Charity insisted that she had to finish her share of the farmwork before we left, so we didn’t go back to the house right away. Instead we settled in to help Joshua harvest ripe apricorns from the trees. While we worked I told Charity about the trip to Union Cave and the progress (or lack of progress) we’d made on the prototype balls so far.
She frowned thoughtfully as she balanced on a branch above me, testing a fruit to see if it was ready to come down. “So you cannot see what is happening inside the ball when a majū is in it,” she summarized. “I wonder if we could change that.”
I tilted my head to the side. “I’m not sure that’s possible. We could try making the ball out of glass, but that would break really easily.”
“That is not exactly what I meant.” Charity wiggled an apricorn gently, then moved on to the next one on the branch. “This is tricky, I will have to think about it.”
Before I might have rolled my eyes, but now I knew she was taking this seriously, not trying to show off. So I just nodded in reply, then turned to look over at Florence, who was holding the basket under Joshua’s tree. “How about you, Florence? Any ideas?”
“I still think we should knock the majū unconscious first,” she replied. “Like I said before, in the well.”
I rolled my eyes. “And I told you then that we can’t do that. Majū have to be conscious to be caught.”
“You do not know that. It is like Isaac says – you have to test a theory to prove it.”
“Fine. Just for you, I’ll ask Drowzee to knock out a Slowpoke the next time we go down to the well so we can test your theory. I hope you’re happy with yourself when we’re stuck with a KO’d majū and can’t do anything with it.”
Florence glared. “Do not be so dramatic. Jordan said that majū wake up shortly after being knocked out, remember?”
“Who is Jordan?” Charity asked from up in her tree, sounding confused.
An hour or two passed like that, with conversation and debate. Joshua didn’t say much, and he seemed grumpy that we were there, but I did see him smile when Charity hugged him goodbye, so he couldn’t have been that upset. And we had helped him finish the chores twice as fast as usual, so really, what was there to complain about?
As we walked home Charity was cheerful and talkative, at least at first. She got quieter and quieter as we got closer to the house, and by the time we reached the front door she was obviously having second thoughts.
I poked her in the back, making her jump and look at me. “Don’t stress out about it,” I told her. “Just tell him what you want.” Maisy butted her head against Charity’s leg in agreement, and Florence clapped her shoulder in solidarity.
Charity nodded, then took a deep breath and walked the last few steps up into the house. She hesitated in the entryway. “Papa?”
I heard a loud thump from the back of the house, followed by scrambling sounds. Then Isaac appeared. He stood half-out of the doorway into the workshop, staring at us wordlessly.
Charity took another deep breath, then stuck her chin up in the air. “I was mad because you wouldn’t let me be a real part of the team,” she said, her voice quiet but strong. “That is all I want, to help the same way Monroe and Florence do. Even if it’s dangerous, I want to be a part of it.” Her voice started to waver a bit; then Maisy gently licked her hand, and her resolve returned. “And I want to learn more about how to make things. I like making things. If that makes me strange, so be it.”
Isaac stared at his daughter like he didn’t recognize her for a moment. Then he took a few giant steps forward and seized her in a hug. In the blink of an eye Charity had her arms around his neck and was hugging him too.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice cracking. “I should have realized you would be interested – you are just like your mother that way. Of course you should be part of the team.”
Florence and I exchanged relieved grins as we snuck by them and back into the workshop, letting the father and daughter have their moment. It looked like we were back on track.
~
“We should reduce the number of duplicates now that we are doing a comparative study,” Isaac said as he jotted notes down on the chalkboard. “It may be more difficult to prove differences beyond a shadow of a doubt, but as we are very early in the process I expect differences will be large enough to see right away. At this moment it is more important to explore breadth than depth.”
We all sat in the workshop together, Charity perched on the stool with Maisy on her lap and Florence, Drowzee, and myself lounging on the ground. It was a bit late in the afternoon to start working, but Isaac was fired up again now that Charity was back and he wanted to dive straight into theorizing.
“The question, then, is which element of the design we should change.” Isaac drew a quick sketch of an open poke ball – I raised my eyebrows at his messy linework – and traced lines to label each part. “The outer structure, the inner carvings, the center band, the entry button. We can assume each of these is essential for the whole poke ball to work. The question, then, is this: which part currently has a fundamental flaw?”
Everyone was silent, so I decided to speak up. “I think it’s the center band. Energy needs to run around it smoothly, right? What if, by breaking it up into segments, we’re making that not work?”
