There were small rumors that there were secret meetings and talks between top-tier trainers.

Some people said these groups were organized by the year that you began your journey as a pokemon trainer. Some said they were organized by Type, or by age, or by how many badges a pokemon trainer had.

But almost everyone agreed that pokemon trainers just traveled way too much to maintain connections like the ones seen, for example, in the known and popular Pokemon Groups of Sinnoh, who were mostly created and used by kids in the youngster program who were from the same city. Kids from ten to twelve at most got two badges by the end of their circuit, one from their own city and another from the modern Gyms where it was closer and safer to walk to and back from your own city.

Proper pokemon trainers just traveled way too much between cities and Regions to maintain connections like that and in Indigo was even worse since here it's acceptable to simply vanish to off-route places like Mount Mortar or the Frontier for training during the off-season.

However, I had always imagined that having a network of trainers who helped each other could be a very powerful thing in the pokemon world. If you wanted to find things in promotion in other cities. Information on wild pokemon that you wanted to catch, a technique that you saw that someone might know how to teach or train, and most importantly, having people to battle.

Having sparring partners was even more important when one considers that the stronger a trainer becomes the more they begin to hoard and hide their knowledge and experience, even refusing battles in hopes of catching people off guard in tournaments and Conferences, so making friends and allies with other trainers earlier on became even more important.

After discussing this with Jeremy, Alice, and Dendra who was unfortunately not invited, they agreed with me so I sent an email back accepting the invitation.

Now, two days later, I was in front of a charming two-story yellow house.

I released Mesa and was thrilled when the Doll pokemon leaned back and opened his body and eyes wide, showing that he was surprised at my new clothes. It was an emotion he still hadn’t displayed before, normally he always saw me in my old everyday clothes, jeans, white or black shirt, and black shoes and when it was cold I wore a plain old black jacket.

Today, however, I had put on the new traveling clothes that I had bought just two days after the interview with Professor Oak. I had assumed that I would only wear these clothes when I went to battle Bugsy but I decided, and the others agreed, that the only thing to do when meeting fellow trainers was to dress like a trainer.

So I was wearing a long-sleeved grey shirt, black cargo pants with lots of pockets, very comfortable blue hiking shoes, a light sleeveless black traveling jacket since it was warm and I also wore my Pokeball Belt.

I walked up the three steps to the front door and knocked. After some seconds the door opened and a kid, probably twelve years old, appeared. He had brown hair and eyes, and like me also wore traveling clothes, but his were dark and red, he had a Pokeball Belt with two normal pokeballs on it, and in his hands, he had a sheet. When he looked at me he froze.

“Hello, I'm here for a trainer’s meeting, is this the place?”

“Yes, it is, name please?” He coughed.

“Scott Wood and this is my Baltoy, Mesa.”

The boy looked at the piece of paper, nodded, and then made room for me to enter. “We will just pass through the house. The meeting will take place in the backyard, my name is Roland by the way.”

Mesa and I entered and he closed the door, then we began to make our way through the house which looked very homely, like a house that you would see in a sitcom, the thing that attracted my eyes the most were the pictures. There were a lot of them, everywhere. It looked like a normal family lived here, a father, a mother, two kids, an older girl and a younger boy, four or five pokemon made regular appearances here and there, interesting enough they were all from the Western Continent, a Luxray, a Lipard, an Emolga and an Amoonguss.

We exited the house to a big backyard. There was a big outdoor wood table with space for maybe eight people, there were three girls there, two seated on opposite sides of the table and one that was standing, they also looked to be twelve years old and I began to panic a little.

Was this a kid’s meeting? I knew that rationally, at least for the first half of the circuit, most of the trainers I would speak, interact and battle with would be twelve years old, seeing as I was also a first-year trainer, but still, it would be awkward to be the only sixteen-year-old in the middle of a bunch of twelve years old.

When the girl who was standing saw us she excused herself and came to talk. The guy that accompanied me, Roland, just nodded to her.

“It is great to meet you, Scott Wood, right? My name is Katy Anderson.” She was a blond girl with green eyes and a single light blue streak on her hair. She was wearing a white shirt with a light blue jacket and grey cargo pants, she extended her hand and I shook it.

“Good to meet you too,” I said.

“I'm glad that you came, I thought that someone like you wouldn’t come.”

“Like me?” I said, a bit confused.

Her face took a nervous look and she seemed to struggle to speak.

“Now that everyone has arrived we can begin the meeting right Katy?” Roland said

She turned to him. “Yes! Of course, the others are waiting for us.”

