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Nomi recognized the jovial man who entered her lab: a former collaborator of Lulu Flint's, and closely affiliated with bryan delarosa. One of Rocket's Kanto-born long-standing jack-of-all-trades sorts. Also, apparently, a scientist.[break][break]
Nomi had been eager to work with priam conrad ever since she had heard oscar clayton speak highly of him, and now she would finally get the chance. Not only that, but she was quite curious about the nature of the RADIANT SEED recovered by Rocket at the Ancient Tomb. What had felt like a failed expedition - a lost battle full of haunting memories that did not quite make sense - had not been totally useless, in the end.[break][break]
Nomi gingerly picked up the box that Priam had deposited, an Unown-N hovering by her shoulder. She had all the right codes for access, of course. As she began to tap carefully on the box's digital screen, she addressed her new assistant.[break][break]
"Priam, right?" She smiled. "I know of you." All good things, her tone conveyed. "You were at the Ancient Tomb, too, I assume? If anything, I'd be curious to hear about your experience there. Mine was...strange."[break][break]
Strange being the understatement of the century.

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Strange in a way that you felt like you dreamed a whole life?[break][break]
"Yes," she blurted out, perhaps with more passion than she'd intended. "That's exactly how it feels. Like I lived a whole life for...years, in a land that wasn't Hoenn."[break][break]
Decades of vague memories, hard to make out - as if she were looking through a foggy window. A field journal full of research she didn't remember conducting. Love notes from someone who'd been with her, someone she suspected had been parker jones, but without any real evidence, could not confirm. Parker had a ring, but she wore it around her neck - so had it really been a wedding band, despite looking like one? Jumbled-up half-forgotten hazy faces of people she knew were important, their names on the tip of her tongue. An ache in her chest, a broken fence between past and present tense that she didn't know how to properly mend.[break][break]
But she didn't say any of that. She just gazed at Priam with sad crimson eyes, until he mentioned constellations. Then she perked up.[break][break]
"Constellations? What sorts of constellations? Tell me about them."[break][break]
As she waited for him to elaborate, she finished the task of opening the box holding the Radiant Seed. It sprung open with a decisive click.

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Nomi gaped at Priam as he began to rattle off the names and descriptions of the constellations he had supposedly learned about at the Ancient Tomb, while they'd all been forced to sleep under some supernatural spell. As he spoke, enthusiastic and animated in his delivery, Nomi's head began to ache. Not because Priam was annoying to listen to, but because she recognized some of what he was talking about.[break][break]
Hastily, she opened the drawer of her desk and pulled out the notbook. The one she had recovered at the Ancient Tomb, that she'd apparently had on her the entire time without knowing it. The field journal with all of the mystery research she'd supposedly conducted alongside not-Parker's-but-probably-Parker's scribbled contributions. She whipped it out and rapidly turned to the last pages. She held them out for Priam to see.[break][break]
"Look! Aren't these the same as what you're describing?" Star charts with similar descriptions. Questions posed and observations recorded by the scientist who had studied them - "Skyler confirms the leviathan is Kyogre" and "the watching eyes remind me of the Unown" and others, countless others. Nomi looked down at the notes, then back up at Priam, eyes wide and full of wonder.[break][break]
"How could I possibly know about something you dreamed about?" Her voice had lowered to nearly a whisper. "The dream mist allows people to share waking dreams, but there was no trace of it at the Ancient Tomb when we'd first arrived..."[break][break]
For the first time, something new occurred to Nomi. Something horribly fascinating in its impossibility, and yet, a perfectly plausible explanation for what had happened to them given the evidence.[break][break]
"Maybe it wasn't a dream," she dared to suggest. "Maybe we went somewhere...all of us. Together."

