I didn't pay much attention to Joshua when we met him, since I was too busy poking around and trying to figure out how such a perfectly nice and ordinary family might end up creating the first-ever poke balls someday. Only now did I regret daydreaming through history class in school; I was pretty sure we'd covered such things back then.

Certainly Joshua couldn't end up being the first poke ball designer (in fact, I was insulted by that very idea, since I had very high standards for who such a great inventor should be). He was a sullen kid around my age, and he seemed infinitely more interested in music than Pokemon. The only time I saw him smile during the entire ten-minute visit was when Charity asked him if he could play us all her favorite song on the family's piano. He was really good, to my surprise; certainly I wouldn't have been able to make the dusty old thing sound so nice. It was just too bad that he barely said a single word. How was I supposed to get hints that way?

And there had to be hints in the house! Most of the time, when my dad got some strange new poke ball to analyze, he got it from the famous Kurt. In fact, he’d gone on a day trip to Azalea on my birthday; that was why he’d gotten home so late. What if he had gotten the gold and silver ball from modern-day Kurt? If he had, investigating the past Kurts could help me figure out where the strange ball had come from. That logic made perfect sense to me, but my investigations bore no fruit; I couldn’t find a single clue in the crowded little house.

The five of us eventually said goodbye to Joshua and left, with Charity leading the way and Drowzee walking fast right after her. Maisy was lagging behind, of course, and Florence walked next to me. I was stewing in frustration and trying to think up ways to get back to the Kurts later when Florence spoke up.

"Joshua does not usually live here, does he?"

Charity stopped mid-skip, skidding to a halt before the street intersection; she whirled in a circle and sent her skirts fluttering as she looked back at us. "In a way. How did you guess?" she asked, curious, as Drowzee continued his unusually fast-paced walk straight across the street. I scratched my neck while looking left and right for traffic, grateful that it would be made up of slow-paced carts instead of machines.

"Intuition," Florence replied, shrugging. She did that a lot, making decisions without proof, or so it seemed to me. I decided to watch more carefully to see if I could catch her in a mistake.

"Well," Charity said, turning back around to half-skip her way forward again, "most of his family does live out of the city. They've got the biggest apricorn orchard in… well, anywhere, I think." I blinked at the familiar word, processing that new and valuable information. "Some of the flavors are icky but I love the orange ones, they're so delicious! Anyway, Joshua and some of his siblings stay here with his cousin sometimes so they can go to school, but their parents are all out of town. I've visited the orchards once or twice..."

I tuned the girl out as she continued prattling incessantly, thoughts whirling through my head. Finally, a clue! Apricorns could be used to make poke balls; they had been used to make poke balls, in fact, up until maybe twenty years before I was born when the standard artificial model was made. The Kurt from my time still used them primarily, and my dad had brought the shelled nuts back home several times when he was experimenting with them.

Unfortunately, all these thoughts didn’t really lead anywhere. Thinking about poke balls and apricorns could be relevant to the gold and silver ball, sure, but what good would it do me when I was so far away from Dad's workbench? That brought on a totally unexpected wave of homesickness, deep and sickening and certainly responsible for how my eyes suddenly got wet; luckily, we reached Charity's house before it could really settle in.

Once we were back inside, Michael pulled Florence and me aside to tell us that we were all going to stay in Azalea for the following two days so he could get some tasks done and talk more thoroughly with Isaac. Florence was not to get into trouble or go wandering off again, and I was to keep my mouth shut and make myself useful because he still wasn't sure what I was really doing there. Michael was a confusing guy, honestly, though I was pretty sure that his sour mood was due to his Hoothoot's absence; she had flown back to Enrui to bring them a message telling the villagers what we were doing.

"Does your Hoothoot have a name?" I asked him suddenly, remembering my earlier thoughts and worries. I looked around for Drowzee after thinking of that and saw that he had curled himself up in the corner of the room (asleep, of course).

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Michael blinked at me in a wide-eyed way that was quite reminiscent of his partner; then he actually smiled. "Yes, but that is our business, not yours," he answered before steering the conversation back to the list of Don'ts he'd made for us kids. I noticed that he seemed more comfortable with me after that had been brought up, though.

