We got back to the house just as the sun was starting to touch the horizon. Isaac was impatient to get started, so we went straight to his workshop. I was eager to get inside; the room had been off-limits to us kids before, and I was desperate to know what kind of setup he had in there.
The workshop took up the entire back half of the first floor, and it was filled with all sorts of interesting tools and objects. Some were familiar; I could see a workbench with a hammer, screwdriver, and pliers, as well as a small kiln that was currently unlit. There was also what looked like a medical kit hanging from a peg on the wall, and an old-fashioned microscope was set up on a table. But there were other tools I didn’t recognize, including a strange glass contraption that was slowly dripping liquid into a bottle and an odd circular device that was held up in the air by an axle. Papers with notes scribbled on them were scattered on every surface and a small chalkboard leaned against the wall, currently scrubbed clean.
I had only just set down my basket when Isaac grabbed me by the shoulders and steered me towards a desk that was set snugly against the wall. “Trainer Monroe, you are our resident expert,” he told me cheerfully, “so let us begin with your knowledge. You spoke before of the design of the poke ball and of its use in capturing and controlling majū. If you were to simplify this device down to its most essential components, what would you need in order to implement a ball that could simply capture a majū?”
“Uhh…” I chewed on my lower lip for a moment, then pulled out my notebook; it was always easier for me to plan by drawing things out. I quickly drew two hemispheres that were connected at the back. “You’d need a device that can open and close, a sphere with a hinge on the back. I think a simple wooden hinge would work for this.” I moved my pen slightly to the side to sketch the idea that had half-formed in my head. “We’ll need a latch on the front to make the ball stay closed most of the time. We can put the arm behind the entry button; that way when the button is pushed in the latch will open and the top half can pop up.”
Florence and Charity had joined us at the desk by that point, and Charity peeked around my elbow to see what I was drawing. “What about the middle band?” she asked, pointing at my sketch. “Isn’t that missing here?”
I shook my head absently. “No, that’s mainly for control, not capture. If we’re just trying to capture something and we don’t care whether it escapes right away, I don’t think we have to bother with the center band, or the internal grooves.” I frowned as I started down at my sketch. Now that it was on paper, it seemed way too simple. Had I forgotten something?
“Well, this seems perfectly achievable,” Isaac said brightly. “We need nothing but the apricorns we already have. What an efficient design.”
“I’m not sure it will work,” I told the group hastily as I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’ve never actually made one before, not for real. And I don’t know for sure if just using an apricorn will be good enough.”
Isaac simply smiled and tapped his head. “That is how research works, Trainer Monroe. If we were certain that the plan would succeed, we would not be inventing something new. Well. Re-inventing something new, in this case.”
With that, he quickly set us all to work. Florence and Charity were assigned to cut an apricorn in half and clean out the nutmeat inside of it. Isaac and I worked on fashioning the hinge, latch, and button out of spare pieces of wood and bits of broken apricorn shell we had collected in the orchard.
I couldn’t help but smile as I worked on whittling a pin for the hinge out of a small chunk of wood. Working with my hands again felt natural and comforting. It certainly seemed a lot easier to me than chasing around bug Pokemon or learning how to meditate.
Soon we had finished making all the parts and we just had to put them together. Isaac produced a wood glue from his workbench, and I carefully attached each of the pieces to their respective locations and clamped them in place. Then I sat back and admired our handiwork.
What we had made looked… well, kind of poke ball-ish. It was much more monotone in color than the balls I was used to, and it certainly looked rougher around the edges. But the size and shape were right. Maybe it really would work.
“Well done, everyone,” Isaac said, clapping his hands together. “This looks quite promising. I am confident we will achieve excellent results when we test this device tomorrow afternoon.”
“Why wait?” Florence asked from the floor, where she sat against a tall barrel. “We could find a majū tonight if we go looking, I am sure.”
“We need to let the glue set,” I explained. “To be safe, we should give it about a day.” Modern glue could set a lot more quickly than that, but you were still supposed to let it sit for a while to strengthen the bond. I could only imagine that glue from this era worked the same way.
“In addition to that, this is only one prototype,” Isaac added as he walked over to the bushels of apricorns. “Now that we know what we are doing, we should make the rest of the set.”
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I looked over at him, confused. “The rest of the set? Why do we need more than one?”
Isaac made a ‘tsk’ noise. “We are still in the experimental stages, Trainer Monroe! If we make just one prototype and test it, we will not know if its behavior is typical or due to pure chance. We must produce a reasonable number of copies so that we can determine the average effects. Ten should be a good number at this stage.”
“Ten!” I yelped, sitting up straight on the workbench’s stool.
“Ten,” Isaac said firmly, picking up a red apricorn.
In the end, Isaac had it his way. We all pitched in to make nine new copies of the original prototype ball. Carving the connectors took longer than cleaning the apricorns, so Florence soon joined me and Isaac, and I showed her how to use a small knife to turn a bit of shell into the appropriate shape. Charity stayed back with the apricorns, happily snacking on bits of nut as she cleaned out the shells.