So it's just four kids then, great. Not that I have anything against kids but… I was expecting at least someone at fourteen or higher.

While we followed her to the table I looked around and saw that some pokemon were by the side while a fully grown, and very muscled, Luxray, probably the same one from the photos watched over them, they were normal pokemon for the most part, there was a Sentret, a Zubat, a Snubbul, the only outside the norm was a Palpitoed which was a water and ground type pokemon from Unova.

So obviously Katy Anderson was an Unovan or, at least, one of her parents was based on her surname, probably the father who was a trainer too now that I think about it. The pokemon in the pictures appeared a lot more when he was in them too and now that I was getting near to the Luxray I noticed that he also had faded battle scars, so another pretty big tell.

We sat down. Mesa briefly looked towards where the pokemon were but then turned back, his mood right now was disinterested so I didn’t even ask if he wanted to join them, he just floated near me for now. I looked around the table, as all five people were now seated. Katy, who I was almost sure was the organizer of the meeting sat between one girl and Ronald while I sat at the other side of the table with another girl.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“I just want to start this meeting by saying to you three thank you for coming today, My name is Katy and this is Ronald we are both pokemon trainers and we had this idea about having a meeting between trainers.” Ronald nodded to her. “If you guys could introduce yourselves.”

As the girls didn’t seem to want to start I cleared my throat. “My name is Scott Wood,”

“Jess Brin.” Said the girl sitting by my side, she had medium dark hair in a ponytail.

The other girl, a redhead wearing a white ivy hat said. “My name is Emilia Cord, nice to meet you guys.”

Katy nodded. “Roland, if you can start.”

Roland nodded. “Well. Katy and I have been battling in the Battle Hall for two months now in preparation for our journey and, in between the battles that we fought there, when we were resting we also watched a lot of fights and what we saw from you three were some of the best battles that the zero badge section ever saw, of course, we have invited more people, exactly ten, but we knew the majority would not turn up.”

That is the competitive world of pokemon training rearing its head.

“But, of course, five is still pretty great to start the kind of group that we have in mind,” Katy added.

“So you want to make a group?” Said the dark-haired girl, Jess. “What do you want to set up exactly?”

“In simple terms what we imagined,” Katy said and gestured to Roland and herself, “Is a group of trainers who are united by a common goal, to become better trainers and battlers by cooperating instead of the mainstream Johto way of competing all the time.”

“We want to create a group where whenever we meet, be it on the road or in cities, we will train together and trade information and tips so that we can support each other in our journeys,” Roland said.

“We think that if we get together to share tips about battling and training and develop a healthy rivalry while we do our respective journeys, we will have a greater chance to even get to the conference in our first year.” Katy completed.

The girl on my side of the table, Jess, snorted. “The conference? Do you think that we can get to the conference in our first year just by holding each other’s hands? Do you believe in the power of friendship too?”

“We know it sounds a little too good, but you know, there are precedents, there are many times in Conference history that groups of two or three made it to the Conference by doing the circuit together, Maxwell, Sarah and Kent, Miran and Samantha, Samuel Oak, and Agatha.”

Hmm, bringing renowned trainers was a good point.

To get to the Conference at twelve years old is hard, not just because it is physically and intellectually challenging, but because you also have to possess something of an iron will, there are many challenges along the way that are going to set you back again and again and unless you have a very strong will to succeed you will not get to the end. For a kid, just seeing your pokemon being beaten down once is already very hard. I can see how sharing the burden might be the way to go in these kid’s case.

Jess rolled their eyes seemingly uninterested but I saw how her eyes had briefly widened at the mention of those names. “Okay, continue with your offer.”

“Roland,” Katy said. The boy nodded and took a laptop from a bag that was on the ground, then he opened it and turned it to show us what seemed to be a website.

“There is the problem of how we will maintain communication in a big group who might not take the same routes, it's very difficult to get a signal on the routes to speak on the phone so we searched a bit and we found this.”

Roland turned to us. “This site is called the Pokemon Battle Forum and it was created by the Sinnoh branch of the League, you can register and then you will participate in the forum which is a space where people post threads and talk to each other by writing, sometimes even someone big will post some tips and tricks, like some past conferences winners or finalists.

“You can also create writing groups in it so what we can do is create a group and everyone will, sometimes, write about their own progress and what they found out, moves, tactics, things like that, then when we get to cities we can read what they wrote and answer without the need to call each other.”

