Drowzee, Florence, and I took our time on the walk back to Isaac’s house. That was partially because I was still feeling wobbly after the Confusion attack, but it was also because I couldn’t resist experimenting with our new mental connection.
At first we kept it simple, just trying to communicate the most basic possible ideas. I would close my eyes, Drowzee would point in a random direction, and I would try to turn and face that same way by interpreting which angle the buzzing sensation in my mind moved towards. Once we had that working, we swapped so that Drowzee closed his eyes and I pointed out directions instead.
Communicating abstract concepts was harder. I tried to start with emotions, since I could feel how Drowzee was feeling through the bond, but it turns out there’s a big difference between actively feeling an emotion and thinking about it more generally. Besides, it was hard to check whether the idea had come across the right way; Drowzee and I didn’t share a lot of facial expressions in common, though I was starting to recognize some of his usual reactions.
I tried switching to communicating colors, but that didn’t work well either. I would think of a color that we had just passed by and try to hold it in my head, but Drowzee would point to the wrong object just as often as he pointed to the right one. When he tried sending colors to me, my mental impression of the hue felt washed-out and incomplete, and it didn’t match what I saw in the real world.
“Maybe we’re being too abstract,” I said as we turned onto the street that Isaac’s house was on. “The Slowbro we met were able to communicate in words – maybe we should try to do the same thing.”
Drowzee snorted, but then he wagged his trunk up and down. I could feel a tinge of reluctance that went with the action echo through our mental bond.
“And we can start with yes and no,” I said, inspiration striking. “Because we already know how to say those without a bond, so we can check if we got it right as we go.”
Drowzee wagged his trunk up and down again, more firmly this time. I told him I would go first, then stopped walking so I could close my eyes and focus my mind. (I could hear Florence sigh behind me; she was definitely impatient about our slow progress towards the house, but had insisted on sticking with us in case one of us collapsed from overstimulation).
I thought the word yes in my mind as hard as I could, but didn’t hear any reaction from Drowzee or feel any change in the buzzing. I frowned a bit and focused more on the buzzing sensation, trying to force words into it. Yes, I thought as loudly as I could, attempting to funnel the word through the bond.
Again, nothing changed.
I opened an eye to peek at Drowzee; he had his own eyes closed and hadn’t moved an inch otherwise. I sighed and closed my eye, resolving to try again.
I spent at least three full minutes trying to think the word yes, then the word no at Drowzee. Neither worked. He must have felt my growing frustration, because he eventually pulled at my shirtsleeve to interrupt my thoughts. I opened my eyes to see that he was gesturing to himself.
“You want to try sending words?” I asked. Drowzee flipped his trunk up and down quickly. “Sure, I guess. You can’t do any worse than how I’m doing already.”
I closed my eyes one last time and tried to clear my mind and focus on the buzzing in the back of my head. Drowzee felt determined and focused, which made me smile; he wasn’t going to back down so easily.
Then, suddenly, a loud staticky noise erupted in my head. Ỵ̷̡̧͓̥̪͓̞̙̦̮̲̲̀̓̎̎͜ë̸̹͎̺̬̲̜̜̱́̂̿̍͝s̶͈̭̭̠͍̈́̀̑͗̔̈̒ an alien voice ground out between my thoughts.
I immediately slapped my hands over my ears (which did no good whatsoever) and screeched, startling a woman who was walking nearby with a basket of laundry. Drowzee opened his eyes with a bray and looked around us in a panic, curling his paws into fists while he searched for an enemy to fight. Florence jumped over to my side, looking like she was ready to grab me if I keeled over in faint.
“It’s okay,” I gasped out, moving my hands to press hard against the sides of my head. My earlier headache had been fading before, but now it was back with a vengeance. I turned slowly to look at my Pokemon; Drowzee was now radiating concern and sorrow, and his ears were flat on his skull again.
I sighed and reached out to scratch the top of Drowzee’s head, trying to calm myself down so I could send him that calm through our bond. “That worked, I think,” I croaked out, “but it was a little… uh, much. We’ll have to work on it.”
Drowzee flicked his trunk up and down. Florence, on the other hand, put her hands on her hips and glared at the two of us. “If you keep this up you will destroy your brain completely,” she told me flatly. “Or you will destroy Drowzee’s brain when he pushes too hard.”
I frowned; I hadn’t considered that.
“Back to the house,” she told us firmly, grabbing both of our shoulders and turning us to point in the right direction. “Bash your head against something different for a change. Like this new tumblestone?”
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That was right – now that we had plenty of stone samples, we could try to create new poke ball prototypes. I smiled at the idea, and my smile was only a little strained from the headache still throbbing in my skull.
When we reached the house I wasn’t surprised to see that Isaac was busy in the workshop. But I was surprised to find that he hadn’t gotten much work done.
“I am rather distracted today,” he admitted, flipping a smooth rock over and over again in his hands. “Last night I was able to confirm that Charity is staying with the Kurts, and she is apparently well, but she refused to talk to me.” He frowned down at the stone, his fingers trembling slightly.