Isaac raised his eyebrows. “You think we should try the powder approach instead?”
“Not really,” I replied with a shrug, “but I don’t have any better ideas.” I noticed Charity frowning on her stool, so I decided to elaborate. “We thought maybe we could crush the tumblestones and make a paste out of them, but that will probably ruin whatever makes them work in the first place.”
Florence tugged on a strand of her hair. “What about the really big stone you dug up?” she asked, casting a look over at Isaac. “If we carve part of that out we could make a full band.”
“That stone is only so big,” Isaac said as he wrote Segment and Powder on the chalkboard. “We will use it up quickly if we try to make bands out of it.”
“Then just use it to prove a point,” Florence said. “Make one band, perhaps two. If they do much better than the segment bands, we will know Monroe’s theory is right. If it works the same we can look into other ideas.”
Isaac tapped his chalk on the board, then smiled. “That is a good point,” he said, then wrote Whole under the other two ideas. “Three ideas, then. If we make four prototypes each for the first two ideas and two prototypes for the third, that is still only ten prototype balls overall.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Are we still going to judge them based on how long it takes the Po – majū to break out?” I asked.
Isaac shrugged. “I do not see a better system. It is not like we can see the majū energy through the ball.”
“That’s it!” Charity yelled. I jumped and looked at her; she was sitting up very straight and her eyes were open wide. “We need to see the energy through the ball!”
I blinked. “What?” Isaac, Florence, and I all asked at the same time.
She turned to look at me with a huge smile. “Monroe, quick, call Drowzee back into his poke ball.”
I looked over at my starter, who had been about to fall asleep before, and he looked back at me; I could feel his confusion reverberating with my own through our bond. Then he flipped his trunk up and down, so I dug his ball out of my pouch (clicking it back to full size before I pulled it out) and returned him.
“There!” Charity said. “You said before that you can see his energy in the ball, yes?”
“Uh, yeah.” I turned the ball so I could look at it directly. As usual, there was a soft glow behind the entry button that showed it was occupied.
“We just need to do that, but with the whole ball!” Charity exclaimed, clapping her hands together.
“… what.” I said.
But Isaac was nodding like this made sense. “I think I see. Weaken the boundaries of the ball so that the light of the energy can be seen through the walls, as it is on the entry button in Drowzee’s ball.”
“How do we do that?” Florence asked.
Isaac scratched the back of his head. “I suppose we need to thin the apricorn shell. Perhaps we could file it down?”
“Or use sandpaper,” I added as I started to get into the idea. “That might work better since it’s a sphere.”
“Yes.” Isaac tapped his elbow with one hand, then nodded. “That is a clever idea, Charity. Well done.”
Charity beamed at her father, and I hid a satisfied smile.
~
After a few days of hard work sandpapering apricorn shells, grinding down tumblestone, and assembling prototype balls, we were ready for the initial test. We all climbed down to Slowpoke Well together (Charity included this time, with Maisy in a cloth sling across her chest) and identified a few possible subjects, then got right into to experimenting. Florence tapped the Slowpoke with the prototype balls and dodged back out of the way, Isaac timed the captures, and Charity and I observed the balls from different angles to find patterns in how the light moved.
The experiment worked, sort of. We found that the powder-paste worked just as badly as we had all suspected – Pokemon broke out of those balls after just about a second of shaking. The energy-light in the balls flew all over the place around the inside of the apricorn shells, bursting out of the entry button as soon as the light lined up properly again.
The segment-band balls each took just two seconds for the Slowpoke to break out again, but this time we could see why. The light in those balls did focus in on the center bands, but it stuttered as it moved around in a circle, and the light broke out on one of those stutters even if it wasn’t close to the entry button.
The whole bands did the best by far. One of them took four seconds before the Pokemon burst out; the other lasted a whole six seconds, and even stopped shaking at the end before the energy suddenly exploded out of the ball to form a very irritated Slowpoke.
“That second one nearly had it,” I said wistfully as I went to pick up the used poke ball. “I think it didn’t work because we had to get rid of the internal carvings to thin down the shell – did you see how some of the light never moved to the center band?”
“Yes,” Charity said cheerfully, trying to pull the ball she had retrieved earlier out of Maisy’s mouth. “Why not use that one again? It might work on the second try.”
I shook my head. “Can’t. We found out last time that they aren’t reusable, the balls stop working after a majū breaks out.” I popped open the prototype I had just picked up and turned it to show her the inside. The stone band was dull, all of its inner glow and sparkle gone.
