It was late by the time my pokemon finished their checkup, but not too late for a call home. Hobbes took absolute delight in transforming into his horror-movie version of me and being the first one to greet my parents in the video call, still laughing to himself five minutes later at their reactions. After getting over their initial scare, my parents and Kisses absolutely loved my two new pokemon, showering them with enough words of affection that the two were begging to escape into their ball and phone after just a few minutes.
My family was less enthused with Hobbes’ new form, mostly because they knew how much trouble he would get into with transform. But after lecturing him — and me as well — to be responsible with his new power, they were similarly affectionate to the small pokemon.
It was late by the time we got to bed, and I worried we wouldn’t be ready the following morning for the battle with Seb — Hobbes was still new to his fusion, after all, and I hadn’t had a chance to do any training with Porygon or Sableye. But a quick message to Seb’s phone relieved my fears.
It turns out his and my definitions of ‘first thing in the morning’ were very different. We scheduled our battle for eleven a.m., which gave me and my team roughly three hours after breakfast to train and figure out a battle plan.
Luckily, the checkup didn’t reveal any further issues with my pokemon. Sableye and Porygon were both somewhat malnourished and consequently weaker than they could be, but that would resolve itself with time. I sprinkled a small portion of my poached diamonds on top of Sableye’s pokechow, which he devoured with almost scary gusto.
According to the nurse who looked over my pokemon, Porygon could subsist perfectly fine on the standard pokechow as long as he got some access to a technological device. The sophistication didn’t matter as much as the fact that the device could connect to ‘cyberspace’, at least when it came to his nutrition. Porygon might prefer to explore more sophisticated devices and networks, but that was just for pleasure. The nurse permitted Porygon to use the center’s computers, but warned against trying to breach into anything that was designated ‘off-limits.’ Apparently the pokecenter, and many other important networks, had porygon of their own to defend them, and they would take great offense to any attempts to circumvent that security.
I was a little worried that Porygon, after being out of contact with the world at large for the last several decades, would accidentally stumble into one of the off-limits areas in his curiosity. But the nurse assured me that was impossible — a porygon would take to cyberspace like a duck to water, and there was no way he could miss the warnings.
The only interesting result of Hobbes’ check-up was his new typings. According to the tests, he was primarily a ghost type, secondarily a normal type, with fairy type as a distant third. Unlike the games and anime, it was entirely possible for a pokemon to have more than two types, just as it was possible for the types to differ in intensity. For example, while bulbasaur was a grass-poison type, its grass typing was much stronger than poison. This meant that a bulbasaur’s strongest attacks would typically be grass-type moves, with poison moves being second, and all other types third. This functioned the same way defensively, with bulbasaur being most weak to fire, flying, and ice, slightly less weak to psychic, and normally resistant to types like normal and rock.
The fact that pokemon could have more than two types, and that those types could vary in intensity, threw a wrench into much of my previous world’s pokemon knowledge. But thankfully it didn’t change my understanding of matchups too much — a gyarados’ partial third dragon typing would make it slightly more resistant to electric attacks than I would expect, but not to the level that electric attacks would be weak against it. For the most part, it just affected the potency of different pokemon’s type matchups, not what those matchups actually were.
For their part, Porygon was almost entirely normal with just a smidgen of electric and psychic types, while Sableye was perfectly split fifty-fifty dark and ghost.
We found a mostly empty field just beyond the battle courts outside of the city to do our training. There were a number of other teams sharing the field, but they were each focused on their own pokemon and training so I resolved to do the same.
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“Okay! Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I called after releasing Sableye and calling Porygon out of my phone. “Hobbes, you need to practice transform. For now, don’t worry about speed, just focus on the transformation being as thorough as possible. Take turns transforming between Porygon and Sableye.” Thus far, he’d been pretty good about being able to transform into pokemon he’d encountered on his first try — better than the ditto he’d fused with, at least — but so far he’d only tested it on familiar pokemon. Before yesterday, he’d never encountered a porygon or a sableye, so I hoped they would pose more of a challenge. “Porygon, Sableye, show me what moves you know, and we’ll figure out where to go from there.”