“Oh,” I said lamely. I glanced at Florence, unsure what to say (especially with my head still aching); she shrugged and motioned at me to keep speaking. “Maybe she just needs time?”
“Mmm.” Isaac gripped the rock tightly, then blinked and looked back up at us. “Still, we should try to make progress. I have outlined a few ideas for how to create the center band. Will you take a look?”
“Sure, we can talk about the tumblestones,” I said with some relief. I had no idea how to talk about family issues, but inventions? Those I could handle.
“It’s tumbled – oh, fine,” Isaac said, sounding exasperated. “Tumblestone it is.”
Isaac and I spent at least an hour brainstorming designs for center bands and discussing the pros and cons of the different approaches, with Florence occasionally adding her own thoughts. The main issue we were up against was simply that the tumblestones were hard to work with. We had lots of small stones, pebbles really, but the only large sample was the big stone Isaac had dug up; it was the only one large enough for us to carve a whole band out of it. We needed to figure out how to combine multiple pebbles together into a single band.
Eventually we decided to carve the stones down into individual segments, which could then be combined together into a whole band by gluing them together. It was that or crush the tumblestone down into a powder, and we were all worried that the energy properties wouldn’t work anymore if the fragments were too small. The other ideas we’d come up with (like having Drowzee use his new psychic powers to reshape the stone) were even less feasible than those two.
We also spent a bit of time discussing the internal carvings that should be made in the apricorns to redirect energy. From the design side, this was trivial. I’d always found the carvings fascinating, so I’d paid more attention to my dad’s explanations of how they worked. I knew the core pattern that was used as the starting point for most designs, a simple four-line etching mirrored on top and bottom with shallow channels connecting the lines at the halfway points. I’d even carved the pattern in dried putty when I was eight as practice. I was very confident the carving would do its job well enough for a basic poke ball, and that’s all we needed to start.
The harder part was convincing Isaac. He wasn’t content to use the pattern I proposed ‘just because’; he wanted there to be a reason for why it would be the best choice. I eventually had to pull out Drowzee’s poke ball, pop it open, and point out that the carvings in the metal followed the same basic pattern that I had sketched in my notebook. Even then he insisted that we would need to run tests on different patterns once we got the core one working, to see what effects they had. (Not that I minded that idea so much; I found myself sketching different patterns in my notebook and wondering which might work best as Isaac extolled the virtues of systematic experimentation.)
Once all the plans were set in stone (no pun intended), we started working. Isaac carved the stones with his lathe; I etched the internal carvings into apricorn shells; Florence hollowed out apricorns and prepped the hinges and latches. Drowzee curled up on the floor next to my stool and napped. The work was repetitive, but doing the same task over and over again was soothing. At least, it was soothing once I got used to working with real-life apricorn shells – I accidentally poked holes through a few before I figured out the right amount of force to use.
Assembling a prototype poke ball took a lot more time now that we were trying to actually capture Pokemon permanently. Assembling a set of ten, like Isaac wanted, took ages. We only finished two complete balls that afternoon, and the next day only four more were made. By that point we had all figured out the main flaw in the system. The stonework took a lot longer than the other parts of the poke ball; it was much harder to prepare a bunch of small stone segments and assemble them into a ring than it was to work with apricorn shells and wood. And we couldn’t parallelize the process, because Isaac only had one lathe in the workshop. The best we could do was swap out who ran the lathe when Isaac got worn out.
It drove me half-mad with frustration. I wanted power tools. Even a simple rotary grinder would make shaping the stone so much easier!
But there were no electric motors yet and no easy access to electric Pokemon anyway, so no power tools for me. I had to swallow my impatience and focus on making small bits of progress day by day. At least training sessions in the morning were still interesting. Drowzee had gotten a lot of practice at performing his move pattern and could switch smoothly from Disable to Hypnosis now, and I could run all the way to the tree and back again without turning into a gasping wreck. I was even getting better at meditation, I thought; it was easier to clear my mind when I could focus on the buzzing connection with Drowzee instead of trying to clear out all thoughts entirely.
On the afternoon of the fourth day we had ten fully-prepared poke ball prototypes, and Charity still hadn’t returned home. Isaac was clearly distracted, but he insisted that we test the prototypes to see how they did. As a baseline, we expected that they should be able to capture Pokemon as we’d seen before – if a ball with a simple button of tumblestone could capture a Slowpoke, a ball with a whole capture band should definitely work. The real trick was seeing if any of the captures would be permanent, if the Pokemon wouldn’t be able to escape.
As a way of assessing how well the balls worked, we decided to time how long it took for the Slowpoke we tested on to break out of each ball that we tried. I still had my wristwatch, and Isaac had a pocket watch; with the two of us keeping track and Florence tapping prototype balls on Slowpoke heads, we were able to collect fairly accurate data. It helped that Drowzee was on hand to use Confusion on any Slowpoke or Zubat that were offended by our presence. Life was a lot easier now that we didn’t have to rely on Pound.
The results were unexpected. None of the balls fully caught the Slowpoke, and none of them broke open immediately like the first prototype had. Instead, every ball took exactly two seconds to break open, even when we switched to different targets. And we couldn’t figure out why.