Florence probably would have stayed there laughing in the grass for hours, but Isaac was too practical for that. He insisted on washing off her cuts with water from a canteen and bandaging them before we did anything else.

“You ought to be more careful with wild majū,” he admonished as he tied a piece of cloth tightly around her arm. “You do not know where that Rattata has been or what could be in your blood now.”

“They are not a wild majū anymore,” Florence pointed out, little giggles still escaping her now and then. “They are a captured majū now.”

Isaac grumbled but didn’t press the point. I wasn’t feeling quite so cavalier about the whole thing. “Seriously, Florence, you could have gotten really hurt,” I said as I flopped down on the grass next to Drowzee. He patted my arm in a consoling way. “What if it had bitten you?”

“I have been bitten before,” she reminded me cheerfully. “This is just a little scratch, I will be fine. And now we have proven that the poke balls can work on majū that are not Slowpoke!”

“When you can throw them properly,” Charity pointed out. She was wandering around the grass and collecting all the poke balls that had missed their target; luckily, it seemed like their energy hadn’t been drained, so we could still use them for future captures. “I wonder if we can do something to the prototype so that it will open as soon as it hits a majū.”

“Or we can just get better at throwing them,” Florence suggested helpfully.

“Hooray, another activity to add to training,” I replied in a monotone voice. Florence giggled again.

Isaac shook his head as he finished securing the bandage, then moved back to the bag of prototypes to grab his notebook. “We can address the problem of how to capture more, ah, lively majū later. For now, I am extremely interested to see how the new majū we have captured reacts to its situation. The Slowpoke we caught were… uninspiring.”

“Hey!” Charity protested as she covered Maisy’s ears. Maisy just sat there and blinked, not appearing to take offense.

Isaac smiled briefly and walked over to pick up the Rattata’s ball, which still lay in the grass. He peered at it for a moment, then shrugged and clicked the entry button.

Light poured out of the poke ball and pooled onto the ground a few feet in front of Isaac, condensing to form the small rat Pokemon. The Rattata looked very startled; it just stood there, not moving a muscle as it darted its eyes rapidly between each of us in turn.

“Let us begin the first test,” Isaac said. “Hello, ah, Rattata. Can you understand what I am saying?”

The Rattata stared at him briefly, nose twitching. Then it suddenly turned around and bolted, running straight in the opposite direction.

That caught me by surprise, but apparently Florence was suspecting it. She had slowly moved into a crouching position as Isaac released the Pokemon; now she sprang forward to catch the Rattata before it could get more than a few feet away. There was a brief tussle before she set the Rattata firmly back in front of Isaac again. She leaned in, growled “No more of that,” then let the Pokemon go. But she stayed very close to the Rattata, just a foot away.

The wild Pokemon stared up at her in a way that, quite frankly, made it look terrified. It slowly moved into a sitting position, but it didn’t try to run away again.

“That brings up an interesting question, actually,” Isaac said. “Can a majū run away from its ball once captured, or will the connection force it to return? We will have to study this later.” He wrote a few lines in his notebook, then turned back to the Rattata. “Well, you certainly do not seem talkative. Let us try commands. We know you know Quick Attack – you used it in the battle. Please demonstrate it now.”

The Rattata just sat there, warily watching Florence out of the corner of its eyes.

“Quick Attack,” Isaac said, louder and slower this time.

The Pokemon raised a paw and licked it casually, smoothing down its fur.

Isaac sighed and shook his head, making another mark in his notes. “As I suspected. Simply being captured does not have any impact on a majū’s understanding of human language.”

I frowned; I hadn’t considered that. Sure, Isaac had pointed out before that wild Pokemon had no reason to understand the human language, but I had kind of assumed that poke balls just fixed that. Apparently it wouldn’t be that easy.

“Well, at least we have a workaround,” Isaac said. “Monroe, will you ask Drowzee to intervene?”

I blinked at him for a moment, then lightly slapped my forehead. Of course! Wild Pokemon couldn’t understand us, sure, but they could certainly understand other Pokemon. And Drowzee was a Pokemon, and he could understand us. (Come to think of it, Maisy was probably in the same boat… then again, she was a Slowpoke, so trying to hold a conversation with her on one side would be excruciatingly slow.)

I turned to look at my starter and saw that he was already paying attention. He caught my eye and flipped his trunk up and down, agreeing to translate for us. “He’s willing,” I said out loud for Isaac’s benefit.

“Excellent!” Isaac replied. “Drowzee, will you ask Rattata to demonstrate its Quick Attack?”

Drowzee turned to the Rattata and said “Drow, ow zee dru?”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

The Rattata sat up straighter and looked at Drowzee with its head cocked to the side. It paused for a moment, then spoke. “Tat, ra?”

“Does it still not understand?” Isaac asked, sounding annoyed.

Drowzee turned back to me and tapped his head. I nodded and closed my eyes, focusing my mind. Practice had made us better at this, but still…

S̷̢̛͇̟̀̉ḩ̸̣̲̟̅͂̋̎͝ͅẻ̷̓̒́ ̶̧̛̩͚̥͚́ả̵͚̲͌̈́̒͐ś̵̩̱̈̊͘ḳ̸̏̾͊ ̵̖̼͆͑̅̋w̸̱̗̫͌̓̑̀̋h̶̭͋͂̀̽̌ỹ̷̧͎͉̙̃̒̄ͅ, Drowzee thought to me, and the words grated against my brain in a burst of static. I gritted my teeth and pushed back the inevitable headache, focusing on parsing the words from the noise.

