We woke up early to train.

My pokemon were released, except Mesa and Valley who had slept outside their pokeball, and we had a quick bite before all of them dispersed to do their training.

Normally I would focus on one pokemon per morning, then we would walk for two hours, then eat lunch, and fight against trainers and each other in the afternoon. But since we didn’t need to worry about the traveling part of the journey, I decided to walk around to see how my pokemon were doing in their training.

I also invited the Cryogonal to come with me. Since we needed to convince him that we could make him strong, showing him our training could help. The ice pokemon accepted.

The first one we visited was the one that trained the farthest from the camp, Cape.

As we reached Cape’s training ground we saw at a distance the bug pokemon collecting fighting energy on its arm and hitting a tree, or at least trying to.

Brick Breaker is one of the most utilized moves of all time in high-level battles. Almost any pokemon that could swing a major limb of its body can learn it, either through a TM or by training. It worked on the principle of movement. Swing a fist or an arm while gathering fighting energy on your limb, either an arm or leg, and you could use it.

Not as simple as that, of course.

The trick that made Brick Break better than Arm Thrust was the fact that the pokemon didn’t use just the fighting energy of its arm. They collected the fighting energy from the entire body and put all of that on a single limb. That small quantity of fighting energy resided inside the bodies of all pokemon who could use Brick Break and represented the aspect of movement that exists inside fighting type energy.

That fact, ironically, made it harder for fighting pokemon to learn Brick Break.

An Ursaring, for example, had very little fighting type energy without training, so collecting all of it from its body, and maintaining it stabilized to use was easy. But if you were let's say, a Heracross, you had a lot of fighting energy naturally. You could pull the energy easily, but you pulled a lot which made it difficult to control.

“Cape.” The sulking pokemon turned to us as me and Cryogonal approached the battered thick tree that he used for training. “Show me what you got.”

The bug pokemon arm glowed and he tried to perform the move on the tree.

I put my hand on my jaw. There were… Several things were wrong here. “Cape, your feet are not properly placed on the ground, your posture is not straight enough, and you are not putting enough spin on your hip… Actually, make the initial stance.”

I walked around the embarrassed Heracross adjusting his stance. I was also a little embarrassed. I thought that Cape, being a fighting type pokemon, would naturally know how to learn his own moves better than I could show him.

We watched the videos together, I explained the move, and gave him tips, but I guess that even fighting types need help to learn and to spot mistakes.

“Brick Break is different from Arm Thrust. There you only need to move your arm. This time, you need to first create motion and then pull the energy to your arm. Swing just like this see… Try now.” I took some steps back to give him space.

Cape’s punch was way better now. The fighting energy flared across all of his body and rushed toward his arm. The tree shook strongly at the hit. I could also see that the flow from body to arm was moving much better now.

Cape stared at his fist and smiled.

It was good, but it still wasn’t a true Brick Break. Now he reached the second obstacle, control.

“Look, Cape.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “I know you are prideful. But if you can’t do something it’s ok to speak up and ask for help. It's why I’m here, okay?”

Cape nodded, still a little embarrassed. “All right. Move back to near the camp, please. I will begin making rounds like this every day and you are too far for me to walk here and back.”

The bug pokemon nodded again and the three of us made our way back to the camp. Cape went to another tree to continue training, this time nearer the camp. And Cryogonal and I went to see Jungle.

The grass pokemon was sitting down on a towel we put for him to not be directly in contact with the snow. He was still but his green bulb seemed to be stirring.

“Hey, Jungle,” I said from afar. I knew he was working on his powders and I didn’t want to inhale something that could put me down for a whole day. “How are the powders going?”

Jungle looked up at me and motioned with one of his two vines for me to come closer. I did and the Cryogonal floated behind me.

The Bulbasaur waited for me to get close and then his bulb began to slightly open. For a second I thought that maybe he wanted to show me the powders and jerked my hand to cover my mouth and nose, but stopped when I saw a small red light coming from inside his bulb. I got closer and saw a miniature sun glowing between the petals of the bulb, Sunny Day.

It was not ready to be released, not even close. But it was there.

“Wow,” I said, speechless. “This is incredible, Jungle.” The Bulbasaur, looking up at me, smiled smugly.

It really was. Most people waited until their Bulbasaur evolved to then train the Ivysaur on that move. Sunny Day was a complex compound move. I didn’t know exactly how it worked, I had videos of it being used but I didn’t have a full explanation on how to do or train it. For Jungle to discover on his own might be a fluke or it might be something else.

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“Jungle. Do you like training the powders?” The pokemon stood still. “And please, be honest.”

The grass pokemon’s face relaxed and he shook his head.

I hummed. “Okay, you still need to learn the powders, just to be safe. We don’t need any holes in our fundamentals. But we can turn the powders into secondary training and focus on Sunny Day and Synthesis since you seem to have a talent for it. It will take you towards the long route but it might be beneficial if we play this right.”

I spent some more time explaining my plan to Jungle while the Cryogonal listened. After that, we were ready to leave the Bulbasaur.

“All right. Work one hour on Sunny Day, and one on Poison Powder and Sleep Powder.” The Bulbasaur bounced off the ground and nodded.

I caressed his head, which I knew he liked, and then we left towards Valley.

As I walked through the snow the Cryogonal passed me by and turned his body towards me. Then it began to slowly shift. A question.

“What do you want to know? Why did I change my plan?” The Cryogonal’s ice plates shifted in approval.

“I mean… Training can be boring but some paths are more boring than others. If you can make it easier for your friend and companion to get from point A to point B, you should do it… It's what I think at least.”

The Cryogonal became silent, seemingly mulling over it, as we reached the space where Valley was training.

