“You sure this is okay?”
Louis shrugged. “I have to test them either today or tomorrow. Teaching you and getting your help is just lucky timing.”
“And the trees?” David asked, chewing on his lip.
“Officially, these need to be tested against a rock face or in a cavern.” Louis waved his hand at the flat marshland around them. “Unofficially Fuchsia ignores that as we don’t have many caves or rocky areas and the ones we do are all protected habitats. We'll break a few branches and leaves but that's nothing to the ecosystem.”
“Fine. How do we do this?”
“I’ll go first. We’ll fire at-" Louis spun around, scanning the trees surrounding the training grounds. "-that tree. Wait until I’ve disengaged the hook and pulled the rope back before you fire. Drop the empty canisters in the red box. There’s a couple spares in the green box if we need to retest.”
After a short demonstration from Louis, David felt confident enough to try himself. He lined the sights up, and pulled the trigger.
A round metal arrow flew forward, a thin line following after it. It struck a little higher than he’d aimed and disappeared into the canopy above. He gave the thin line a quick tug, hearing a faint click as the arrow split and opened up into a hook. It took another arms length of rope back before the hook caught in the branches. Any more attempts to pull the rope back failed. It was stuck fast.
“Cool.”
Louis snorted. “Let’s see if you are still saying that when we’re made it through twenty. Press that button there to disengage.”
There was another faint click after he did.
“Now try to wiggle the rope a bit like this and-” Louis gave the rope a bit of slack before whipping it up and down, sending a curve rolling down the line. He waited a few seconds before reeling the rope back in. A few seconds later the round arrow dropped to the ground at the base of the tree. “It’ll release from the tree. If that doesn’t work we need to go over and release it ourselves.”
“It’s a lot more fun than I thought,” David said, coiling the escape rope as Louis showed.
“Again,” Louis said, shaking his head. “I want to see if you’re still saying that after testing twenty of them. If you want to climb a cliff with these things you have to do it over and over again. It gets boring fast.”
Two hours later David stuck to his opinion on firing Escape Ropes, but stubbornness played a larger role in that than he’d like to admit.
-.-
Venonat dug into the stacks of compressed treated paper with a fervour that, on anything other than a metre tall ball of fuzz, would have been frightening. They buried their face into it, holding it steady with their pincers and tore into the material with their snout.
The secret, as Finn explained it, was in the layers. Venonat loved the taste of the treated paper. From what David could work out, the treatment made it the insect equivalent of catnip. They couldn’t get enough of the stuff. The only limitation was the speed at which they could consume it - which was where the layers came in. Bug type Pokemon were used to eating leaves and the occasional sliver of orange tent fabric. All thin fabric that they could cut with their pincers and tear pieces off to deliver to their mouth. They could then shred the slivers with tiny teeth. The training aid, paper blocks, was compressed until it was too thick for that approach to work. They couldn’t tear pieces off the block. Instead they were forced to skip that step and shred the large block directly with their tiny teeth. This wasn’t very effective. Venonat used its pincers to separate bite size pieces for a reason. Eating large chunks with its small mouth was slow, awkward.
Venonat liked the paper too much to settle for slow.
Stuck with this conundrum - the paper being oh so tasty, but oh so difficult to eat, Venonat cheated. They reached for that otherworldly energy inside them and directed it to their mouth. David couldn’t tell if it was instinct or frustration that drove them. Within a minute of attempting to eat the paper, Venonat’s mouth began to flash lime. Sparks flew, dancing around its mouth as the paper was consumed so much faster, disintegrating into shreds as Venonat gulped it up.
This was when David interceded. Stepping forward, he pulled the stack away, ignoring as Venonat’s happy squeaks became sad wails.
“Bug Bite,” He ordered, shoving a thick branch at Venonat to replace its tasty meal.
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Venonat ignored the branch at first, choosing to try and follow the stack of paper in David’s hand. Only when David raised it well above his head would they give up and turn to the wood. The sparks of lime were fading by this point, but as Venonat dove forward, the faint glimmers reignited, gaining some of their strength back.
Venonat mouth butted the stick and the clearing was filled with a hum quite like that of a wood chipper. David flinched, both from the noise which he was too close to the source for comfort, and the shavings that flew away from the impact. It was only a few seconds before Venonat stepped back, but in that time the bark had disappeared from a football sized length of the branch, and it'd been hollowed out like a beaver had spent all day working on it.
David pushed the branch closer to Venonat, indicating to a new spot on the branch. “Bug Bite.”
