After dropping all of that onto her, Kurt just left. He didn't even go back to say that he was simply joking, and standing there for about 10 minutes with an injured Meowth right next to her, she realized that he might be a little bit serious so she went ahead and let herself sink under the shade of a nearby tree so that she could think. Minutes later, she got up and decided that no, she shouldn't get caught up with whatever it was that Lionel was cooking up because those things always ended up in him going to the hospital. And so, after dusting herself off, she decided that worrying about him should be put at the back of her mind indefinitely.
She didn't need to care about him for the time being because she had other problems at hand. Mainly- that she needed to complete this activity and stay in this forest for an entire month.
A few of her classmates had talked about just staying for a week or so before finally calling it quits. That'll allow them to yield a score of maybe 5 digits (3 at worst and 7 at best,) right as long as they have something to show for. And these "showings" would be the state of their camp as well as the strength and "health" of their Pokemon, with the two at least being comparable to one another when finally tested. There is also an optional mock test that can either boost your digit or if you already have a digit of 20, give your trainer card a priority for the "call for rangers" function. And she's planning on getting that priority call so that means- "you're gonna have to wait," she said to herself and to the metaphorical Lionel currently taking up her headspace.
He can wait because Whitney has her own problems.
Now confident that she won't think about what Lionel is doing with Team Rocket - of all people - for the rest of the month, Whitney went away from the shade and decided that training against wild Pokemon can wait for now so she recalled her Meowth before he could complain. Staying back is a pretty good idea because not only is one of her Pokemon badly injured and needs to heal, she didn't have anything to heal him with except for Oran Berries. She also had another reason and it's so that she could think what she wanted to actually do while inside the forest.
And she thought about it as she made her way back. For one, she wasn't planning on turning her camp into a small sustainable village because the digit she could earn from her camp's situation is capped at 8. And that can easily be reached right as long as she has the bare essentials like her tent, her pot, as well as a place to stay in: all of that she'd already done. Training her Pokemon becomes easy after she has a good amount of Berry Juice.
Now that she actually put some thought into it, Whitney realized that the biggest problem that she'll have while staying here is boredom.
And as grading goes, the spot that she picked wouldn't even help her increase it because as far as she knew, her teachers wouldn't be able to check anything that might tell them how much time she'd spent in a single area so that type of grading doesn't even exist, and potentially, she can go ahead and move to another one when either her classmates decided to come over to her current clearing or when the Pokemon in the general area around it become wary of her.
So it's probably best to scout out a new one in the near future.
She looked west, going a bit further south there wouldn't be so bad.
...
The sweet scent of berries wafted around her tent as Whitney opened up the small, circular container that acted as a fermentation unit for her Berry Juice. It only took around 5 days or so before the crushed berries she threw in there fully fermented and the results looked promising; swishing on the lower half of the container was a purplish liquid with a bit of pink in some areas.
And with it being made from Pecha and Oran berries, the coloring did make a bit of sense but that didn't actually mean that the juice had any other effect except for healing. A double-edged sword, as far as she's aware because no matter what kind of berry combination one tries, it will always result in a berry juice that restores a Pokemon's HP, which makes it situational because berry juice is pretty hard to spoil but berries do. And they spoil very quickly.
If all you had were healing items then you're gonna have a bit of trouble if your Pokemon gets paralyzed. The fact that it can only heal doesn't make it useless of course, it's useful for situations like the one she's currently in. Though, there's also a small possibility that she can make paralysis potions using berry juices because rumor has it that Silph Co. uses berries for their various potions but the method of extraction is relatively unknown.
"alright Meowth, give me your bottle," she looked over to the lazy cat, who had a small improvised belt made of grass fiber around him as well as a bottle made from two apricots strewn together right next to it.
Said bottle looked like a small peanut but with a hole and cap (held by linen rope,) on one of its tip.
Since he didn't at all move, Whitney walked over and took it away from him, Meowth continued to sleep, the cat not at all caring about what she just did. She huffed, "and here I thought you were proud of your little arts and craft project!"
Meowth snorted as if to say 'you wish,'.
That made Whitney grin.