Florence shook her head. “It is incredibly wasteful. What is the point of putting so much work into these devices if they will break on the first use?”
I gave her a flat look. “You’re just mad because we proved the balls don’t work on unconscious majū when Drowzee knocked out that Slowpoke earlier.”
She stuck her tongue out at me in response.
Isaac (who had apparently ignored our exchange) frowned as he tapped his pencil against his notebook. “I still would like to know why the tumblestone we encountered in the caves did not lose its energy when the Quagsire bumped into it.” He sighed. “I suppose that is not the most pressing question at the moment, though.”
“Right,” I replied. “I think we can say now that the band has to be whole for sure. But how can we make’em whole when all we have is a bunch of pebbles?”
Our group was quiet as we packed up the materials and left the cave. I kept turning the problem around in my head, trying to figure out what I was missing. Surprisingly, it was Charity who broke the silence halfway back to the house.
“What if we fused them together?” she suddenly asked. “Like – get the stones really hot so they melt together like iron or glass?”
I blinked at her. I didn’t want to burst her bubble, but… “Umm, Charity, I’m pretty sure rocks don’t work that way.”
“He is right, I’m afraid,” Isaac added. “Stone does not melt, at least not under temperatures we humans can produce.” He stroked his chin. “Perhaps there is a majū that could produce flames hot enough… but of course, we do not have access to such a creature.”
Charity huffed. “Perhaps regular rocks do not melt, but these are not regular rocks! When have you ever seen a stone that glowed before?”
I blinked in surprise. She had a point.
“It is worth a try, isn’t it?” she asked, smiling up at us charmingly.
That was how we ended up in front of Isaac’s miniature kiln, trying to melt rocks. I was very convinced that there was no way this could work. The rocks would surely stay solid even up to the highest temperatures, or if by some chance they did melt they would completely lose their glowy property and become useless once they cooled into a solid once again.
I was promptly proven wrong. Once we got the fire stoked up enough, the stones in the ceramic crucible did melt. And when we poured the liquid into a cast-iron mold and let it cool, we were left with a solid lump of glowing stone, much larger than the tiny pebbles we’d had before.
Charity was smug about that one for a while.
We all spent a few days learning the basics of metalworking from the local blacksmith, who was quite confused about our single-minded determination to learn how to make rings but played along when Isaac offered to pay him for his troubles. I had to return Drowzee when he got too interested in sniffing the different powders the man used in his work and nearly knocked some of them over, but I enjoyed the process otherwise. My parents had always told me I would have to wait until I was older to try forging, but I didn’t have to wait anymore!
Then we settled into a comfortable routine. Training in the morning (Drowzee had gotten good enough at Confusion that he could beat Venomoth in most of their duels now, and I could do forty sit-ups in a minute before I collapsed from exhaustion); work on the poke ball project in the afternoon (I was getting quite good at carving hinges with a few efficient knife strokes, and Drowzee had found the most comfortable spot in the workshop to take naps). About once a week we would take a bag of prototypes down to Slowpoke Well and run a set of experiments, with Isaac jotting down the results in his serious way. He always had suggestions based on the results about what we should do next. First we had to smooth the edges of the center band, then we had to try a few variations on the internal carvings, then we had to adjust the way the new stone entry buttons fit against the band and the apricorn shell.
Drowzee, Florence, and I started doing stretches in the morning and practicing meditation in the evenings, and Charity and I exchanged crazy ideas as we carved little designs out of leftover pieces of wood in our spare time. Isaac told stories about his studies of different majū and the way they interacted with the world as we sat around the table for meals, and he helped me buy a sturdy pair of boots and a new outfit that was more comfortable than the clothing I had from Enrui. I practiced connecting with Drowzee and sending simple words through our bond, and sure, it still gave me a massive headache, but the words were slowly getting easier to understand.
Spring faded into summer, and I was comfortable. Sometimes I would forget about the future for a few hours, maybe even half a day. It felt like I had always lived with this group of people I now recognized as my friends. I stopped worrying about paradoxes and how I was going to solve the problem of the gold and silver ball. I just lived my life and, for a while, it was good.
Then, a month and a half after we started the poke ball project, Florence tapped a prototype ball on the head of a Slowpoke, the ball shook back and forth for about ten seconds, and then it lay still, a soft light shining behind the entry button.
We had finally caught a Pokemon.