The sun was setting, and Grant’s hopes of making it to the first Viridian Forest village were all but crushed. The challenge wasn’t really what delayed him, it was the loss. He had a hard time keeping up the fast pace he had set before the challenge, and as the sky darkened, he estimated he was still a good four or five hours walk away from the village.

“Better to just find somewhere to camp for the night.” Grant said glumly. Grant was truly frustrated with the outcome of the challenge, and even more than that he was frustrated with how his pokemon journey was going so far. He was still scratched up from his fight with tangela, he was hungry and had very limited rations, and to top it all off he had just lost half of his money. He didn’t even know what to say to horsea who Grant had left in his ball despite the constant impatient vibrations it emitted.

Grant kept walking for another thirty minutes until he found a small clearing on the side of the road. The clearing had the ashes of an old fire inside, and Grant guessed that people frequently spent the night there. Unfortunately, Grant didn’t have the materials or know how to actually start a fire of his own, so dinner would be a pair of granola bars. It was as he sat in the dirt, and bit into the first granola bar, that he finally freed horsea from his pokeball.

Horsea looked angry. He glared at Grant clearly just as upset as his trainer.

“Sea.” Horsea accused. Grant wasn’t sure what to say. He had been thinking about it for the last hour, and he knew horsea was going to be mad about getting pulled from the challenge before he had fainted, but what else was Grant supposed to do?

“I’m sorry I pulled you from the challenge.” Grant finally said. Horsea huffed and rolled his tail as if to say ‘and?’

“And I’m sorry I froze up at the end. I couldn’t see a path forward that wouldn’t get you hurt.” Horsea rolled his eyes and rolled his tail again.

“And I’m sorry we didn’t stay behind in Pallet Town for a day or two to do some training?” Grant asked. He wasn’t exactly sure what horsea was looking for. Horsea just nodded at Grant’s words and pointed his tail at the granola bar in his hand.

“Right, sorry, let me get you some food.” Grant had purchased a small bag of food in Pallet Town with his limited budget before leaving. It was not exactly the greatest, the food claimed, ‘Loved by Water Types Every Where!’ but based on his expression horsea wasn’t in love with the food, even if he still ate it. Grant had plans to fix that situation once they were back in a real city.

When they finished eating, Grant proposed that they try to get a little training in before sleep. Horsea was thrilled at this suggestion, and Grant could see all the remaining anger horsea was holding onto fall away.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“I think there are three main areas for us to focus on for now.” Grant started. It was dark in the clearing, but the moon and stars were enough to see that horsea was locked on to every one of Grant’s words.

“First, is the power of your water gun. We need to get a stronger blast, I have a few ideas for that, but we’ll get to that in a second. The second area I want to focus on is widening the area of your smokescreen. It is a super useful move, but it just doesn’t cover enough area right now. Lastly, I want to work on your speed, that will come tomorrow. For now, let’s focus on water gun.” Grant explained. Grant had two ideas that would hopefully help Horsea’s water gun. The first was to have horsea charge up the attack longer, ideally creating a more powerful attack from the pressure build up. The second was to have horsea try to fire the water in a spiral to create a more compressed and hopefully more powerful attack. Grant explained his ideas to horsea, who got right to work.

Horsea had been angry with Grant before, but now he was angry with himself. Grant had explained his ideas for improving what horsea knew was a very weak water gun, and they were great ideas. The problem was horsea had trouble accomplishing even one of them. He had tried to hold the water gun to create a stronger blast, but he could only hold it for a second before the pressure was too much for horsea to contain. Despite the pressure being too much for horsea, the attack was hardly any better than before. It just fired slightly more water than usual. Spiraling the water like Grant expected was near impossible for horsea. He could get the water sort of moving, but he knew it wasn’t the tight spiral of water Grant was looking for. It had been a largely disappointing day. Sure, he got his human, and that was great, but horsea had failed to even damage the tangela, he had gotten pulled from the challenge before he had even gotten injured, and now he was failing to accomplish what in horsea’s mind were very simple water techniques.

“Horsea let’s take a break. No actually let’s call it a night. I don’t know about you, but I’m beat.” Grant said. Horsea slumped half in exhaustion and half in depression.

“Hey, you did great today.” Grant said, ad reached out to cup horsea in both hands. Horsea didn’t look up to meet Grant’s eyes.

“I know today was rough, but it was our first day together. Things will start going our way and soon. I’m sure we’ll figure out the trick to the water gun, I mean I didn’t really think you would figure this out today, and in the meantime, we can work on other things.” Horsea looked up, he supposed Grant was right, it was only the first day of training he had lots of time to work on the move. Horsea and Grant both felt a little better as they went to sleep that night. Afterall, surely tomorrow had to be better, right?