It was astonishing how easy it was to fall back into the pattern of everyday life in Azalea.

Training was one element of that. We spent a week learning how to manage our own training sessions under Smith’s direction. Florence took to it like a fish to water, of course, but I picked it up pretty quickly too. The hardest part wasn’t even managing Pausso or Echo’s training; no, the hardest part was forcing myself to run laps or do planks when Smith wasn’t ordering me to do it. Pausso started nagging me in his place, though, and that helped.

After that week Smith decided we were ready to graduate from the ultra-novice training and join the big leagues… well, maybe the regular leagues. We started training in the afternoons with him and Alonso, which was an eye-opening experience. Maybe Smith and Venomoth didn’t go out on missions anymore, but they still kept their skills honed. Watching them do target practice and endurance training made it clear they were a formidable team. Alonso and Pineco, on the other hand, specialized more in defensive work. They had combined Rollout and Protect so that Pineco could roll to a specific location and throw up a shield quickly, and they often rehearsed different scenarios where Pineco would need to move around a field to guard several targets from a variety of attacks.

We each mostly focused on our individual training regimens, but there was a decent amount of crossover. Venomoth and Pausso often helped each other in training psychic moves. Echo sometimes teamed up with Skiploom for flight training. Both Smith and Alonso occasionally observed how I worked with my Pokemon and gave me suggestions. And we held a few mock battles, though we always called them off long before any of the Pokemon could get seriously hurt.

Outside of training I still worked on the poke balls. We had to do a few rounds of iteration on Charity’s weighted balls, but eventually we got them to work well enough that the balls would hit Pokemon at the right angle more often than not. I talked to Isaac about my concerns around the poke balls being flammable, and he came up with some kind of chemical concoction that made the balls more fire resistant. We ran more experiments to determine why the particular design we’d come up with worked as well as it did, and Isaac started writing up more detailed theories based on the results.

After we got the fire resistance working I spent a full morning carefully crafting every component of a single poke ball and fusing them all together. When the glue had dried I etched a word into the top half of the ball, right above the center band. I waited until I had the workshop to myself, then called Echo down from her favorite spot in the corner of the ceiling.

“This is for you,” I said, grinning at her widely. She was perched on my shoulder, so I held the ball up so she could sound it out easily. “It’s even got your name on it.”

Language was still a work in progress for the two of us, but she had picked up common words quickly and this seemed like a straightforward enough idea. I’d explained to her about the poke ball project before with Pausso’s help, but had never formally captured her since we’d run out of balls back in Ecruteak. I figured now was as good a time as any to fix that.

She seemed to think differently. Echo twitched her ears towards the ball, then inched backwards and squeaked in an uncertain way.

I frowned. “Umm… are you worried about needing to stay inside it? You wouldn’t have to, you could stay out like Pausso does.” I clicked the ball open and used my free hand to mime her coming out of it, then pulled Pausso’s ball out of my pouch and gestured from it to him. He had been napping in his usual spot before, but now he opened one eye and looked at me quizzically. “See? He’s fine.”

Echo lowered herself a little and her usually-smiling mouth turned down. “Bah,” she said quietly, moving her head so it faced away from the ball.

I bit the inside of my cheek as I realized what she was trying to say. “You don’t want a poke ball at all, do you?”

Now she turned her head back around to face me directly, and her ears twitched. “Zu,” she confirmed.

That hurt. I was proud of the poke ball I’d made for her, proud of everything I’d learned. A large part of me wanted to go off and sulk about it, especially after I’d spent so much time on the crafting. But that wouldn’t be fair to her.

“Okay,” I said, forcing back a disappointed sigh. “That’s okay. If you don’t want a ball, you don’t have to have one.”

Echo perked back up at that and leaned in to nuzzle my cheek with her head. I settled the poke ball away in my pouch and scratched the spot on her back between her wings the way she liked, marveling as I always did at how soft her short blue fur was. Before meeting her, I never would have thought that a Zubat could be cuddly. She had sure proven me wrong.

So Echo’s poke ball was put away unused and things stayed the same as they had been before. I supposed it didn’t make a huge difference if she wasn’t linked to a ball. She was small enough that I could carry her if she fainted, and she could easily fly anywhere she needed to go. There might be complications if (no, when) we got back to my own time, but that was a future problem, and it assumed she’d even want to come with Pausso and me in the first place.

I didn’t let myself think about that much. The idea of leaving her behind just made me feel upset.