Valley received us with a happy shout. “Minccino!”

“All right," I chuckled. "Valley, show us what you got.”

It was more than I expected. Valley learned Sing, Play Rough, and was able to evoke the “stars” of Swift, and it was now just a matter of learning to control them, and then learn to control them in a fight.

“How is Charm going?”

The Minccino head hung low and its ears dropped.

I hummed. “Show me.”

The Minccino faintly glowed with fairy type and stuck an elegant and gracious poise. The Cryogonal shifted in a way it hadn’t before, it sounded like disapproval. We both could tell that something was wrong. Thankfully I had read a good description of the move and was able to catch its pitfalls.

“I understand.” The Minccino stopped and looked at me, preoccupied. “Valley, you have to play to your strengths with Charm. Charming someone is not about hiding behind a mask of grace and innocence. It’s about revealing your inner self and letting it shine through.”

“Min?”

I laughed. “You are not a Kalosian noble, you are a Johtonian warrior.”

“…Minccino!” The wide-eyed pokemon shook her head and smiled.

The Minccino tried to use charm again. This time she stuck a battle stance, her four limbs on the ground, a sneer on her face, and her large tail pointed towards the sky, ready to swing down and deliver a strike.

This time the pink shine of the fairy energy glowed in a satisfied and strong sheen.

The eyes of the Cryogonal narrowed in a smile, a smile of approval.

“That's it!” I clapped my hands. “Congratulations Valley, you learned all the moves you needed to, what do you want to do now?”

The Minccino’s eyes narrowed, and then she smirked.

-

“Sorry, it took so long to get to you, Mesa,” I said to the Baltoy as he turned to us. “Valley asked for quite a list of moves and I had to show her how to do at least three.”

The Baltoy slightly nodded its head, then raised an arm to greet the Cryogonal. The Cryogonal shifted his plates towards the sky, greetings.

“You were working on mastering Psybeam and Rock Tomb, and its interactions with other types right?” The Baltoy nodded. “Show us please.”

A ball of pink appeared in front of the Baltoy, then it was compressed into a small ball the size of a fist. The ball blasted forward and stretched, turning into a beam. It hit a tree and pierced it halfway through the trunk.

The floating of Mesa wobbled, he had become exhausted.

“Good job!” The Baltoy stabilized itself, raised a hand to me and I slapped it. “If you are too tired to show the Rock Tomb we can do it later.”

The Baltoy shook its head and turned to another side. His body glowed and a little spike of rock surged from the snowy floor. It was a hard rock transformed from the soil below the ice. It stood at one meter high from the ground.

Mesa began to glow just as the rock began to disperse along the ground as it became sand, and then it rose with snow between pockets of grains. The snowed sand reunited and stirred into itself, becoming mud. The mud floated to the sky and Mesa began to wobble.

“Mesa, you all right?” I walked towards him.

The pokemon glowed again and the mud paste formed four big lumps of mud. A lot of water fell from them as they became rock again and then they fell to the ground at the same time as Mesa.

Snow rose to catch the Baltoy. I grabbed him as he almost fell to the side. I picked up Mesa, and put him on the ground, after some seconds it was clear that he had just fainted from the effort.

I sighed and returned him to his pokeball.

The Cryogonal shifted slowly, a question.

“Thank you for the help. Mesa likes to do things like that, normally he does not go this… Big, but I think the revelation that he could use snow to make mud made him go a little crazy. Well now that we visited everyone. It's your time now,” I said.

The Cryogonal shifted rapidly, enthusiasm.

“I did some research today when we were having breakfast and, apparently, there is a trick to teach Rain Dance.”

That article that I read, which was inspired by a chapter in a book by a water pokemon master, went into detail to explain how Rain Dance worked and how to take a shortcut to teach each different type of pokemon the move. For ice types, the article suggested teaching them Aurora or Ice Beam since creating a ball of energy and turning that into a beam was one-third of making Rain Dance.

“We are going to learn Aurora Beam. And then use what we learn from that move to learn Rain Dance.”

This time, the shift of its ice plates was still one of approval but it was a bigger one than before. So an enthusiastic approval.

“Now, remember when Mesa used Psybeam?”

-

After eating lunch we decided to rest a little. Valley tried to get up to train her new future moves but she was too full and just laid down again. I was not as dead as them since I had not eaten as much. It wasn’t me that trained hard all morning after all.

I used this opportunity to finally pick up “Notes from Year Two”, the journal that Brian had given me to learn from. I opened the book and began to read.

One thing I hadn’t understood when Brian had first given me this book was why he gave me the journal from his second year instead of his first.

Now as I finished the first chapter, which was an analysis of the previous year, I understood why. He didn’t go to the Conference in his first year. He halted at the sixth badge. Three times he tried and three times he failed to pass through the wall that was the sixth badge.

My face was stone as I put down the journal for a second.

I had researched Brian after he left, the government site has a list of every pokemon master that worked for the Indigo Region, together with a brief description of their feats and accolades.

Brian had been born in Johto. He began his journey at twelve years old and was judged a promising trainer at fifteen, after ending up in fourth at the Silver Conference. He then entered the army and was sent to Kanto to help with the emerging terrorist group that would become Team Rocket.

He had been a rookie in the division that fought the first real battle of that war. The battle in which Gym Leader Marco was killed, and the battle that opened space for Giovanni to become Gym Leader.

That kind of guy couldn’t reach the Conference in his first year.

I remembered what I had said to Professor Oak, that I would win the Conference. I had not said that I would, really, but it was the spirit of the thing.

Needless to say, that first chapter didn’t help with my self-esteem.