She decided to wrestle him.
Dusting herself off, Whitney walked back to the container and started pouring down the berry juice. Once Meowth's bottle was filled, she went ahead and grabbed her Pidgey's bottle and poured the remaining juice into it. When the container was empty, she again mashed up a bunch of berries on it before sprinkling it with Shuckle Dust and closing it tight.
"4 more days of fermentation then," she said, standing up, she stretched. It taking so much time was a small problem that she had already accounted for and because of that, she- "good thing that I have extra," - murmured, gazing at four more containers filled with Berry Juice.
She walked over to them and placed the one in her hand a little bit further from the rest so that she could differentiate which is which. After that, she pulled out a mycelium container from her bag, it was half her height and had more than enough space inside to empty the four other fermentation units. With each unit she emptied, she started to process another batch, she continued to do it until she emptied all of them. In the end, the container was filled halfway through.
Walking out of her tent, Whitney got greeted by the usual sunset. Oddly, the sun going down on the far horizon is visible from her spot despite being a little far from the ocean. The ocean is also slightly visible, and it isn't that she didn't realize it back when she first arrived here but she may or may not be camping on a hill. Which also explains why there's very little rain around here.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
A quick search around the clearing let her know that her Pidgey hasn't come back for dinner yet so she went ahead and walked over to the pot, poured out the remaining stew from it and into an empty tupperware, walked over to the lake, and then started cleaning.
Living in the forest was surprisingly mundane and sure, one can argue that she had modern tools but she's sure that living out in the wild without them isn't that different is it? It's probably a lot more effort but it's still the same.
The pot now cleaned, Whitney went back to her camp to start cooking. She looked at the flat ground that was her campsite, the general area around her tent had been cleared of any sort of grass because at one point, even with all the repels, a group of three Ratatas still found their way towards her camp and Whitney got forcibly woken up. Her pokemon had managed to take out those three Ratata obviously, but her sleep had been ruined by that point and she had to spend the remaining darkness lying in a patch of grass, looking at the stars, and feeling furious that she didn't ask her Meowth to cut down the remaining tall grass two days prior. Or even the days before that.
...
Whitney sat down on a nearby log, she then looked up, got her eyes flashed by the sun, covered them, then sighed. It had been seventeen days after she arrived in Ilex Forest and the only thing that she's considered as a problem so far was the lack of luxury. The fact that two entire containers had been filled meant that she already had enough berry juice to cover the remaining time she still has to spend in this forest and because of them, she isn't even worried about her Pokemon lacking any healing items or surviving against wild battles for that matter. They knew how to use the bottle of Berry Juice and being able to heal on the spot meant that none of them were in serious danger.
Her Pokemon had grown strong enough to pass as well. The only problem that Whitney has right now is boredom so she thought of allevating it-
At one point, she decided to see if she could spend her time productively by learning how to craft tools so she can do manual labor but her ideas came to an abrupt end when her Meowth showed her that he can do what tools can do, just better. After that, she tried to carve but after a single completed "work", she looked at it, thought that it was ugly, then decided that she wanted to draw instead, she had a lot of charcoal from her campfire after all and using them to draw didn't seem so bad...
Until they started to dirty her arms. But that had been solved by wearing gloves but then another problem happened, the same one that made her stop carving: that her resulting work was so ugly it wasn't worth it.
Instead, she thought that maybe, cartography wouldn't be so bad and yes, it wasn't! it actually wasn't!
The first few times of mapping got her excited enough to think that maybe she can spend the remaining days mapping the area around her camp. The start of it wasn't so bad and she managed to figure out a few things when it comes to the surrounding area. Such as, for example, directly further south of her camp would allow her to see a Shrine, the one that she assumed Lionel talked about, and West of her camp also had another notable landmark, mainly that there is a river there, running from only Ho-oh knows where.
East didn't really have anything that piqued her interest though she did see a large tree with a bunch of Pineco on it. It also had four Forretresses and when Whitney saw them eyeing her, she decided to back off and move on.