We settled into an easy rhythm where Charity came up with new ideas, I managed the construction pipeline, Isaac designed experiments, and Florence handled testing. Every few days we would go out to some wild location to test the next set of poke balls. The wild Pokemon slowly got used to seeing us out and about, and the ones who came up to challenge us more often knew what to expect. We had fewer cases of Pokemon being upset about being captured and more cases of them just demanding to be released right away. Lots of them simply wanted to see what our new devices were like; others liked the challenge of battling human-partnered Pokemon and were in it for the fun.

A few of the Pokemon decided to stick with us after being captured. Some of them wanted to spend more time in human civilization, like the Meowth we found in a tree right at the edge of town and the Geodude Florence caught just outside of Union Cave. They both proved quite helpful, as Meowth was willing to climb trees to assist with apricorn picking and Geodude used her connections in the caves to find us more tumblestone deposits. Then there was the little Oddish Florence caught on the outskirts of Ilex Forest. She seemed skittish at first, but when Isaac interviewed her she warmed up right away. By the end of the interview she’d decided she wanted to be Isaac’s Pokemon. He was completely befuddled by this development, but he let the little Oddish follow him around and didn’t complain, so it seemed to be working out.

Only one of the new captures decided to join Florence’s team. A Snubbull from the fields north of town came up to challenge her one day, which was nothing unusual. But when Florence sent Skiploom out to battle? Well, the wild Pokemon practically fell over her own feet. Snubbull was very obviously infatuated with Skiploom, and after a few days everyone but Skiploom knew it. He just treated her like a sparring partner, even when she was clearly pining after him. But she loved battling too, especially when she got to battle alongside Skiploom, so she adapted to training pretty well.

News about our poke ball project slowly spread around Johto. We got occasional letters delivered by groups of traders where someone asked to buy a poke ball or offered a business opportunity so we could start selling them. Isaac locked all of those letters away in a drawer and refused to respond to them. Occasionally a traveler would stop by the house and ask to see how the poke balls worked, and he was willing to demonstrate with Oddish and explain the high-level theory. But he refused to tell anyone how they were made, and he refused to let anyone buy them.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“You saw what happened in Violet,” he told me when I asked him why he didn’t want to sell the poke balls. “If these devices fall into the wrong hands, who knows what could happen? Better to keep them in our circle for now.”

I didn’t think that made sense. If he thought poke balls were so dangerous, why was he still working on developing them? But I didn’t bring that up, because our work on the poke ball project was my ticket to home. If we kept learning more about the science behind how they worked, surely at some point I’d figure out how to undo the lock on the gold and silver ball. I had already attempted several secret experiments to try to recreate the lock and none of them had worked, but it was just a matter of time.

I had to believe that. What could I do otherwise?

Months passed and gradually summer turned to fall. Pausso figured out how to target his Confusion attacks to affect specific senses, and his psychic training with Venomoth led to him learning Psybeam. Echo fully adjusted her sleep schedule so she could stay awake all day, and her persistent practice with her Bite attack eventually helped her learn a new move, Poison Fang. I didn’t make much progress on self-defense, unfortunately, because Smith and Alonso only knew a few basics. But I paid attention to how they trained with their partners and adopted some of their ideas into my own training.

All of that eventually led to a brisk afternoon in the middle of fall. We were on the training grounds, of course, and had just finished running (or flying) laps around the field as an initial warm-up. Pausso and Echo were going through a few iterations of their move patterns as I set up targets along the side of the field. Pausso’s Psybeam was pretty accurate already, but I wanted to work on its range since he would benefit from having an attack other than Hypnosis that he could use from far away.

Echo finished her pattern and flew over to me, then nudged the straw hat that hung over my back with her head and squeaked.

“You’ve only been out in the sun for half an hour, girl,” I said as gently as I could. “You need to work on your endurance.”

She squeaked more insistently and wrapped one of her tails around the cord that held the hat in place, trying to tug it upwards.

I sighed. “Okay, okay. Just five minutes, then we need to get back to work.”

She chirped a happy reply and settled down into my hair. I pulled the hat up and placed it carefully over her body, giving her some shade. Yes, her progress with staying out under the sun was slow, but there was progress and it was close to the middle of the day. Surely she’d get even better over the winter.

Pausso finished his own move pattern and trudged over to position himself a few dozen feet away from the first target. I moved to stand next to the target, then tugged on our mental connection to give him the signal that it was okay to start.

He put his paws up with the palms flat and furrowed his brow. His eyes quickly glowed purple and a spinning globe of swirling purple energy formed in the air in front of his hands. He held the globe for two seconds, then shot it in a brilliant beam towards the first target I had set up.