By the time two hours had passed we had ten balls sitting in a row, all waiting for the glue to set. We’d run out of clamps at some point and had to start taking them from the balls that had already been finished, but nothing had fallen apart, so it did seem like the glue was drying properly.
After that, we had nothing left to do except wait. I fidgeted impatiently through the cold dinner we all hurriedly dashed together, and I was restless all night. With Michael’s departure I had been upgraded to sleeping on a spare futon in Isaac’s room, and that was much more comfortable than my previous pile of blankets had been, but I was too impatient to care.
The next morning all I wanted to do was sit in the workshop and stare at the prototype balls while they dried, but Florence and Drowzee insisted on dragging me to training. Forcing myself through the paces did help the time go a little faster than usual, though trying to clear my mind during meditation was an exercise in futility. The one bright spot of the training was seeing how much Drowzee was improving. During defense exercises he could now tell when Venomoth was approaching him from behind using just his mind – well, most of the time, anyway. Dodging out of the way was still hard for him, but at least he could tell when an attack was coming.
Finally Smith released us for the day. For once I didn’t directly collapse onto the ground, though I did spend a minute with my hands on my knees, breathing deeply. As soon as I got my breath back I started nagging at Florence and Drowzee to hurry up and head back to Isaac’s house with me.
Florence just raised her eyebrows. “Why are you in such a hurry today?” she asked as she helped me pull Drowzee up into a standing position. “It is not like watching the glue will make it set any faster.”
“I know that,” I said with a sigh, “it’s just… I dunno. I guess I keep changing my mind. First I’m sure that the prototype balls will work, then I’m worried about what we’ll do if they don’t, then I’m feeling confident again. I just wanna know what will happen now.”
“And I wish I could form a bond with a partner majū now,” Florence replied evenly. “Wishing does not make it so.”
“Drow, zee,” Drowzee added, twitching his ears.
“Yeah, I know,” I replied, not having any idea what he was saying.
The three of us walked off the field together, heading in the direction of the house. Florence hummed under her breath in thought as we walked. “You know,” she finally said, “we have spent a great deal of time discussing how to make these poke balls and waiting for them to be ready. But we have not discussed how to test them once they are ready.”
I was briefly horrified. Florence was absolutely right; I hadn’t thought about that at all. An idea came to me right away, though, so I was able to relax. “Testing shouldn’t be a problem, we just need to find a wild majū. There are plenty in the forest if we go back there.”
“Oh yes, we can just go back to the forest without Trainer Michael there to provide protection,” Florence said in a clearly sarcastic tone. “Certainly we will not run any risk of being attacked, especially when the wild majū discover we are trying to capture them against their will.”
I shot her a dirty look. “You did exactly that earlier when you ran off with my notebook!”
“That was different. I was doing my best to stay hidden. You are trying to attract their attention.”
I just grumbled in response, but Florence was undeterred. “And what if this first attempt does not work? Then we will be stuck in the forest with an angry bug majū. You did say before that Drowzee is weak to bugs, did you not?”
“Okay, fine,” I snapped, ignoring the indignant muttering that Drowzee started doing under his breath. “So we just need to find a majū that won’t care if we try to catch it. Can you pull one of those out of your sleeve?”
“No,” Florence snapped back, “but Mr. Isaac might know of one. He is familiar with the majū of this area.”
I was skeptical, but I later found out that Florence was right. Isaac already had a plan for how to test the devices in relative safety. “It is simple,” he told us when we explained the problem, “we will just test on my daughter’s Slowpoke. Maisy is already close to Charity; she should not mind assisting in our trials.”
He wasn’t wrong, either. Maisy was napping steadily on the floor next to the door, and she didn’t seem to care what we did. Unfortunately, he hadn’t accounted for Charity herself.
“What!” Charity squeaked when she returned from school and we told her about the plan. “No, no, no. I do not want to risk Maisy in this testing.”
I was confused, and I told her so. “But you were excited about testing out Drowzee’s poke ball before, when you thought it could work on other majū too. This is just the same thing.”
Charity whirled around to make a face at me. “It is not,” she told me. “Your poke ball clearly works fine. These new poke balls, they have never been tried before, and they are incomplete on purpose. What if we try and Maisy gets stuck, or hurt?”
“It should be perfectly safe,” I protested, though I did think guiltily about the gold and silver ball in my pocket that did appear to have a Pokemon stuck in it. “Theoretically –”
“I don’t care about your theory,” Charity interrupted, scowling. “I do not want to test on Maisy.”
“Everyone, calm down,” Isaac ordered, stepping up to the two of us and resting his hands on each of our shoulders. “If Charity does not want us to run tests on Maisy, that is acceptable. We will find other test subjects who will not object to our experiments.”
“And where do you plan to find these other subjects?” Florence asked from her seat at the kitchen table.
“It should not be hard at all,” Isaac said with a smile. “There are always many majū available at the Slowpoke Well.”