Margaret is on her way to work at the CDC, walking instead of flying today so she can drink her coffee without spilling it, when she sees the cryptid. She's a truly far-out one, no limbs to speak of, just a long snaky body with a mirror for a face. Margaret smiles at her and goes to walk on by, but the cryptid slithers right at her all of a sudden and--hits?--Margaret with the giant mirror. Except she doesn't experience getting whacked with a sheet of glass.
She's pretty close; Bella corrects her.
She can come up with a spelling for her own name later. For now, more vocabulary! Nouns and verbs and yes and no and who/what/when/where/why.
Bella can't always tell what she's getting at but tries to cooperate with Margaret's interests.
Yeah, communicating abstract concepts is hard, even with the ability to draw pictures quickly. If Bella wants to decide what words to do next, that's fine too.
Bella names objects! She places them in grammatical context and sometimes spells them if Margaret doesn't pronounce them right.
Margaret is very appreciative of this; she learns quickly and consults her notes a lot. She can keep going for several hours; Bella will probably get sick of it first.
Actually, Bella's not the first person to get sick of it! Larry, the fellow who caught Margaret, wanders over after less than two hours have gone by. Margaret does not have enough vocabulary to follow the resulting tense conversation.
She tries to distract herself from her nerves by reviewing vocabulary words. It's not very effective.
Bella and Larry have a heated argument!
Margaret gives up on studying and watches them. She looks as nonthreatening as a cat-eyed vaguely reptilian woman can be reasonably expected to look.
After a lot of heated argument, Bella picks up the creature that has been sitting by her all this time, displays it from several angles to Larry. He shakes his head. She puts it in a Pokéball and pulls out another one, a deer with treebranch antlers. He inspects this creature.
The creatures are very interesting when they're not being extremely aggressive. She's not sure if Bella is trying to make a point or offering him the creature as a bribe to go away or what.
Eventually, after more, less-urgently-heated conversation, Bella gives Larry the Pokéball that contained the deer and accepts a Pokéball from him. She sighs.
Okay, so it probably was the bribe thing. Now Margaret feels bad about causing Bella to give up her tree-deer.
Does Larry at least go away now?
Yep. Larry goes away. Bella lets out a lapsize black mammal with gold markings, hugs it, and resumes teaching Margaret the language.
"Thank you." Margaret goes back to learning.
If Bella keeps the black mammal out, after a bit Margaret will ask (haltingly and with slightly awkward word choice) whether she can touch it.
Bella says yes and holds out the mammal. It is quite docilely petted when Margaret touches it.
Pet pet. Aww, it's fuzzy. Back to langauge lessons.
After a while she gets hungry. She doesn't want to impose on an already very helpful stranger for food, so it's going to be disaster-movie style. Hmm, better warn her as best she can first since she doesn't know about magical girls.
"I will food. I will not wings ten, fifteen minutes, make food, wings again."
She doesn't know how to say "don't be alarmed", so she says, "I'm okay" and takes off her wings.
Alright maybe she spoke too soon, not having wings is unbalanced and weird and generally unpleasant. She needs to steady herself for a moment despite sitting down, but after a bit she smiles again. It's pretty fake.
"- what!" Bella pulls the Pokéball assigned to Margaret off her belt.
"I'm okay, it's good," she says reassuringly. "I did that, I" she checks her notes, "I wanted that".
"Can only do . . . some things. Not all things. Want do food, not can do wings." She points at her arm, adds "I do this, okay?" and makes a small strawberry vine grow out from between two scales.
"I can feed you!!"