Back at his lodgings.
Baimu eagerly set up the inflatable pool and let Shiny Milotic into it.
Splash!
Water flew everywhere. Milotic's enormous body pressed against the pool's sides, sending clear water spilling over the edges. Its golden scales shimmered with rainbow hues in the sunlight, but their beauty could not hide the fact that it had to coil up just to stay in the pool.
"Milo?"
Milotic looked around. As more and more water spilled out, it simply wriggled free of the pool. It no longer had trouble breathing out of water, anyway.
It was a Pokémon descended from amphibians, after all.
Baimu gazed up at Milotic, which stood over two meters tall. Its head was only somewhat slimmer than Aggron's armored one, and its alluring pale-blue eyes were as large as fists. Looking up at it from so close, he even felt a hint of intimidation.
Strictly speaking, though, Milotic's length of over eight meters was a little misleading. The overlapping, fanlike golden scales at the tip of its tail accounted for nearly a meter of that.
Given its build—or rather, its girth—the remaining seven-plus meters did not look especially outrageous.
At least it was a far cry from the eighteen-meter Steelix.
It was still within the bounds of what the house could accommodate.
"Milo~"
Milotic lowered its head and rubbed affectionately against Baimu's face, then curled the pale-blue, hairlike fins hanging from its head around his waist.
"Oh! You can control your 'hair'?"
He was a little surprised.
In truth, Milotic could only bend those fins. Raising them or making precise movements with them was basically impossible.
Up close, Baimu noticed something else he had missed at the award ceremony—
Feebas used to have a faint fishy smell from the mucus and secretions that protected its body.