I really had to figure out whether Drowzee needed a name.

We ate and made sleeping arrangements, things ordinary people did. I wasn't too surprised to hear that it was common for Pokemon to sleep with their partners in Azalea, sharing rooms and, occasionally, even beds. The people did seem to have a close bond to the creatures, something a bit more special than what I'd usually seen in Goldenrod. In my time, Pokemon were friends at best, and more commonly pets or, in the bad cases, tools. Here they were truly partners, considered equal as much as they were occasionally feared. It made me wonder when things had changed.

That night, I slept on the dining room floor in a pile of blankets, back-to-back with Drowzee. It seemed comfortable, right; camping out while traveling would be a million times more bearable if it felt the same. Sure, my back ached and my head felt strangely empty when I got up the following morning, but I felt better for the night all the same.

I found myself with nothing in particular to do and no threats hanging over my head the next morning. Isaac and Michael were busy in Isaac's workshop, Charity was off at her school, and Florence was sitting next to me and stubbornly insisting that if I didn't think up something to do she could just ask me plenty of questions about the future, and what would be wrong with that? I didn't want to dance around considerations of what could cause a paradox, though, so I decided to do the one basic thing I hadn't done since becoming a trainer: train!

Because, well, why not? It was better than sitting around and wondering what to do, which was my only other option until I could get back in Ilex Forest to look for Celebi again. It would give me a head start, in a way.

Drowzee agreed to the plan as soon as I informed him about it; he waggled his trunk up and down pretty vigorously, actually. I was willing to bet that he was sick of being weaker than most of the other Pokemon in the area; even Maisy had shot him down with a Water Gun when he sniffed too close to her the night before. So the two of us left Michael a note and went off to find a clearing outside the city to practice in. Florence decided to follow, voicing her own judgmental comments along the way; I did my best to ignore them. Drowzee and I were going to train, and we were going to do a proper job of it!

What followed was nothing like what I'd seen trainers do before, the typical rehearsing of strategies and combinations over and over, often against other members of the team. Apparently that only worked when the human knew what they were doing. Since I definitely had no clue about what was going on, I decreed that we would work through Drowzee's moveset, improving each of his attacks to the best extent that we could.

"Let's start with Pound." Drowzee stared at me, no emotion in his eyes, as I flailed my hands around wildly and tried to explain my thoughts. "I mean, what I've seen you do before is good, y'know? It's just, well, you seem to lack a little, um, force."

Drowzee narrowed his eyes at that.

"Hey, don't glare. Here – we'll practice together!" I could hear Florence snickering in the background, but I ignored her as I located a sturdy-looking rock off by the trees and made a beeline for it. Drowzee followed me slowly, skepticism written all over his snout. "We'll both work on our punches on this! C'mon, like –" I made a fist and dashed it against the rock to demonstrate, not thinking the action through.

Two seconds later I was hopping in a circle while clutching my fist, breathing quickly to try to keep the sobs back (I was not going to cry in front of Florence, that was not going to happen) and hoping that I hadn't broken anything. Okay, so maybe it would help if I actually knew how to throw a punch. But I was smart; I could figure it out.

Drowzee had taken initiative by the time I'd recovered, and he was punching away at the rock with a determined look on his face. I decided to stick to observing, offering encouragement and occasionally tapping at the rock with my knuckles in a nervous, hesitant way, to make it look like I was making an effort.

I didn't see when Florence left, but I did hear when she returned. Or, rather, I heard the person she'd brought with her.

"Dear me, I see what you mean," a silky voice said from behind me. I turned to find myself face-to-face with a short old man, silvery hair and all, who had a Venomoth that was graying with age hovering next to him. "These two certainly are new to battling."

"I grew tired of watching you mess up," Florence informed me brusquely, her chin up in the air, "so I went and found this trainer to help. He was practicing nearby." She looked far too pleased with herself, insufferable as always.

I eyed the man and his Pokemon warily, wondering if he'd bring the term 'battle' up. He didn't, luckily; he just got straight into drilling me on how training was supposed to work.

Ten minutes later, I found myself wishing he'd just defeated us and left it at that.