Venonat turned to the branch again and dove at it, but unlike before, they didn’t have the lime sparks at the ready. David saw a few glints of colour appear, but when Venonat stood back only a thin layer of the bark was gone.
He sighed. “Let’s take a short break.”
Venonat let out a trill, looking up at where David held the stack. He wasn't persuaded.
“We’ll do more later, let’s rest for now.”
At his words Venonat squatted down to rest, but David still took the time to stow the block of paper away out of sight. He trusted Venonat, but it was best not to leave temptation out. The stack was nearly done too, less than a quarter of the original size remained and as Venonat improved it shrank faster and faster. Hopefully by the time Venonat finished their second block of the stuff they would have the Move down well enough to practise without the training aid. The paper was too expensive to use frivolously.
With Venonat resting, David turned to the other participant in today’s training.
Cloudburst, who had been watching him, turned her beak away as he looked at her. She’d been grumpy over the last two days. As effective as Venonat’s training aid was, it had created a problem. It wasn’t jealousy as such, but Pidgey was definitely perplexed by the fact that Venonat got to eat a tasty snack while training and she didn’t.
“Let’s do some more Quick Attacks. It takes a little too long to charge up still. We need to get it as close to instantaneous as possible.”
Cloudburst twitched before ducking her head under a wing.
David rubbed his face. In a way it was his own fault. Back when they first met he’d used berries as a means of motivating Pidgey. At that point they didn’t have a set schedule and Pidgey’s meals weren’t regular like they were now. First the promise of food and then the choice between what to eat had been what drove the tiny bird Pokemon. Once she started to battle she didn’t need that extra source of motivation anymore. The progress and gains from the training pushed her to fight more battles, and the battles to train more. It was a great loop.
However, he had reintroduced food to training with this stack of paper for Venonat. Cloudburst was now questioning why bring it back, and if Venonat got it, why not her too?
“Cloudburst,” he complained. She’d participated in training yesterday while she considered what to do about this change. Not fully, but enough to make some progress. Today it seemed she was going on strike when Venonat got food and she didn’t. “Venonat needs that to train. It’s not a reward, it’s how they’re training.”
The fact the training only worked because the paper was a treat for Venonat didn’t count.
Cloudburst didn’t make a noise of protest. She didn’t complain, she just stayed perfectly still. Still enough to be an obvious complaint by itself.
David rubbed his face again. They didn’t have time for this. There were only sixteen days left.
“Fine. A berry tomorrow. One, and not the rare kind either!” After paying for Venonat’s paper and clothes for himself, there wasn’t enough Poke spare to buy a Touga. Pidgey would have to settle for a more common spicy berry.
Adding to her diet wouldn’t be the worst thing either. She was starting to eat more and more as she continued to grow, and he would need to adjust her diet soon to keep her well fed. The occasional berry would stave that time off for a while. At least, that was the best way he could justify the added expense to himself.
Cloudburst shifted, lifting her head out from under her wing. She stared David down. He held fast. After a few slow seconds, she let out a chirp. David relaxed.
“Alright, let’s start with moving targets. I’ll be throwing them pretty close to you, so react fast.”
An hour later Cloudburst was too tired to continue and retreated to her ball for the night.
David recalled Venonat as well, giving them a break while he got changed. The wide brimmed hat, the red scarf, the well-worn sweatpants. It all went into the backpack. His new outfit was retrieved at the same time. For all the colourful hair, the popular clothing in Fuchsia seemed to trend on the bland side of things. While shopping, he'd chosen the most common outfit and colour. His new clothes were grey, and made from a soft fabric. The pants were loose, not limiting his movement at all. The shirt was nothing special aside from the odd triangular neckline that dropped an inch below his collarbones.
David tried to flatten those strands of his hair that suffered from their time under the hat, and set off back to Fuchsia. This was his routine now. In the morning he was David. First he would search for battles for Cloudburst on the training grounds. Then it was off to the market to earn some cash while she rested. After lunch he would head over to the ranger’s office, his new private training field, where he would train Cloudburst and chat to Louis. Venonat tended to wake up an hour or two after Louis left for the day. The three of them trained for the next few hours until Pidgey needed to sleep.
After that point he considered it nighttime, and time to become Fred. He changed outfits and returned to the public training grounds to meet Finn Voyant and train Venonat. Fred, the clothes - it was part of a disguise and likely a stupid one, but it made talking to a Voyant feel less risky. Having the disguise made it easier to relax, and when you were lying to an empath, that made a huge difference.
It was Fred that walked onto the training grounds and gave the man with dark indigo hair waiting there a big wave.