My team jumped to their respective tasks with varying levels of enthusiasm.
Porygon demonstrated an impressive variety of moves: tackle, magnet rise, agility, conversion, thundershock, psybeam, and what I think might have been recycle — it was difficult to tell without a berry on hand for testing. The move that interested me most, however, was conversion; it acted similarly to transform or mimic in that it copied some aspect of its opponent, but in this case it only copied the typing.
Sableye’s moveset was smaller, including only leer, scratch, astonish, shadow sneak, and night shade. Those weren’t bad moves, as I knew first-hand how powerful shadow sneak — and other priority moves — could be in the right situations. But from his shifty glances and hesitation at the end, I suspected Sableye was hiding at least one more move from me. Which was fine; he’d just come from a terrible situation, and despite his choice to follow me as his trainer, it was understandable for him to still hold some distrust toward humanity. Trust could only be built through time, so I would give him the time he needed. But even with his limited moveset, I was excited for Sableye’s potential. With how quickly he was able to use leer, I was almost certain he had the ability prankster, which gave his status moves a higher priority.
Traditionally, pokemon moves could be divided into three categories: physical, special, and status. The physical moves corresponded to a pokemon’s physical attack and defense, while special moves corresponded to their special attack and special defense. But the divide between special and physical functioned slightly differently in this world than in the games.
Basically, physical moves were any attacks that relied solely on a pokemon’s physical body, while special moves were attacks powered by the pokemon’s external manipulation of ‘type’ energy — in the case of Sableye’s night shade, ghost-type energy. But manipulating type energy, or aura as some called it, was not an easy or quick process; a special attack almost always took longer to perform than an equivalent physical attack, requiring the user to build up the necessary energy before unleashing it upon their opponents. Unlike physical moves, however, most special moves could be performed from range. So as long as two pokemon didn’t start too close together, it would take about the same amount of time to attack with a special move as it would to close the distance and attack with a physical move.
Status moves were similar to special moves in that they utilized type energy for their power, but while special moves manipulated that energy externally, status moves were the internal manipulation of type energy. They never did any direct damage, but they could be used to boost a pokemon’s future attacks, weaken an opponent’s defense, or any number of other buffs or debuffs.
I wasn’t sure how it worked, but the prankster ability allowed a pokemon to internally manipulate type-energy much faster than what was typically possible. Which meant stableye could get two or more status moves off before his opponents could even use one, and I was sure his speed would increase even further with training. With leer as his only current status move it wouldn’t be that much of a game-changer, but I knew the potential was there for Sableye to be an amazing battler.
That was all for the future, however. With how new they were to battling and to having me as their trainer, the best thing I could work on with Porygon and Sableye was their willingness and speed with which they reacted to my commands. So that’s what we did for the next two hours — taking turns, I would call out different moves and other directions, and they would respond as quickly as possible.
That was what we were still doing two and a half hours later when I got a message from Seb saying he was up and ready for our battle, so I called my small team back together.
“Okay everyone, let’s take a breather and have a quick snack — not too much, you don’t want to battle on a full stomach.” Sableye looked at me with sad eyes, begging for more than the light sprinkle of tiny diamonds I gave him, but I refused to be moved. “In just a few minutes, we’re going to have our first battle as a team. I want you to give it your all, but remember — this is just a friendly. There’s no money or other stakes on the line. We don’t hate or want to kill our opponents. Our goal is to enjoy ourselves and to learn.” I paused, thinking, before continuing. “I’ll have to confirm this with Seb, but let’s try to stay away from knock-out blows. I’d like each of you to be able to battle more than once, which we can’t do if you’re unconscious.”
I received confirmation from each of my pokemon before nodding myself.
It was time to battle.