North... North was where she saw the last few remnants of her classmates. She also saw some of them but she and by extension, them, decided that ignoring each other was the best option they had. And that was it, that was the only interaction that she had with them this entire month and it was them ignored each other.
Not that she cared of course.
She didn't.
Anyhow, she realized that back then, Whitney had slightly better looking states than some of them. Mainly because of her relatively safe position in the clearing as well as the clearing itself. Thanks to the lake, she had managed to take showers to clean herself, the area being remote enough while also being in the outskirts meant that it was so safe that she could afford to sleep well each night, and even her stock allowed her to eat food in relative peace. This was all thanks to the benefits of securing the area. Her classmates didn't have that luxury and from the last time she saw them, they looked like they had seen better days.
From the ones that she did see, some had frazzled hair, both boys and girls had that problem, though the girls were more noticeable.
Others looked like they had their clothes torn up in the daily and so, lost their best looking ones and were only wearing what accounted for as the bare minimum such as a dirty but intact shirt and pants/shorts that weren't ripped, others were wearing clothes stacked atop each other and she swore they looked like a solidified Grimer. She, at one point, asked one of them why they didn't quit and they replied that they were in it for the same reason that she did; for the extra digits as well as the - boring, - experience of living in the forest.
And the last group she found were covered in all sorts of things that turned their hair hard from all the mud, their clothes dirty, and their face filled with soot.
The soot, she assumed, was because of the after effects of fire moves. Or maybe they slept right next to their campfires and their hands just wandered over to the charcoal and when they rubbed their face in the morning, it became dirty! - was an aggressive reply that would've caused the old Whitney to fume up and retort something even worse.
But not her.
Not her.
Anyhow, back to mapping, Whitney was currently in the process of chartering the parts in between the four cardinal directions she went through first. She was currently exploring the South-East region around her camp to be specific.
As she explored, Whitney was Moving in a way that would've caused her to draw a fan if she was being tracked using a digital map. This was the best course of action she could think of and even though it's a bit on the slower side of things, she didn't really mind. She was halfway through exploring the place before she decided to get back to camp. She had no time left and didn't want to spend another night out in the forest. Seriously, those can get bad.
She stood up from her log, looked back to where her camp is supposed to be, then started walking in a straight line.
Whitney looked at the badly written map on her hand, it had a few odd shapes here and there such as a circular shape (that was supposed to be a rock,) that told her a spot for a massive boulder that she found. It was on the northern side of the forest and in the same vein, there were other "landmarks," drawn on its surface because Whitney notes the parts she found interesting, she hasn't found anything on this side yet but she doesn't think it'll stay that way.
...
Whitney frowned, she didn't like the sensation she was currently feeling and her gut was telling her that she was somewhere dangerous. The telltale signs that she shouldn't be here had started popping up half an hour ago, for one, the pressure that was supposed to be gone for at least three months had come back and was weighing down on her, second, the trees had looked like they now had odd angles and the last would be that there is a pink fog that only went up to her ankles anywhere she looked.
It was like she was standing in some horror prop house and worse, she didn't know how to get out!
"shit!" she cursed, her father would probably be furious about that but she didn't have the time to feel rebellious right now, "am I not supposed to be here?" she harshly whispered hoping that someone could hear her.
After she was done mapping the Eastern part of Ilex Forest's Southern areas, she thought that it was fine to check the west but now that she's here... she didn't think it was still a good idea.
She knew that she was oddly close to the Celebi shrine, partly because her "fan route" had gotten her to make her steps east-wise so that she can cover as much ground as possible.
"wait," she paused, can't she go to the shrine and go back to her camp that way? The moment that she reached it meant that she only needed to move north in order to go back to her camp!
Following her epiphany, Whitney went ahead and started moving.
And as she did, a small, fairy-like Pokemon watched her. Its green, bulb-like head completely still in the same way as its eyes never left her running frame. It floated there, bobbing up and down, its mouth expressionless, its antennae wavy. Celebi turned its sideways and released a psychic attack, one that would cause a tree to "unfortunately" fall on a nearby Exeggutor, it then went back to watching Whitney until she disappeared from its sight. The Celebi thought that it was time to teleporting away.
To another spot, to observe.