“…and you just stumbled into each other?”

“Yep! Turns out my napping spot was his napping spot, first. So I shifted over to give him some space and we just chilled for a bit. Turns out we vibe pretty well, so he decided to join my team!”

I shook my head. I was getting thoroughly annoyed at that word, ‘vibe’ — I was starting to suspect Seb was just using it as a substitute when he couldn’t give a proper explanation. But I couldn’t argue with the results.

We were walking through the streets of Fuschia back to our rooms in the pokemon center, and I glanced to Seb’s belt and the four pokeballs stored there — or rather, the one pokeball, two great balls, and one safari ball. Unless any of his pokemon fused, he was nearing a ‘full’ team already, an impressive achievement so early in the season, especially considering his pokemon’s power. While trainers were allowed to carry up to twelve pokemon, sanctioned battles were capped at six versus six.

“What’re you planning for tomorrow?” Seb asked as we walked. His slakoth was once again draped around his neck, while Porygon floated behind me next to Hobbes. Sableye and the rest of Seb’s pokemon were back in their balls.

It seemed like all of our pokemon had a good time at the daycare, Porygon especially flying at me and buzzing excitedly when we returned after the safari. Sableye was a bit harder to read, but he at least didn’t seem like he’d hated the experience, and all three of my pokemon had spent the majority of the time playing with their new friends in Seb’s team, if I’d understood Hobbes’ and Porygon’s cries correctly. But now it was late, the sun setting over the road leading out of Fuschia, and after the day we’d had I wanted nothing more than to return to our rooms at the pokecenter and collapse into bed.

“Nothing too exciting. Probably just some more training and time at the battle courts. I want to get started toward Pewter City, soon, but I’m not in a huge rush.” I wasn’t too far behind my new friend in terms of number of pokemon, but Porygon and Sableye still needed a lot of training before they were ready for more serious battling.

“Oh? You planning on challenging the gyms in the traditional order, then?”

I shrugged. “Might as well. I’ve got a few other things I’d like to do around Pewter City, too.” Brock was the traditional ‘first’ gym for aspiring trainers for a couple of reasons: he was much less intimidating than many of the traditionally later gym leaders, and though his pokemon weren’t weak, the rock type’s many weaknesses to commonly found starter pokemon types made many view his as the ‘easiest’ gym. “How about you? You know what gym you’re challenging next?”

“Eh, I figure I’ll just go with the flow, see where I end up,” he responded with a shrug. But then his shoulders sagged. “Not for a bit, though. My parents got my family some tickets for the S.S. Anne, starting tomorrow. So my journey’s gonna be on hold for a while.”

I whistled. Moreso than even the Safari Zone, the S.S. Anne was the premier vacation spot in Kanto for the rich and famous. “I doubt it’ll slow you down. From what I’ve heard, that ship’s a battler’s paradise. And that there are much more varied pokemon to face than you’ll find battling youngsters or bug catchers.”

“I suppose,” he said with another shrug. “It’s still annoying. I was looking forward to getting away from everything and everyone on my journey, yet one week in and I’ll already be stuck back with my parents.”

I gave a half-hearted nod. That made sense, but it was hard to feel sorry for him when a ticket on the famous party-slash-battle boat cost more than half of my parents’ yearly salaries.

“Wanna trade numbers?” I asked instead as the pokecenter’s sliding doors whooshed open in front of us, Porygon zipping forward excitedly as I pulled out my phone. “If we end up in the same city, I’m sure my pokemon would love a rematch.” I smirked. “Just don’t expect to beat us so easily next time.”

His frown turned into a smile. “Heh. You’re on.”

----------------------------------------

The next few days settled into a comfortable routine. Each morning my pokemon and I would wake up early, eat a quick breakfast, and retreat to the clearing outside of the city for a morning training session.

Hobbes spent most of his time practicing transform, which I suspected was something he would have to get used to. Transform was a move with a ton of nuance, and I doubted he would ever reach the point that we could call the move truly ‘perfected.’ For the training sessions, with only Porygon and Sableye as targets for practice, he alternated between transforming as quickly as possible and making the transformations as ‘perfect’ as they could be.

Since all of Hobbes’ transformations included his patchwork disguise, we couldn’t easily determine the success of the transformation from looks alone. Thankfully, we didn’t need to — unlike ditto, who often used their transformations to blend in with the targets of the move, Hobbes’ goal was just to steal his opponents’ power. So after each transformation we’d measure and compare the strengths of his transformed forms’ most powerful new move — thundershock for Porygon and night shade for Sableye — to judge the success of that transformation.

While he was doing that, Porygon and Sableye had their own training regimens.

Porygon was working on his power. Thundershock had been supereffective against slowpoke, yet the dopey pokemon had taken a staggering number of the electric attacks without showing any signs of injury, even accounting for its use of amnesia. So we found a burnt-out stump in the middle of the field for him to repeatedly thundershock with the goal of packing more power into each of the attacks. Speed and accuracy were secondary concerns until we could get his attacks to contain enough power to force his opponents to take him seriously.

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

In truth, it wasn’t too surprising that he struggled with power. Even before his decades-long hibernation, he had never been a battler or even had any experience as a wild pokemon. It would be a long journey for him to get to where he could match other pokemon at his level, and even longer for him to match a pokemon like Hobbes that had been battling for years. But he was determined to join me in battles, so I would do my best to train him to reach his goals.

Sableye was having slightly different issues. The most obvious was his tendency to ignore my directions in battle, instead doing whatever he thought was best at the moment. But I knew that was just a matter of trust, which would hopefully be resolved with time. The more pressing issues were his moves — or rather, his lack of moves.

