And then it was there. Despite being a clearly highly formalised procedure, there was no fanfare about it, no grand posturing. No, the setting was doing all of that for them.
The room Adelaide was being led into had once been some kind of church hall arranged for a mass, since gutted of any pews it might once have contained, but still sporting a disembodied altar at one end, and imposing pillars, past which she could see a rainbow's worth of Legendaries. The hall was decently well lit from strips of white light set into corners, though overall more as though it were trying to be a nice place for a romantic dinner than a place for any court's proceedings - or it would have been, if it weren't for the glow of one of the Legendaries, easily brighter than a full moon, but quite shy of the strength of direct sunlight.
There were six of them, altogether. She recognised the one that had once made conversation with her, all flowing plume and eerie skin. Then there was the star made flesh from the day before, and its crimson tuning fork companion. The other three were new to her perception.
One of them was on fire. That wasn't altogether unusual for a pokémon, of course, but something about the black skin made it feel like it would actually burn her if she touched it - not like the benign flames of a Rapidash. While it shared the overall shape of the others, the arms were short and curved, clearly designed for digging.
Another was some kind of aquatic adaption of the general theme, with a fin where a plume might be, and webbing between its white fingers. It might have been a partial albino of some sort, even for its species, but the eyes had the dead white of some ghastly blindness instead of the kind of soft pink she might have expected for that, and there were rich blue feathers spattered in decorative tufts along the edge of its arms.
And the last was a clear electric type, all spikes and spines, the smallest of the batch by body, but perhaps not if measured spine-tip to spine-tip, visible current running along the protrusions from the back of its head.
Jagdish was walking beside her, bringing her into view of all this, but he might as well have been invisible. All Legendary eyes set on her.
✘ IN PROGRESS