I kept a close eye on the straw target as the beam hit it. The trouble with Psybeam was that it didn’t do any physical damage; it was all mental. That meant it didn’t leave a mark when it hit a non-living target. But if I was standing close enough I could see where the beam hit, so we did that instead. Luckily Psybeam was a fairly accurate attack, so I wasn’t worried about getting hit by it accidentally.

“Not bad!” I called back to Pausso. “You’re a few inches left of center, though.”

He grunted and formed a new globe of energy, then shifted it slightly before sending it off. The second attempt was practically right in the middle of the target, and he twitched his ears happily when I told him.

We slowly worked our way back through the targets, increasing the distance for the attack with each one. By the fourth target the Psybeam was starting to dissipate before it hit the straw, so I asked him to hold the attack for longer before releasing it. That seemed to help. I made a mental note to test out the relationship between how long he held the attack and how far it went later on.

After a few more tries the purple energy started sparking and jittering as it formed into a globe at Pausso’s hands, so I called the exercise off. I jogged over to join my starter, ready to tell him he should take a break for a few minutes while Echo and I worked on her agility training. But before I got there Natu teleported over and told him something that made his ears stand up straight.

“What is it?” I asked as I reached the pair. Echo peeked out from under the brim of my hat to squeak her own question.

S̸o̴m̵e̶o̸n̴e̸ ̵ i̸s̴ ̶ c̶o̶m̸i̶n̸g̴, he told me. These days his mental voice had gotten a lot clearer; there was barely any static at all, and most days the headaches were mild enough that I could get by without eating a persim berry. S̸h̷e̴ ̷ d̶o̵e̵s̷ ̸n̸o̷t̷ ̴ r̴e̶c̶o̷g̴n̸i̷z̵e̶.

That made me raise my eyebrows. People from the town occasionally stopped by to watch the training sessions, especially if they wanted to ask for advice about how to get a Slowpoke to behave. But by this point Natu would probably recognize most of them. Why would a stranger come to see us train?

Natu teleported off again to rejoin Florence, and Pausso and I jogged over to join her group. She’d been busy leading her team through a set of stretching exercises, but now Natu and the other Pokemon were all talking over each other. “What did Natu say?” she asked immediately.

“Someone is coming, apparently,” I said with a shrug. “No idea who.” That made me a bit nervous, but I quashed the feeling quickly. I was home in Azalea, my team was with me, and Smith and Alonso were training nearby. There was nothing a mysterious stranger could do to me, not with so many Pokemon around for protection.

A loud squawk came from the other side of the field, so Florence and I both looked over to see what was going on. What looked like a Pelipper had flown onto the field and hovered in the air not far from the other two trainers. Venomoth had immediately taken to the air to defend them, and he shook his wings in a threatening display, but the bird didn’t react to it at all.

I exchanged a look with Florence, then we both ran off to join the other two trainers. If there was going to be trouble we would need to be there to help.

As we drew nearer I realized that the Pelipper wasn’t alone; a woman had also appeared on the path that led from town to the training grounds. It was immediately obvious that she wasn’t from Azalea because she didn’t dress anything like the other women I’d seen around town. She wore a plain silk shirt with a pair of loose pants that cut off under the knees, and I had never seen a woman in this era wear pants. Even Florence still wore skirts, though she had switched to shorter ones with slits that made it easier for her to run. The woman also had a wide, floppy hat atop her tight dark curls and a bright yellow scarf tied around her neck, and she walked in a broad, swaggering way that screamed confidence.

“Sorry to alarm you!” she called out to Smith as we ran up to join him. “We mean no harm.”

Smith still looked unsettled, but he gestured up towards Venomoth and his partner descended to land on the grass next to him. “Who are you, exactly?” he asked in a wary tone.

The woman swept her hat off her head and bowed in flamboyant fashion. “Zuri Abwao, of Cianwood Village,” she replied; then she flashed a bright grin that stood out starkly against her dark skin. “My partner up there is Pelipper. Do not mind him, he is just curious.” The bird squawked again in greeting, and I noticed as he winged down to settle on the ground that he wore a yellow band around the innermost part of his right wing, a band that matched his trainer’s scarf.

The new woman’s words didn’t appear to comfort Smith. “You are a trainer?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Not officially. Pelipper and I are sailors by trade, and we are here on official business for our village.” Then she grinned again. “But when we heard in the market where the trainers of this town could be found, we could not resist the opportunity for a challenge.”

Now Smith hummed and looked at her with new interest. “Ahh. So you are looking to battle.”

“Of course. Are you interested?”

Smith glanced down to where Venomoth perched in the grass. His partner looked back up at him and twitched his wings just slightly.

Then Smith smiled and looked back up to meet Zuri’s eyes. “This should be an entertaining exercise. We accept.”