Chief is Carmen's starter, whom I picked half because I love Psychic types and half because his starting move would be Teleport, and given Carmen's penchant for quick escapes, I thought it'd fit perfectly for her to have a Pokemon that could teleport her away in a flash anytime she needed to make a speedy exit. He's named Chief because way back in the day when she was still a detective with ACME, the AI who now runs the agency had a robot body and was her first partner, so there was a certain nostalgia in that. Coincidentally, her first three Pokemon were all named after her ACME rivals, which she did intentionally — Chief, Ivy, and Zack.
According to the Dex, Abra sleep eighteen hours a day, so part of Chief's really chill personality stemmed from that; also, given Carmen's independence, I sort of pictured her as just walking around exploring places and Chief floating along behind her, fast asleep but keeping pace, and it was such a cute mental image that I rolled with it. She also used to cuddle with him at night back when he was small enough to do it, because Abra are cute and hugs forever. But then he evolved and now he's big and he's not as huggable anymore, which is sad but she deals with it. And he will never evolve into an Alakazam because then he would lose his tail, which would make him decidedly less cute still.
The other thing about Chief is that he very much runs the team. I have a mental hierarchy of how her whole roster breaks down (who's subordinate to who, who answers to whom, who works together under whose direction), and Chief stands at the very top; in the event that something were to happen to Carmen, Chief has been trained to immediately step in and continue managing the team, with Zack's help. Frankly, she's confident enough in him that she'd be willing to initiate a battle and then walk away and just let him command it in her place. And that exists for two reasons — one because, like I mentioned above to Mega, that if she disappears she wants the team to be able to take care of itself, but also because when you're commanding henchmen (and she does treat her team like her henchmen back home), you need to have a definite chain of command. Chief has been taught how to keep the family together and what to do if god forbid Johto sends her back home. And she finds that reassuring because more than anything, she wants to know her roster is going to be okay, regardless of whether she's there to watch out for them or not.
Also, she likes to play chess against him. He's perfectly welcome to read her mind, but she still usually beats him anyway. Part of how she treats her roster in general is on the overarching theory that it's her job to help make them the best they can be, and that's not just in the sense of training them to battle. She actually teaches them (hence why she plays Trivial Pursuit with Zack and lets him make friends on the network and so on), and part of Chief's education is learning how to deal with people as well as with Pokemon.
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According to the Dex, Abra sleep eighteen hours a day, so part of Chief's really chill personality stemmed from that; also, given Carmen's independence, I sort of pictured her as just walking around exploring places and Chief floating along behind her, fast asleep but keeping pace, and it was such a cute mental image that I rolled with it. She also used to cuddle with him at night back when he was small enough to do it, because Abra are cute and hugs forever. But then he evolved and now he's big and he's not as huggable anymore, which is sad but she deals with it. And he will never evolve into an Alakazam because then he would lose his tail, which would make him decidedly less cute still.
The other thing about Chief is that he very much runs the team. I have a mental hierarchy of how her whole roster breaks down (who's subordinate to who, who answers to whom, who works together under whose direction), and Chief stands at the very top; in the event that something were to happen to Carmen, Chief has been trained to immediately step in and continue managing the team, with Zack's help. Frankly, she's confident enough in him that she'd be willing to initiate a battle and then walk away and just let him command it in her place. And that exists for two reasons — one because, like I mentioned above to Mega, that if she disappears she wants the team to be able to take care of itself, but also because when you're commanding henchmen (and she does treat her team like her henchmen back home), you need to have a definite chain of command. Chief has been taught how to keep the family together and what to do if god forbid Johto sends her back home. And she finds that reassuring because more than anything, she wants to know her roster is going to be okay, regardless of whether she's there to watch out for them or not.
Also, she likes to play chess against him. He's perfectly welcome to read her mind, but she still usually beats him anyway. Part of how she treats her roster in general is on the overarching theory that it's her job to help make them the best they can be, and that's not just in the sense of training them to battle. She actually teaches them (hence why she plays Trivial Pursuit with Zack and lets him make friends on the network and so on), and part of Chief's education is learning how to deal with people as well as with Pokemon.