"Mi..." Hobbes gave a tired cry as the defeated pokemon fled, and surprisingly the cry wasn't in response to his torn disguise.

"Don't worry, buddy, we'll find one soon. They've gotta be coming from somewhere," I said, reassuring both him and myself.

We'd been searching and battling for four hours now, and the sun was starting to set over the horizon. With how easily we'd found the first ditto, I'd foolishly thought that it would be easy, that in just a couple of minutes we'd have the new addition to the team. I'd even been prepping an empty pokeball in my hand, ready for capture, when the ditto had flung a chunk of sticky dirt at Hobbes, an obvious use of the move mud-slap.

For a moment, I'd been stunned. Dittos only knew a single move, transform. Had we stumbled across some weird variant that was somehow capable of learning other moves? But a second later I realized my mistake.

It wasn't a pure ditto we were fighting. It was a digto, a fusion of diglett and ditto.

With the similar size, purple coloring, and distinctive dopey smile, I had misidentified the digto as an unfused ditto, and Hobbes seemed to realize my mistake at the same time. He was slowed by the mud that coated his disguise, but not enough to seriously hinder him. Before the digto could unleash another mud-slap, he dashed forward and clawed at the digto with shadow sneak, the digto releasing a cry of pain and immediately turning to flee.

Neither Hobbes nor I gave chase. For our plan to work, we needed a pure, unfused ditto. We just needed to look around a bit more to find one.

What followed was hours of quick battles and disappointment.

Pidgtos, pidgey-ditto fusions. Catertos, caterpie-ditto fusions. Rattatos, rattata-ditto fusions. Sentros, sentret-ditto fusions. And so, so many more digtos. Yet no pure dittos.

"We'll find one soon..." I said again, just as much to Hobbes as to myself.

Typically, unfused wild pokemon outnumbered fused wild pokemon by at least twenty to one, but that obviously wasn't the case here. Dittos were renowned for their ability to fuse with any other pokemon, yet I hadn't believed it would be this difficult to find an unfused ditto.

Despite their easy ability to fuse with any other pokemon and the fact that fused pokemon were highly sought after as more powerful than their unfused counterparts, dittos weren't a popular choice for serious trainers. There was a time about half a century earlier, when Silph had just developed the poke-splicer that could trigger fusions between captured pokemon, that dittos were extremely popular, but trainers quickly realized that not all fused pokemon were created equal.

Typically, fused pokemon were more powerful than their unfused counterparts for one or more of four different reasons: improved stats, improved typings, improved movesets, and improved abilities. A meowth fused with a skarmory would hit much harder than just a base meowth, though not any harder than an unfused skarmory. And a steel-normal typing was considered much better than a pure normal typing, gaining numerous resistances while only adding weaknesses to ground and fire. They would have access to both of the fused pokemons' movesets, a much wider pool of potential moves to surprise an opponent with (although they would still have to train hard to learn and be proficient at all the moves available to them). And finally, a fused pokemon's innate ability would often become an amalgamation of the two fused pokemon's abilities, which was almost always a direct benefit.

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Ditto, however, offered none of these.

When untransformed, ditto had some of the worst base stats in the game. In this world, that translated to any pokemon that was fused with ditto was, at best, only as powerful as it had been prior to the fusion. Ditto was normal type, which -- while it didn't add any weaknesses besides fighting -- didn't add any resistances either, aside from its immunity to ghost, which wasn't a particularly common type of attack. The only move that ditto could learn was transform, a move that was extremely difficult to use effectively in battle. And even for those who managed to master transform and utilize their opponent's likeness and moves better than the opponent themselves, the move used up a few crucial seconds at the beginning of each battle. Seconds that the opposing pokemon could use to buff themselves up or close the distance before the ditto fusion was ready.

Finally, there was ditto's special ability: limber. All this did was keep ditto and ditto fusions from succumbing to paralysis, their flexible body unaffected by the annoying status condition. While undoubtedly useful, this ability was nothing compared to what something like huge power, or hundreds of other stronger abilities, could offer.

So while a few people here and there still sought out dittos for the 'prestige' of having a fused pokemon without the risk of a rejected fusion, serious trainers one and all looked down on them for being, essentially, a wasted fusion.

My situation with Hobbes, however, was different.

We would still face the issue of a ditto fusion not benefitting Hobbes any in terms of his 'stats', but that was fine; in the same way that ditto normally got around its abysmal stats with transform, mimikyu was already somewhat of a 'gimmick' pokemon in how he utilized his disguise to take the first hit of a battle. And while the normal typing didn't typically bring much to the table if it was part of a dual-typing, there was one exception to this: the ghost-normal type. It would become immune to normal's biggest weaknesses -- fighting moves -- as well as one of ghost's biggest weaknesses -- other ghost moves.

Of course, mimikyu was a fairy-ghost dual-typing already, so there was no guarantee that a mimikyu-ditto fusion would end up as a ghost-normal type over a normal-fairy type, but it was a fifty-fifty shot, so I was hopeful.

The two birds of how useless the move transform typically was and the relatively weak ability limber could also potentially be killed with a single stone. And that stone was ditto's hidden ability: imposter. Imposter invalidated transform's biggest weakness by activating a transformation immediately upon entering a battle, rather than taking a few seconds while the opponent had time to set up their own moves.

In the games, each pokemon had one to two possible normal abilities, and then most had an extra hidden ability that was much rarer and could only be acquired through special circumstances. I hadn't been able to find much about hidden abilities in this world, unfortunately; with how many different total potential combinations of pokemon fusions there were, any 'special abilities' would easily get lost among the noise of what people would claim made their pokemon unique. But with how the broad strokes of the mechanics on this world seemed to line up with my meta-knowledge, I assumed they had to exist. It was just up to me to find a ditto that possessed imposter.

Unfortunately, as the hours passed and we hadn't yet found a single ditto, my hopes of finding one with its hidden ability were swiftly dwindling. I was confident that we'd find a ditto eventually, but with how long it was taking us to find one, my original plan of simply tracking down dittos by the dozens until one of them had imposter was no longer feasible.

In the end, though, that wouldn't be an issue. I'd have preferred to catch the perfect ditto: one with imposter and with impressive stats, stronger and faster than its brethren. A ditto that wouldn't weaken Hobbes' and my future battling prospects. But at the end of the day, all of that was secondary.

Before everything else that made ditto a good potential fusion for Hobbes came my friend's desires -- and for that, I would sacrifice all of the other benefits and more.

"Mi!!" Hobbes called excitedly, and I turned to my companion, pushing through the few feet of tall grass that separated us. Ditto fusions weren't the most aggressive nor dangerous of pokemon, so we'd spread out a bit as we wandered through the grass to increase our odds of running into an unfused ditto. It wasn't too far, so in a few seconds I caught up to Hobbes, looking around for what caught his attention.

And then I smiled.

Finally, we found a ditto.