Gliding over the treetops was a nice view, and I had to keep forcing myself to actually direct my attention downward to keep an eye out for Pokémon instead of just staring around toward the horizon. The evening sun was slowly shifting downward to my right, so as best as I could tell we were flying south into the wooded area. It wasn't all trees, however, as I saw sparser areas that looked like flowering grasslands. When we flew over those areas, I could see flashes of movement down among the flowers. Hints of green carapace vanishing underneath the curtain of petals in some areas, while the occasional Weedle glared upward at us and aimed its stinger-tipped tail upward as if to warn us off.

Aside from a brief encounter with a curious Masquerain, a flitting bug with large eyeball-pattern wings that flew up closer to us in brief examination before moving on, there wasn't much remarkable that happened on our flight. We had been winging along for a fair bit now, and the silence was starting to wear on me. "So you don't think Pidgeotto will care if we want to shelter out near it tonight? I don't want to make her mad." I remarked, more to break the silence between us than anything else. It was still true, though, and I didn't know the bigger bird's temperament aside from the one brief encounter.

"Oh, mom's not gonna care. If anything she'll be glad to see me coming to visit. She's told me before that I'll evolve faster if I were to come out and stay in the woods anyway, but I still didn't feel comfortable being out here by myself. She wouldn't let anything real bad happen to me, but she's a firm believer in 'learning to fly on your way to the ground'. As long as I wasn't getting too beat up or actually starving, I don't think she'd intervene much, despite the fact she showed up during our first sparring. She actually thought I was in trouble, then, since it's rare for anything to happen at the pasture." Pidgey didn't bother to look my way, focusing on the path ahead as we spoke.

"But you don't mind coming out here now, huh? I guess I'm just so powerful that you feel safe having me watching your back? Impressed by my battling earlier today?" The playful retort was accompanied by a sharp dive downward, as I already knew that my bragging antics were going to make her try to soar closer to smack me if I didn't make it more inconvenient to do so.

Pidgey still had a look like she was considering chasing me down, but shook her head and continued flying along normally, so I rose back up to casual speaking distance. "Very funny. Rub it in that I didn't get to battle as much as I wanted, why don't you! But I guess it is nice to have someone to cooperate with. With my siblings, it's usually very competitive."

Her head jerked in a nod that indicated I should look forward, and I obliged, spotting a particularly broad, squat-looking tree. I wasn't sure of the species, but it almost looked like a building with pine-needle like greenery covering its branches. It'd take twenty of me to cross the width of the trunk, and yet it didn't seem to rise as high into the sky as it should, as if the upper reaches of the tree had broken off at some point in the past. I could see a whole bunch of Pidgey flitting around from branch to branch, with many nests of various sizes tucked away in the branches. Perched in a positively huge nest at the uppermost reaches, Pidgeotto looked out over the area like a sentry at their post. I had little doubt that she had already spotted us, but didn't so much as shift a wing in acknowledgement.

"Yeah, this is where the flock nests. It's a pretty sweet tree, right? You wouldn't believe how many Beedrill we had to deal with before they finally gave up on this place. That big tree actually has a pretty big hollow up at the top, and they were nesting there when the flock moved in. But this is the only big tree around here that we could all fit in, and my mom's too stubborn to not live on the biggest tree around."

"It does look impressive." I agreed, not really feeling sorry for the Beedrill. I just had the heebie-jeebies about stinging insects, let alone ones with stingers the size of me. "So where did all the Beedrill go?"

The pair of us landed on one of the many available branches and took a moment to settle after the flight over. Pidgey idly settled atop one of the vacant nests, sitting down rather than remain perched on the branch. "Oh, they just sort of scattered through the woods now, I think. It's both good and bad, since you're more likely to run into a Beedrill after they spread out, but at least when you do it shouldn't be more than a few of them since they aren't gathered up in one big swarm."

Great. Just great. I can't wait to inevitably run into some giant hornet horrors. "Is it okay to just claim a spot like that?" I asked, as I had assumed all the nests had owners.

"Yeah, it's no big deal. We've lived in this tree for a good while now, and we've had outsiders come and go over time too. As long as there aren't any eggs in a nest, it's pretty much a free-for-all. It's not just for members of our flock, either. As long as other birds don't cause trouble, mom sometimes lets them stay a while when they're travelling past the area. There's at least one big flock of Fletchling that come by on the regular." She looked upward, as if worried about being overheard from above, and leaned closer to me to speak in a conspiratorial whisper. "I'm pretty sure mom's sweet on the Talonflame that leads that flock." Giggling, she peeked upward again to ensure she hadn't enacted some sort of divine vengeance from the Pidgeotto above for saying such a thing.

I rolled my eyes, not wanting to dwell on that mental image for any longer. "I really didn't need to know that. Anyway, now that we're here, what's the plan? It wouldn't be much of a camping trip if we just flew out here and hung out in the big nest-tree."

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"Well, after catching our breath from the flight over, I figured we could just roam around the forest for a while. We can see if we can find the picky eater any berries for dinner. We might get lucky and find some that are ripe and not being guarded by anyone, or we might have to see if we want to get in a fight over it. That is if you think you can find berries that aren't handed straight to you." Pidgey teased, and I huffed a breath out in annoyance. I'm not a picky eater, I just don't want to eat something that can talk to me! That's being normal! It's the other Pokémon that aren't normal, all of them, and I refuse to change my mind.

