I regret this immensely, I thought as I dragged the piece of wood around the bend again under the beating sun.

The log was tethered to me by a makeshift harness of woven vegetation… an acknowledgement of my lack of even semi-thumbs like the sandshrews used to keep their own logs hoisted on their backs. Which is to say, I wasn’t alone. Unless you meant it in the sense of ‘alone in last place.’

Even Tree-Climber, who was participating in the training as a punishment for her foolish traipsing about the Ekans’ territory, was staying well ahead of me with her two logs balanced carefully on her back.

“You can do it!” I heard a chipper voice from somewhere up ahead. Tree-Climber’s encouragement, intended not just for me, but for the younger sandshrews who were still too shy to say anything to me directly. She wasn’t directly in view, though imagined she was over by the weird field of standing stones, where most looked aged and weathered yet a solid third looked freshly unearthed.

“Why did I agree to this?” I muttered to no one in particular.

Because I want to get stronger, was the eventual, quiet answer. I grimaced and took another step. And each step after that.

I lost track of the number of times I’d made a complete loop around the hill, though it had to be at least ten. By the time the sun was beating down from directly above, even the impossibly upbeat Tree-Climber was an exhausted heap.

“All right,” the scarred visage of Wound-Seeker voiced, “that’s enough for today. Get some grub and rest up. Then we’re starting again.”

A chorus of groans answered him, though the sandshrews perked up at the mention of food.

‘Grub,’ as it turns out, was fairly literal. I’d tried to keep an open mind about it, thinking that perhaps as a pokemon I should be able to eat bugs (little creepy-crawlies, not bug-type pokemon) just fine. As it turned out, no. The Nidoran side of me was just as disgusted by both the texture and taste of eating bugs, living or dead.

So while the sandshrews all crowded into one of the tunnel-huts for some of the carefully gathered bugs, I instead headed for the nearest outcropping of foliage and got to munching. The sparse and dry leaves of the plant life in the area wasn’t particularly enjoyable, but it was edible. No one bothered me, though whether that was because they didn’t notice I had wandered off or simply didn’t care I couldn’t say.

I ate until I spied some of the sandshrews gathering again at the base of the hill near Wound-Seeker, and cut off my meal to join them.

“Listen up,” the sandslash said when the rest of the sandshrews had returned, “I know you all can Scratch well enough. We’ll be going over Defense Curl instead. Those of you who can pull it off to my satisfaction will move on to Sand-Attack practice.”

As I watched, Wound-Seeker called up each sandshrew and had them demonstrate the move, giving pointers to some, while telling others to just keep working at it. A rare few, Tree-Climber included, he snorted and sent over to a sandy area seemingly set aside just for Sand-Attacking.

When at last he trudged my way, it was clear to me he’d decided to deal with me last.

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“Let’s see it then,” he said.

Uncertainly, I did my best to curl up into a ball, keeping my underside protected. My doubt that I could do anything remotely resembling the move intensified as he started laughing.

“Oh boy. Yeah. I needed that,” he said as he worked through his humor at my poor showing.

“You just don’t have the right body shape for it I suppose,” he said finally. After making us all run laps in the morning, I’d expected him to be more of a hard-ass, but he seemed contemplative.

“No… no you’re probably just not shaped right for it. Let’s try something easier then. Scratch.”

“Uh… I don’t…” I protested weakly, but he was having none of it.

“You have claws, don’t you? Now Scratch.”

“Scratch what?” I said in slightly exasperation.

He simply held his arms out in a pose which clearly said, ‘Come and take it, if you can.’

Annoyed and slightly frustrated, I charged at him, doing my best to finalize it with a scratch, which he didn’t even bother to dodge.

“Again,” he said, and I did my best to rake claws down and across his front.

“Again,” he said, and I kept trying, though I could feel that they were only scratches, not a true Scratch.

“That’s not in my learnset,” I ground out in annoyance.

“I don’t give a damn, now scratch!”

I kept trying, perhaps taking out my frustration about the pointless exercise through the pointless exercise.

And then I Scratched.

I paused, stunned, as Wound-Seeker grinned and knocked me down while I was distracted.

“What was-”

“Less jabbering, more Scratching!”

It was maybe another ten minutes of fruitless attempts and wondering if I had imagined it before another proper Scratch connected. I nearly made the mistake of standing there in stunned wonder again, but caught myself before I could take another bop to the head for it.

I had used Scratch. Twice… three times. With each success, it got a little easier. A little more consistent. And even as my body started to move on a sort of auto-pilot, my mind whirled.

Nidorans don’t learn Scratch. My memory of the game wasn’t encyclopedic, but there were patterns to pokemon move sets. They generally learned one offensive and one stat-affecting move very early, and those specific moves didn’t typically show up later in learnsets. Tackle, Scratch, Peck, Pound… those were in the category of early offensive moves.

According to Mete’s pokedex, Nidoran learned Peck and Leer, fully satisfying the remembered pattern. So how the hell had I used Scratch?

Before long, Wound-Seeker paired me up with some of the better but not perfect Defense Curl-ers, having me take turns at using Scratch on them and giving them the chance to see how best to adjust their form to best protect against my attack. Once we had a rhythm going, he moved over to those practicing Sand-Attack.

By the time the sun set, I was exhausted, but I could pretty consistently pull off Scratch. I had also noticed something of a pattern with my improvements – I could get better at it by using it on the air or a dummy, and I could get better at it by practicing with a single opponent over time. But practicing against multiple opponents was both the most difficult and most rewarding method.

Every time an opponent tried something new or moved a different way as I was trying to use Scratch, it forced me to adapt and improve my approach.

I tried to stumble my way to the bed where I had woken previously, but a somewhat amused Soft-Claw directed me to the communal sleeping area after a not-so-subtle, “You’re not bleeding, so get out of my place of healing.” I was too tired to argue, or to care about some of the sandshrews giving me odd looks for picking a random spot and flopping over in it.