Katy nodded. “If anyone sees a rare pokemon that someone wants, they can just write it and when that person gets to a city they can read up the information, for example.”

The three of us spent some seconds in silence, and then finally the girl by my side, the dark-haired one said.

“That sounds okay, I guess, it doesn’t sound so hard to maintain, but I am sponsored by a League Official, I will be going pretty fast and will not have time to stop and wait for you guys to catch up.”

Katy smiled. “That’s the good news. Everyone here is sponsored by a League Official.”

What? I looked around at the two girls and saw that they were surprised too.

Roland then explained. “We watched a lot of people fight in the Battle Hall and every time the announcer said the name of the winner in a good battle we would write it down and then later research it on the site of the circuit. They need to put a pin explaining that this or that trainer is sponsored by so and so person on the profile of every sponsored trainer.”

I didn’t know that as I had never entered the League website, so now that was another thing to do then. I saw that this was news for the two girls as well.

“Why would they do that?” Asked Jess, her browns narrowing in annoyance.

“For transparency of course,” Katy said while shrugging,” Roland and I are sponsored by my father who works at the League as a Ranger Instructor, ah, but don’t feel obligated to tell who your sponsor is, that’s okay if you want to keep it to yourself.”

Now I also understood Katy’s and Roland’s reactions when they met me. They already knew who I was sponsored by and so were afraid that a trainer sponsored by someone with the status that Professor Oak had, who is known to be pretty high on the League and who consistently sponsors great trainers such as his newest ones, Red, Blue, and Leaf, wouldn’t want to work with people who were sponsored by a Ranger Instructor, thankfully for them and me they tried sending an invitation anyway instead of just assuming that I wouldn’t want to participate in something that I was quite liking so far.

They had put thought into this presentation, by inviting just people who could keep up and involving the pokenet in an actual positive manner. If all five of us were as good battlers as they thought. It could be good for everyone involved. As for speaking of Professor Oak. I didn’t want to scare the two girls or derail the conversation so I would keep that to myself for now until everyone has decided by themselves. With no pressure from the powerful name.

“Well, I don’t know if that will work out or not, but it's worth trying,” Emilia said.

I offered my thoughts. “I like the idea. As someone who accompanied the trainer scenario for quite a while, this is definitely something that I hoped would exist between trainers, particularly I think it is also a great use of the Pokenet as well and if this is successful maybe it would be the start of a new way of training in Johto.”

I, of course, had hyped it up a bit at the end to sell the idea to Jess who seemed to be on the fence. She hummed and thought about it for a minute.

In Johto, the norm was that trainers should live isolated lives and train alone. It was not a rule or an enforcement, but a cultural phenomenon. Some people, however, didn’t like that approach, and considering that I only became a trainer because someone was thoughtful enough to write a book about Pokemon Training, I also differed from that approach.

“I will participate but only if I know who your sponsors are,” Jess said, “and since I am asking that I will start, my sponsor is an Academy instructor in Sinnoh. I came here to take my shot at the egg.”

What a surprise. The hardest to convince about working together came from ‘soft’ Sinnoh.

“My sponsor is my uncle who is a Veteran Gym Trainer at Azalea Gym,” Emilia said.

Then they turned to me. “My sponsor is a Pokemon Professor, as we will probably search each other on the League website later, I will already tell you that the Pokemon Professor in question is Professor Samuel Oak.”

The two girls who didn’t have the information reacted as expected, Jess’ expression, which mostly had just been set in a frown the entire time, opened up in surprise and she leaned back from me and Emilia’s eyes widened.

After the how or why questions, which I answered as briefly as I could, Katy commented. “You know, we invited some trainers with less influential sponsors than Professor Oak. Some of them respectfully rejected but most were just arrogant. We were worried that you were being sarcastic in your email and just wasn’t going to appear.”

I hung my head as Blue would probably do that if the stories about him were to be believed. That reminded me that, also being sponsored by Professor Oak, I might one day meet Blue or even Red.

After that everyone agreed to participate in the group, Katy and Ronald already had some names for our group but in the end, we all decided on Project, just because it would work something like a group project. We decided on a few more things about how the group would work and even planned to speak more about how our travels would work.

Katy, Ronald, and Emilia wanted to go to Violet City next because there were some pokemon on those routes that they wanted to get, while Jess wanted to go to Goldenrod, so Jess and I made a note to speak to each other at some time, to see if we would want to travel together. They also wanted to have a sparing session for our newest pokemon, the ones without experience in battling so far. We marked the date of that session right after my match with Bugsy which would happen after tomorrow.