With sunrise came another day on the pasture, but I felt the anger bubbling back up inside me as I looked across the rear of the house during breakfast. The shattered kitchen window and the askew door leading into the kitchen were as conspicuous as broken teeth in a smile. The dings and indents in the walls where Pokéball fragments had been pried out, too. I may have gotten over the sheer fear that had been overwhelming me at the idea of the near capture of the night before, but that just made me want to do something about it. As tempting as it was to try and transform and ride out full of fire and brimstone... what was I going to do even if I found that Tristan fellow? I wasn't going to beat his team, and the only reason he didn't have all the time in the world to beat me senseless the night before was due to his concern about being caught.

That being the case, the only way I was going to be able to channel my frustrations was through training. I wanted to get better at flying, considering that it seems my current nemesis had chosen that as their forte, and I wanted to be able to hold my own if I ever ran into him again. I shifted into a Pidgey's body, and soared over to where the flock was milling about in the morning sunlight. I had gotten better at picking my sparring partner out of the crowd, so I bird-hopped over and gave her a swat atop the head with the tip of a wing, much the way she enjoyed tormenting me during our training bouts. "Morning."

An irate squawk and a fluttering of her own wings back in my direction, reminiscent of a shooing gesture. "Ugh, go awaaaay." She complained, eyes barely peeking open to glare at me, then the sun overhead. "How are you so... full of energy? I barely slept at all after that ruckus last night..." With a long yawn, she promptly tucked her head underneath her wing and perched down onto the grass. "Not gonna fight until like, after lunch. Sleepy."

"Come on, flying around and practicing is going to help you wake up?" I insisted, too hyped up on adrenaline and thoughts of revenge to want to wait until later. She didn't respond, but I assumed she had to be purposely ignoring me, as there was no way that she had fallen asleep that quickly. I nudged her with a wing against her side, with all the insistence of a pestering child, until she suddenly lifted her head and jabbed a peck square between my eyes. "Ow!" I hopped back and shook my head, taking in her sleepy, irate stare.

"I beat you up when we practice already, are you sure you want to bother me into fighting with you while I'm grumpy?" She preened her feathers briefly, not getting up from her spot on the grass. After that rather compelling argument, I merely wished her a good sleep and hurriedly took to the air to go and do some practice on my own.

Spending the morning in that fashion, I looped, I spun, I made aggressively sharp turns that stressed what I felt like I could handle. I was basically going through all the sort of imaginary dodges and combat maneuvers I thought I might need and then exaggerating them to an even further degree. I wanted to try and completely conquer the feeling of motion sickness I got during some of the sharp turning actions, and to reinforce to my brain I needed to think about positioning in three dimensions.

It was something that often got me in trouble in the practice fights, merely looking around and behind me when a quick motion caused me to lose sight of my opponent, without worrying about up and down. Plus, I had to keep an estimation of my height in mind at all times while I was executing maneuvers. One time I was forced down into a rough crash landing because I had been repeatedly attacked from above, and kept diving lower out of reflex. Staring up, watching for each swoop to time my dodge, and completely oblivious to how low I had gotten. I wasn't eager to repeat that mistake.

While going through the motions might help me be more used to it when I did need to use them in battle, I wasn't sure I would ever get totally used to the sensations. As long as it wasn't serious enough to impede me in combat, I'd be satisfied. When I grew tired of practicing my twists and turns in the air, I wasn't sure what else I could do on my own to try and improve.

After some thought, I transformed into the hulking, scar-clad figure of the Scyther. While they were capable of flight, it was an entirely different body-type. I suddenly had an extra set of appendages to get used to using simultaneously. Flying as a Pidgey, I was able to rationalize my flying practice by mentally imagining my wings as arms. However, if I wanted to take advantage of how strong this Scyther transformation could be, I was obviously going to need to keep thinking of my arms as weapons. The instincts of the body were there, but my brain kept resisting it, and conquering that odd resistance to the new appendages was going to take some work. It was as good a place to start as anything else.

If flying as a Pidgey could be compared to being an airplane, then using Scyther's back-mounted wings had to be like flying with a jetpack. It was good at fast speed in a straight line, but comparably awful at turning. While a bird could control their motions with their traditional bird wings, the back-mounted configuration combined with Scyther's significantly bigger body made it more like a jump-pack than a jetpack. I could make small side-to-side adjustments while I was midair, as well as twist my body to lean my mass into each shift, but overall the maneuverability was incomparably worse.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Thinking back to the battle with the Scyther, it was mostly doing the same, rather than trying to hover in the air and maneuver that way. It had leapt out of the trees like a rocket to take down the basket, then leapt toward the pasture in mostly straight lines. Out of curiosity, I tried to hover with my wings, and I found that Scyther was capable of sustained flight... but I bled my momentum rather quickly when I tried. The flying pace slowed to all but a walking pace when I was freely roaming the air in a hover.

