Rotom had heard the nickname Nova gave it, but its clever little mind could not quite grasp the meaning hidden inside it. So it floated closer and asked, "Little Love, does this name mean something?"
A sly grin spread across Nova's face as he thought to himself, Just listen to me spin this yarn.
"I love all my partners equally, and that is Great Love. But the love I have for you, Rotom, is something special, so that makes you my Little Love."
Nova's explanation sounded thoughtful and perfectly reasonable, and it made Rotom's eyes shine like little stars. For a Pokémon known for its sharp intelligence, the idea of learning and improving side by side struck a chord deep inside it. For a moment, Rotom's admiration and fondness for Nova welled up like a rushing river.
Meowscarada, who had been watching the whole exchange coolly from the side, finally couldn't hold back a scoff at Nova's shamelessness and spat toward him in disgust. She didn't believe a word of his nonsense. From experience, she knew that whenever Nova launched into one of his long, flowery explanations, he was either chasing after some joke or hiding an ulterior motive.
What kind of ulterior motives could a Trainer possibly have?
Plenty, as far as she was concerned.
By then, Nova had already turned his attention to the manual for the space backpack, trying to figure out how it worked. It was clear that this item was a marvel of human technology. The manual alone was a thick stack of pages. After reading for a few minutes, Nova suddenly called out, "Little Love?"
"I'm here!" Rotom answered at once.
Nova smiled even wider. He hadn't expected that even after ending up in this new life, he would still get to enjoy moments like this with Little Love. It felt like a small tribute to the life he once had. "It's nothing, really. I just haven't spoken to you in a while, and I missed you."
"The last time you spoke to me was three minutes and forty seven seconds ago," Rotom replied. "That is not very long."
Meowscarada nearly fainted from irritation. Nova hadn't spoken to her in over ten minutes. Didn't he miss her at all?
In an atmosphere of quiet calm, or something close to it, Nova finished reading through the manual. Between that and the lengthy explanation Rotom had given him earlier, he now understood the basic science and workings of the space backpack.
Nova had wondered about this before. Since this world was already home to ordinary creatures, where exactly had Pokémon come from? After digging through a good deal of research, he found evidence suggesting that Pokémon had appeared in this world quite suddenly. It happened so abruptly that the existing ecosystem could not adapt in time to creatures far more powerful than anything that came before them, and many ordinary species had gone extinct as a result.
Some studies suggested that Pokémon had first entered this world through the openings of scattered secret realms. These secret realms were like massive fragments of space, and behind every rift that served as an entrance or exit lay a separate small world of its own, cut off from the rest of existence. The workings of the space backpack were closely tied to these same secret realms.
Not every secret realm was as vast as the Viridian Secret Realm or the Silver Mountain Secret Realm. More often, they lived up to the term space fragment quite literally, since most were tiny and broken. Some secret realms were barely larger than a house, a cave, or a shallow hollow in the ground. They couldn't sustain an ecosystem at all, and the space within them tended to sit empty and undisturbed.
These smaller fragments held almost no value to people. Even if someone wandered into one by accident, it would be little different from crawling into an unfamiliar but harmless cave.
The space backpack that Nova now carried made use of one of these stable fragments. Scientists had found a way to anchor the entrance rift of a space fragment to the opening of the backpack. That meant whatever Nova placed inside would end up stored safely within the sealed fragment. Since the only entrance to that space was through the backpack itself, nobody could reach in and disturb his belongings from outside.
Unless, of course, that someone happened to be Palkia.
The backpack itself was small and unassuming. If an item was being taken out or put in through the opening alone, its width could not exceed about sixty centimeters, or it would get stuck halfway. To solve this, the researchers behind this remarkable technology had developed a method of spatial expansion that let the backpack widen its entrance along a flat plane, stretching it out to a circle roughly one meter across at most.
That meant Nova could fit large gear needed for rough travel into this space that belonged only to him, and if it ever became necessary, he could even climb inside himself. Naturally, that would be an extremely risky thing to attempt. Without a trusted partner watching over the opening from outside, anyone who sealed the entrance and left it closed would eventually run out of air, long before hunger or thirst became a concern, leaving barely a few hours before it turned deadly for an ordinary person.
Since every space fragment used to build one of these backpacks differed in size, no two space backpacks in the world were ever quite alike. The one Nova owned wasn't especially large, offering about sixty square meters of usable floor space, roughly the size of a modest city apartment. As a warehouse, it would fall a bit short, but for carrying supplies on the road, it suited him just fine.
At the moment, it also held the battle equipment that Gilbert had mentioned to Nova earlier, the kind Rotom would use during battles. Nova was curious about these tools. Back when he used to play Pokémon games, Wash Rotom and Heat Rotom, fondly nicknamed the washing machine and the heater by players, had always been popular choices, and he had used them in battle himself more than once. Now that he had the chance to see this remarkable piece of Pokémon technology in person, he wanted to learn everything he could about it.
Little Love, still thoroughly charmed by Nova's earlier words, was practically buzzing with energy. First, it switched into its washing machine form and took care of all the laundry Nova had been too lazy to wash over the past two days. Next, it shifted into its microwave form and warmed up a meal that had been prepared ahead of time. Finally, it flipped into refrigerator mode, opening its double doors wide to chase away the thick heat of August.
It was, in every sense, a marvel of usefulness.