I let my transformation drop while we were conversing, draping my semi-amorphous body across the branch like a rag on a drying line. This drew a few startled looks from the other Pidgey close enough in the branches to notice, but they didn't suddenly spring up to get in a fight with me, so I couldn't care less. "Let's see them try and stop me, I've got a big, mean Scyther-transformation I want to try and get in a battle with again! Last time I didn't get to fight properly!"

"So you're against eating Pokémon, but totally fine with beating them up, taking their food, and leaving them to be the one hungry and hurt." Pidgey asked with a rather pointed tone of voice, staring directly at me. "You're still hunting them for your food, even if you aren't eating them. They're going to have to take risks because you're stealing their food, either hiding and resting up while hungry or fighting for food while injured."

It wasn't exactly wrong. It was a competitive environment, and the part that made me feel guilty was that I didn't strictly need to be here. Is it wrong of me to be out here fighting for food when I could be very easily getting food from Mable at the pasture? For what, my own sense of adventure and pride? "I get that it's still going to hurt others if I take food away from them, but it's different!" I insisted, shuffling anxiously atop the branch. "There's a chance that things go badly, but it's still better than eating them!"

Pidgey just rolled her eyes in disagreement, but didn't make a further comment on it. "Well, whatever. But yeah, we can roam around and try and find something to eat, but we should still head back here when we want to sleep unless we're going to take turns standing guard. I don't want to get found by anything nasty in the middle of the night."

"We can figure that out when it's time to think about sleeping. It's not like it'll be hard to find our way back to this spot, the tree's huge." Standing watch and trading for half a night's sleep each didn't sound like a lot of fun, it also sounded like the sort of unavoidable inconvenience I should be getting used to if I wanted to travel. Putting it off would just be procrastinating. I dropped down out of the low branches of the tree, carefully shuffling from branch to branch until I hit the forest floor below. Maybe I shouldn't have dropped the transformation up in the tree, but I was tired from holding it on the flight over. I needed the break back in my natural form.

The pair of us steadily travelled along from the big tree in as straight a line as we could manage. I felt much more at ease in these woods, with various noises of birds, bugs, and other wild Pokémon around. It made me think back to that quiet area I had first appeared, where Bibarel trundling along had seemed to be all but the only sign of life. Hm. I wonder if there was anything weird about that area? I should try and remember to check it out later.

"Look out you dummy!" Pidgey's sudden outburst woke me from my absentminded, distracted pondering.

A Weedle I had been oblivious to had been behind a tree I was strolling past, and it coiled its body up and launched itself at me with a screech, shouting "Away! Away!" I hopped backward, narrowly avoiding getting jabbed with the venomous stinger on the creature's head.

Pidgey flared her wings out in a display of intimidation, made doubly effective by the sheen of glowing energy in her wings, flapping them in the Weedle's direction with a hasty Gust attack, sending the worm tumbling away across the grass. "You get out of here before I have you for dinner, you little stinging jerk!" She retorted with a glare, and the Weedle rose up and hurriedly inched its way around another nearby tree, hiding out of sight. Then she turned toward me, and I didn't even try and dodge the wing-smack that landed atop my head. "And you! What are you doing, you tremendous dummy!? You were totally zoned out just now! I told you that it can be dangerous out here! Are you trying to get yourself poisoned just to have an excuse to lay around in a nest all night or something!?"

Her berating was met with a sheepish grin, raising my arms in an attempt at a placating gesture, trying to get Pidgey to stop scolding me so loudly by making downward motions with my hands. "Okay, okay! I get it, I messed up! Sorry! Thank you for scaring it off. You saved me from a painful stinging." I hadn't even managed to transform or anything to try and defend myself, just freezing up entirely when I was caught off guard. "It looks like even though I'm not bad at battling when I know it's about to happen, I need to work on getting caught off-guard..."

"Ya' think?!" Pidgey remarked, scathingly. The familiar feathery impact landed atop my head once again, and this time I glared at her in annoyance. Is this girl addicted to hitting me or something!? "Maybe I should just start attacking you without warning to get you into the practice. Once we're not somewhere dangerous, anyway. That'll teach you to pay attention."

I was left grumbling under my breath and rubbing at my head as I looked around, purposefully ensuring no one else was sneaking up on us while we discussed. "Great. Looking forward to it. Can we get back to looking for food, now?"

"I mean, I nearly had dinner there already, if I wasn't being considerate of your picky tastes and delicate stomach."

"You were really thinking about eating that Weedle? I didn't think it would be safe to eat a poison-type."

"It's not like I was going to eat the stingers, sheesh. It depends on the poison-type, but if you're careful you can totally eat Weedle."

I still couldn't completely suppress the shudder of disgust that ran through my body at this topic, so I waved my arm forward to point, "Let's just get back to walking, I really don't want to keep talking about this."

"Berry baby." She remarked, having overheard Mable call me that during mealtimes in the past.

"Shut up, I am not!"

"Are too!"

"Just look around and stop teasing me."

"Oh, so now you're gonna lecture me on keeping watch, huh?"

Our bickering carried on in hushed voices as we maneuvered through the trees, with Pidgey flitting ahead and glancing around as she argued with me, while I hopped along to catch up. Well, we certainly wouldn't be sneaking up on anyone anytime soon.