Penny Saves Paldea | Pokemon Scarlet & Violet

Perfect Backup

Penny never went anywhere without proper equipment. Once inside Ortega's "office," she sat down in his swivel chair and laid her Eevee bag on her lap. From there, she extracted a thin, tablet-like collapsable monitor and a tri-fold keyboard. She laid them out across Ortega's desk, which was quite comfortable to sit at. If she was going to get stuck frantically planning countermeasures to Juliana's attack, this wasn't the worst place to do it.

"We need to know everything we can about Juliana and Arven," she said as she tapped on her phone. It immediately recognized the hardware and connected to it. The keys glowed with a soft blue light, and the monitor lit up with a mirror image of the phone's screen. "Ortega, start talking, please."

"Wha--?"

"You and Arven obviously know each other," Giamono said. He glanced at his phone. "Also, Juliana's taken out three members already."

"We knew each other as kids!" Ortega protested. "That's it!" When no one bought this excuse, he relented and stepped behind Penny to look over her shoulder as she typed. "Okay, okay. Look, the last time I saw Arven, we were both eight years old. My family provided the angel funding for his mom's research, so we always had access to her data and prototypes and all that stuff before anybody else did. Sometimes my parents let Arven and I hang out together at her lab. I'd bring this double-stacked bento box with me for lunch, which Arven always thought was the coolest thing ever. One day his mom was extra busy, and we didn't know where to sit and eat, so I started looking--"

"Not to rush you, but we only have so much time before Juliana takes out our first line of defense," Penny said. Her fingers itched to put her devices to good use. "I could use the quick version here."

"Eight members down," said Giacomo.

"I'm getting there, all right?" Ortega huffed. "The quick version is that something in his mom's lab terrified me that day, and I never wanted to go near her or Arven again afterwards." He gritted his teeth and faced the corner of the tent. "Arven doesn't know. He thought I'd suddenly decided he was below me or something."

"I'm sorry," Penny said, hoping to strike a balance between sympathetic and can-we-please-hurry-it-up. "What do you know about him now, though? What's most important to him that might get him over to our side?"

"I don't know anything about him now," Ortega said. He pulled out his phone and tapped through to his contact list. "I still have his contact info. But he blocked me a while ago. I blocked him back out of spite at the time, but--hey!"

Penny had already snatched the phone out of Ortega's hand around when he said "blocked him back." She fumbled around in her bag, pulled out an extra cable, and added Ortega's phone to her set-up. The monitor showed a split screen, and she enlarged the one displaying Ortega's data first. After a quick glance at what she had to work with, her fingers flew across the keys, her brain happy to communicate in a language that didn't have a million different ways the receiver could misinterpret the message.

This model of Rotom Phone didn't really block new messages. Instead, it stashed messages from unwanted senders in a trash folder, set to be deleted. And even then, phones of all types were horrible at actually deleting data.

"Fourteen members down," Giacomo said, his normally cool and collected tone waning.

Arven must have decided to unblock at Ortega at some point, because with a little bit of prodding, Penny found several recent messages from him. Ortega looked more and more upset as she scrolled through each one, starting from the last school term: Hey, know we haven't talked in a while, but Mabosstiff is hurt bad. Or sick, maybe? Potions and centers aren't helping. Does your family know anyone who could help?