether or not their goal itself was righteous. Their goal is fighting to stop Project Celestia, a project created by the Celestia Foundation meant to further progress the working relationship between humans and Pokemon. There aren’t many details, but no one knows why the group would want to prevent a project with such a noble goal anyway, especially with the unscrupulous means the Fatui themselves resort to.
There’s the rankings too, from the skirmishers to the agents and mages followed by the most well-known role across Teyvat, the Harbingers. There were eleven of them, all referred to by code name. Signora, the one she had run into, was the 8th. Quite powerful in rank, and her Pokemon themselves were plenty strong too. So strong in fact, that that battle was the first she’d lost in Teyvat. To be fair, she could only bring her fluffy gray partner Eevee, Aster, along with her to Teyvat. The rest of her Pokemon stayed behind in her home region.
She hadn’t built up a new team at all, depending on her partner for everything. Aster was a special sort of Eevee, she found out. At a statue of the Seven, one of several widespread monuments in Teyvat, this one of the local Archon Barbatos, Aster experienced a mutation unlike any other. It temporarily evolved into an Espeon, reverting back as it willed. However, her newly discovered psychic-type partner couldn’t hold a candle to the harbinger’s Froslass, and her new friend Venti’s Flapple faced a huge disadvantage against the ice ghost Pokemon.
The Traveler had expected that event to be a one-time thing, and to never get involved with the Fatui again, but now… “Ugh, don’t you Fatui goons ever give up?!” Lumine swears, every single route and city she travels, the Fatui are on her tail. She can’t tell if they’re targeting her on purpose or if she’s just always in the wrong place at the wrong time. If only fluffy tails and Pokemon dolls worked on trainers too, she mused.
The golden-haired outlander finishes off one final skirmisher, the purple-clad grunt retracting his Electrike back into its pokeball before making his quick escape. Her partner lets out a happy cry at another victory added to its list, reverting back to an Eevee. Aster doesn’t like being in its pokeball, and she prefers having it keep her company anyway. It never fails to make her smile despite her situation. She feeds Aster a sitrus berry for its hard work.
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Later on in Dragonspine, while helping out the local Alchemist Albedo and his partner, a strange armoured Pokemon named Type:Null, she follows the distant whines of a Pokemon to a frozen lake. There she finds a wounded spheal buried in the snow, poisoned and covered in the bite marks of a Mawile. She heals it up with the potions she stocked up on, and the little guy, now named Fang, refuses to leave her side.
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Now in Liyue, specifically in an area called Dihua Marsh, another statue of the Seven stood. This time a statue of Rex Lapis, the local Archon of Liyue. She moves to touch the statue, Aster doing the same. A similar glow took over her partner, and instead of the lime green evident of a shiny Espeon, her partner emerges with a body dark as night and glowing rings of blue. An Umbreon.
Arriving in Liyue Harbour, she was just getting comfortable when a new problem crops up. Surprise! A huge black and yellow dragon drops from the sky. Whispers immediately break out in the crowd, the only words Lumine is able to pick out being ‘Morax’, ‘Rayquaza’ and ‘Exuvia’. The guards are called in to lock down the area, and she flees. She is not going to be the center of another disaster.
Leaping down a flight of stairs, her partner bounding down alongside her, the Traveler finds herself cornered by the Millelith and their Timburr. Left with no choice but to jump off the ledge before her or turn around and fight back, she spins her body to face the Millelith in a battle-ready stance, Aster getting ready alongside her. She readies her order, “Aster, use—”
“Hey girlie, hold still.”
Lumine is cut off by three shots of water gun followed by a torrent of water from an aqua jet, an orange weasel-like Pokemon emerging from the move. The mysterious Buizel slashes at the Millelith’s Timburr, taking each of them out in a single hit. Some ginger clad in a mostly gray outfit and a red scarf, presumably said Buizel’s trainer, jumps in front of her from behind. The current Millelith retract their partners and flee, with more guards running down to intercept them.
The mysterious man signals for the outlander to follow him, and she does, running down the steps chasing after the man before her. Who is this, and why would he help her? Endless questions run through her mind as she runs, his Buizel and Aster in tow.
Right now, all she can do is get strung along.