At present, scratch was his only non-ghost-type damaging move and leer his only status move. With so many of the common pokemon of trainers early on their journey possessing at least a partial normal typing, that left him with a severe lack of options in many matchups.

So I was working with him to expand his move pool. Detect and disable were two moves I knew the sableye line of the game world could learn, and they would drastically expand our options into even higher-leveled battles. So I tasked him with standing with his eyes closed as close to Porygon’s thundershocks as was safe in an attempt to ‘feel’ the energy of the attacks. Not in the literal sense — that would be easy enough to do by simply stepping into the attack — but by sensing the usage of type energy to generate the shock. Which I hoped would eventually allow him to preemptively dodge or even prevent the use of that type energy.

I was no expert when it came to teaching moves, but that method of practice made sense to me based on my limited understanding of how detect and disable worked. Unlike in the games, detect worked differently than the move protect. While protect created an ‘impenetrable’ barrier of normal-type energy to foil incoming attacks, detect gave the user a sixth sense of approaching attacks, allowing them to dodge by the narrowest of margins with temporary prescience. Of course, this meant that successfully using detect also required a certain amount of speed and for the attack to be limited in scope — there would be no chance of detect preventing damage from a move like boomburst — but it was still an extremely powerful move, at least if the online videos I’d watched of it being used were to be believed.

And disable had the potential to be even more powerful, though I had less idea of how it would function. I had to assume that it involved the manipulation of an opponent’s type energy while it was still in their bodies, in the same way detect involved detecting that type energy, but I was really just guessing. Hopefully, the fact that it was in game-sableye’s learnset would enable Sableye to learn it with a bit of focused practice.

I wandered between the three pokemon and offered what advice I could: judging the results of Hobbes’ transformed attacks, encouraging Porygon in his assault of the stump, and gently reprimanding Sableye whenever I noticed him peeking through his eyelids at Porygon. And when it looked like they had a handle on their own training…I trained myself.

There were videos of trainers in this world wielding incredible powers — of people like Bruno going toe-to-toe with hitmonchan, of swimmers holding their breath for dozens of minutes at a time, and whatever spookiness it was that Sabrina did. I know the anime had some mentions of ‘aura’, but if that existed in this world I hadn’t felt anything like it myself. Regardless, I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to be in the best shape possible, so I rotated between running laps, doing pushups, and holding my body in an arched ‘boat’ position.

After around four hours of non-stop training, we would take a quick break for lunch before spending the rest of the afternoon in the battle courts, challenging the others hoping to train up their own pokemon before starting a gym challenge.

I didn’t take the battles too seriously. I didn’t try to throw them or anything like that, but neither did I treat winning as the ultimate goal. It was just another form of training for my pokemon, perhaps even more important than our morning exercises in the field.

Most of the battles were one versus ones, since I wanted to give each of my pokemon plenty of time to rest between their matches and watch each other battle. There was little, if any, money wagered on the outcomes of the battles, and only twice did we have official referees to oversee the matches.

I wasn’t keeping a strict count, but after a week of battling my pokemon were sitting at close to a fifty-percent average winrate, with Porygon being lower and Sableye being higher. As hard as he was trying, Porygon just didn’t have the power to match most of the other new trainers’ pokemon. He was improving, but it would take more than just a week of training to equal the months or possibly even years of battling experience some of our opponents had. Win or lose, I made sure to encourage him after each battle and caution patience, reminding him that growth was a long journey. But he remained frustrated with himself after each poor showing regardless of my words. Thankfully, Hobbes picked up the slack, turning into Porygon’s number-one fan as he cheered louder than anyone else from the sidelines of all my floaty friend’s battles. He even took to transforming into terrifying versions of Porygon’s opponents in attempts to distract them mid-battle, to surprising success. Porygon appreciated that assistance less than he did the cheering, but it gave Hobbes endless joy to see the startled reactions of the opposing pokemon after seeing their horror-show reflections.

Sableye had still yet to successfully use detect or disable, though I thought he might be close to at least detect. And I still suspected he already knew another move that he was keeping hidden from me, but I was resolved to be patient and let him reveal that in his own time. But even with his smaller move pool, he saw much more success than Porygon in the battle courts.

Too many of his opponents simply didn’t know how to deal with his ghost-dark typing. Coupled with his natural ferocity and liberal use of shadow sneak, he was able to eke out wins in most of his battles. They weren’t pretty, as he was quick to trade blows when he should have dodged or charge forward when he should have waited. But it usually ended with him standing tall and his opponents in the dirt, so I didn’t critique him too harshly.

And as for Hobbes…he probably could have won all of his matches, had he gone all out with his base form’s moveset. But he’d been fighting against youngsters as a mimikyu for ages — it was time for him to learn how to fight as a dimikyu.

So at the start of each of his matches, he used transform and attempted to win with the stolen form of his opponents. It…wasn’t particularly successful, especially early in the week. Many of the trainers were novice enough to wait for him to complete his transformations before attacking, but even with the extra time, his new forms lacked power compared to the originals, especially since so many of the forms and their moves were new to him.

His previous experience with mimic helped somewhat, at least when it came to using his opponents’ moves. But using a mimicked move wasn’t quite the same as using a move copied via transfom, so there was a learning curve. But learning he was, and he won more and more of his battles as the week went on, most of them from strategic use of his immunity to the first hit with disguise.

But regardless of how much we were learning and growing, we couldn’t stay around Fuschia City training forever — we had places to see, new pokemon to catch, and gyms to challenge. At the end of the week, I packed up my supplies that had somehow made their way into all corners of our rented room and checked out of the pokemon center.

It was time to head to Pewter City.