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Nomi watched as the void-black blade caught the light, seeming to absorb it rather than reflect it back. She started to feel an aching behind her eyes as her brain worked to identify what she was seeing.[break][break]
[break]
Her voice, from ages ago. Or maybe just yesterday. It was all jumbled up, like losing a needle in the haystack of memory. She clawed at it, tried to follow the threads, but everything was too frayed.[break][break]
"It looks to be the same substance as the crystals found in Lesser Megalopolis," Nomi decided, drawing upon a more recent memory rather than the one that had surfaced, the one in which she seemed to be...forging weapons using infinity energy? "I would have to run the same tests to know for certain, but it looks extremely similar." She paused. "Which means...it came from Necrozma."[break][break]
It also looked exactly like Zev Harcourt's crystal armor, but she kept that thought to herself.[break][break]
So what did that mean? Nomi's brow furrowed, her frown deepening.[break][break]
"My field notes describe a place called Circhester. Which is in Galar. So, were we transported to Galar? Did we fight Necrozma there?"[break][break]
It was all so absurd. Necrozma's plague on Galar had ended, so if they had really travelled there recently, they would have had to time-travel into the past. She supposed, with the DRK Triad constantly universe-hopping and the rifts opening up to entirely different realms, maybe that wasn't so farfetched a thing to happen.[break][break]
All the same, it was a lot to take in.

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"They do!" She answered, perhaps somewhat overly eager. It was just, this was a breakthrough wasn't it? She couldn't suppress her excitement. The fact that Priam also remembered the same vague aspects of a Galar that had been both familiar and unfamiliar was a huge relief: she didn't have to feel quite so crazy about the loose ends that nagged at her mind on a daily basis.[break][break]
She flipped through her field notes until she found a crude drawing of a terrible, poisonous creature flying through a dark sky. Notes were scribbled below about "the Skeleton" and its ongoing was with "The Black Knight."[break][break]
"It was some kind of super powerful poison Pokemon," Nomi recalled, brow furrowing. "I wonder...since I've come to believe that Necrozma was - is? - the Black Knight, perhaps that means the Skeleton exists in our world, too."[break][break]
But where?[break][break]
She sighed. "I guess we ought to try and find it...before the League does. Or worse, the DRK Triad."

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Nomi couldn't help but giggle at his unbridled enthusiasm.[break][break]
"No, I suppose not," she agreed. They had something tangible to study: no need to chase the next piece of the puzzle when they had so much to figure out right now, with their most recent acquisition.[break][break]
With cautious fingers - careful, delicate - Nomi opened the lid of the box, and peered inside. The radiant seed was a small, almost inconsequential thing: for something so mysterious, in that moment, it looked harmless to Nomi.[break][break]
But Nomi knew better than most that one should never judge something by its initial appearance.[break][break]
Gingerly, Nomni reached in and picked up the seed, cradling it in the palm of her hand.[break][break]
"Well?" She glanced at Priam. "What do you make of this?"[break][break]
It didn't...seem particularly powerful, upon first glance. A sudden idea struck her, and she held the seed up for Nu to examine. The Unown-N floated down to it, regarding it with a laser-focused scrutiny. Then it glowed softly, as if...receiving something? A signal?[break][break]
Nomi waited with baited breath for something - anything - to happen.

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Nu's glow faded and it drifted away. Nomi sighed, disappointed. Nothing of note seemed to happen when her Unown interacted with the seed. Priam's words, however, caught her attention, and she turned to regard him once more.[break][break]
"You think it could be some sort of...key? For unlocking a door to another dimension?"[break][break]
It was an intriguing proposal. But if this was the key, then where was the lock? Were they missing something crucial to the overall puzzle?[break][break]
But then Priam surprised her again by stating what, she realized, was actually quite obvious.[break][break]
It was a seed. Therefore, they needed to grow it. Of course! The soil was the lock, the seed the key, and whatever it bloomed into...the open doorway.[break][break]
"I have," she smiled. "I used to run a small micro-brewery where I grew all my own hops. I still maintain a greenhouse, but I've since sold the business."[break][break]
She could think of others more skilled than she was at gardening, but one in particular no longer practiced the art. Elisabeth Fiorelli had dismissed her once-precious Crystablooms with a hand-wave and a sneer.[break][break]
"We should plant it in the lab where we keep the Crystablooms," Nomi decided. "I will ask Kaname Fujihara to look after it when I am otherwise preoccupied. He's been helping me lately."

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