After some practice, the best way I found to use sustained flight was to bound off obstacles along the path I wanted to travel. By leaping at a tree, I could catch a foot against it and shove myself off at a slightly different angle, adding more forward thrust while my wings focused on keeping gravity from yanking me down to the ground more than actually maneuvering. I... okay, yes, I may have been inspired by memories of ninja I had seen in various entertainment forms in my last life. I'm allowed to indulge in my inner shinobi a bit, right?

Scyther certainly fit the vibe, and I spent some time playing at a berry-heavy imitation of a fruit ninja. Pansage had been in the wooded area, feeding some of the Caterpie. After some coaxing, I got him to start tossing berries over at me in an underhanded pitch, and I tried to slash at them as quickly as I could. I missed and got pelted in the face with a berry a few times, and I had splattered berry juice all over myself in the process, but it was a fun way to practice as a Scyther. And it made the Caterpie laugh and murmur assorted single words of approval. Hearing them spout off "Cool!" or "Funny!" with single-minded determination.

I didn't want to say that they were stupid, but... they never seemed to speak in more than one word at a time, and it was often just to express a single emotion. I suppose that Pokémon varied in intelligence, but it was like someone had given a bunch of excitable puppies the ability to speak. Okay, it was cute and endearing, and the energy almost made me forget that I was being cheered on by a swarm of foot-long caterpillars.

Once I was winding down and idly chewing on a berry I had stabbed on the end of a scythe blade, the worm fellows circled around the grass and happily munched on the scattered remains of my practice without complaint. Some of them seemed to enjoy being able to get right at the sugary juices of the center of the berries more readily now that they had mostly been sliced open. Then playful misfortune struck when one of the Caterpie dropped down from a branch above and landed square on my head. "Juice!"

Then I felt the sensation of the Pokémon licking at my head, seemingly because of the fruit juice that splattered me during my chopping. As one, the horde turned toward me. The analogy of puppies was holding strong, albeit slow-moving, wriggling puppies. The slowest chase ever began, with two-dozen Caterpie squirming along the ground after me, while I wandered aimlessly between the trees trying to figure out how I could get a Caterpie off my head without hurting it, considering my arms were scythes. "Stop that! Stop licking my head! Eugh, stop moving too! You're so wriggly, get off!" The deafening cries of "Juice!" from the trailing bugs and the one on my head were remorseless.

Pansage was gasping for air they were laughing so hard at the sight, leaning against one of the trees for support. "Can't you help me out? I don't want to hurt them by accident!" I called out, but they merely held up a hand in a 'hold on' gesture and kept laughing, then pointed upward at the treetops. Another pair of Caterpie launched themselves off the branches at my head, and I just sighed in frustration before they smacked into me, toppling me back into the hoard of wriggly bodies that had been slowly yet steadfastly pursuing me. "No, stop! Get off. Oh gosh stop wriggling, it's so weird!" I cried out at the frustratingly weird sensation of being buried in a mound of Caterpie.

Lacking any better options, I dropped the transformation so that I wouldn't have to feel so many of them moving around me. Sure, it left me even more buried in the pile, but at least it was like two of them squishing me now, and not like two dozen. Eventually, the enthusiastic Caterpie were coaxed off of me by Pansage, with a series of chirped "Fun! Fun! Play!" rising from the group. "Are you okay?" He asked with a quirking grin of someone struggling not to burst out laughing all over again.

"Next time I'll be sure to fling berry juice on you, too, so you can have fun playing." I grumbled with no real heat in my voice.

"It's nice to see them get so energetic. You really should come around and chop fruit up sometime, it's rare that the bugs get to play like that. Even when the kids come, they aren't often too eager to play with the bugs." Pansage dropped down onto the grass, chewing on a sliced-up berry themselves, with a small pile of them hugged against their chest, cradled in their other arm.

I winced at that, and the remark hit particularly hard after remembering Mable's story. Way to land a critical hit on my emotions, Pansage. "I'll... alright, I'll try and come play with the bugs now and again." I reached over for another nearby berry, settling in to recover while the Caterpie milled about aimlessly. It was true, they didn't really have much in the way to play with. They could climb around the trees and roam the grass, but that was about it. "Hm. Hang on!"

Roaming around the base of the trees, I gathered up some sticks and figured that I could bind some of these together and maybe make a swing or something to hang off one of the trees back here. "Hey, can someone use String Shot to give me something to tie these sticks up with?" That was probably not the best thing to ask with a bunch of Caterpie milling around, bored. Every last one of them turned and spat a sticky strand at me in unison, leaving me more layered up than a Cascoon. While I stood there all but entrapped in webbing and Pansage burst out laughing all over again, a chorus of "Fun! Play!" rang around the trees. At least someone was having fun.