“She asked why?” I asked him to confirm, and Drowzee flicked his trunk up and down. I turned to Isaac and shrugged. “I guess it – uh, she – wants to know why we want her to do the attack.”

Isaac stared at me for a moment, wrinkling his forehead like he didn’t understand the question. “It – she – is now our majū. She should perform moves when told to. Why would she need to know why?”

I stared back at him in turn, then glanced over his shoulder at where Charity was rubbing Maisy’s belly in the grass. I had to stifle a laugh when she rolled her eyes in an exaggerated manner. For a moment I tried to think of a carefully-phrased way to say what I was thinking; then I gave up. “Majū don’t do what we tell them to because they have to, they’re not mind-controlled or something. They work with us because they want to.”

“It’s a partnership,” Florence chimed in. “Like Trainer Smith says. The majū and trainer each contribute their own strengths and skills to support each other. A majū may be the one who actually performs moves in battle, but they rely on their trainer to analyze the situation and choose the best strategy at any given moment.”

Isaac huffed and ran a hand through his hair. “I know, I know,” he said in a tone that suggested he did not actually know, “but Monroe, when you first explained the theory behind poke balls, you said they relied on capture and control. Yet you now say the ball does not actually control the majū at all?”

“Oh!” I smiled; that made more sense and was a reasonable misconception. “I just meant that the ball controls whether the majū is in their energy form or not. It just controls capture and release. When they’re outside of the ball, they’re free to act how they want.” Technically a trainer could also ‘control’ their Pokemon by forcing them back into their ball if they didn’t obey. But that would likely backfire the next time they sent their Pokemon out, since Pokemon were even less likely to obey their trainers when they were upset. I had seen that happen to rookie trainers sometimes when I watched impromptu battles on the street or tuned into the local gym channel on a slow summer afternoon, and it was always incredibly embarrassing for the trainer.

Isaac didn’t look happy, but he did turn back to Drowzee. “Tell her… we wish to confirm she can still use her attacks after being captured.”

I could feel Drowzee’s skepticism through our bond (and I was feeling some myself), but he turned back to the Rattata and spoke a few words. The Pokemon scrunched up her nose and considered our request for a moment. Then she started running back and forth across the grass, her speed increasing every time she turned around, until she was dashing almost faster than I could see.

In fact, she was so fast that I didn’t realize for a few moments that she had dashed past her usual turnaround point and was trying to run away again. And this time there was no way Florence would be able to catch up with her.

“Press the button!” I yelled at Isaac. He had already lifted the poke ball, and he fumbled it for a moment before aiming it at the retreating rat and pressing down on the entry button. A beam of light shot out of the device and enveloped the Rattata, dragging her back into the ball with a whoosh.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Isaac, on the other hand, just frowned down at the ball. “That could have gone better,” he muttered as he made a decisive mark on his notebook. “I suppose interviewing newly-caught majū is more complicated than I expected. We will need to take a different approach for future subjects.” Then he looked back up at the rest of us and his expression cleared. “Shall we try to capture another one?”

We ended up catching another Rattata, a Hoppip that Florence first tried to befriend (unsuccessfully – the Pokemon blew a glittery Fairy Wind in her face, then turned to Drowzee and insisted on battling), and an Ekans that Florence scored a lucky hit on with a poke ball thrown from a distance. We battled and tried to sneak up on several other Pokemon, but they all managed to break out of the balls we hit them with and ran off before we could try a second time. Some even got creative about it – a cluster of Spearow simply flew away when we tried to approach them with a ball in hand, and the one Geodude we found burrowed down into the ground when we got too close.

Still, I was in a good mood as we made our way back to the town. My headache had cleared up more quickly than it usually did, and four Pokemon was an impressive haul considering none of us had mastered the art of throwing poke balls yet.

My mood soured pretty quickly when Isaac told me what he wanted to try the next day, though.

“It is the sensible thing to do,” he insisted after my initial rejection of the idea. “We need to communicate with these majū, but they do not speak our language. Drowzee can speak to them, and can understand us, and can communicate with you.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, trying to sound sensible yet well aware that I was whining. “We’ve only just gotten to short phrases. Trying a whole conversation – four whole conversations! – is going to hurt.”

“We all must make sacrifices in the name of science,” Isaac said gravely, though a smile tugged at the edge of his mouth. “Being captured has apparently not had the impact on these majū that I thought it would. We cannot know why unless we ask them directly, and we need Drowzee’s help – and your help – for that.”

“Easy for you to say,” I replied sourly. “You don’t have to put up with the headaches.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Isaac replied in a cheerful tone. “Dealing with your whining can certainly give me a migraine!”

I glared at him.

Isaac put up his hands in a defensive gesture. “A joke, just a joke.” Then he sighed. “If you absolutely refuse to participate I can ask one of the Slowbro to assist, but, well, you know how Slowbro are. It will probably take us four days to interview the majū instead of four hours.”

I scratched at my ear and grumbled. Isaac had a point. I did want to know what the Pokemon side of the capturing experience was like – it might help me understand what could have gone wrong with the gold and silver ball. And I did not have the patience to put up with a Slowbro’s incredibly slow conversation speed.

I glanced down at Drowzee, who was leaning against the wall near me. He flipped his trunk up and down quickly and twitched his ears for emphasis. He didn’t get headaches from mental communication, and he was always badgering me to let him practice more. This was a good opportunity to see just how much we could do.

“Fine,” I finally said, both to my starter and to Isaac. “We can do the whole translation thing.”

Isaac thanked me profusely, but I didn’t reply. I was already sure that I was going to regret this decision immensely.