Appetizer 1.3

Aaron Fulan

Slateport City, Hoenn Region

We checked into the nearest pokémon center, one of eight in Slateport proper, then immediately headed out to the training yard. I was incredibly fortunate. As much as my mother and I did not get along, it certainly helped to have a gym leader as powerful as her as my sponsor. All it took to reserve a room for myself was to flash my trainer ID, no payment necessary.

A sponsorship was one of those things that didn't translate to the games but was ubiquitous enough that every trainer wanted one. The sponsor would provide a small monthly stipend and other benefits depending on the organization such as professional contacts, assistance caring for pokémon beyond the party limit, and discounts on certain items and services. There were even some tournaments that could only be entered through a sponsor.

In the case of Mossdeep Gym, I, along with the nine other students who received their starters with me, got priority booking at any pokémon center for no charge, heavy discounts on government-owned ferries, and perks at other League-related facilities. The sponsorship also came with a big discount on basic pokémon-related goods such as potions and pokéballs as well as the connections to buy rarer items should we become qualified such as evolutionary stones or held items.

Lastly and most importantly, we had access to the Mossdeep Gym Archives, or at least the digitized version, a store of journals and articles concerning psychic types that some people would kill to have. In this world, training methods from masters were guarded like martial arts techniques in a xianxia novel. All ten of us could download introductory articles into our pokédexes for free, though I was the only one who got access to the journals written by the Summers family heads.

However, one caveat to having a gym as a sponsor was that mom wouldn't care for any pokémon of mine unless they were psychic types. Mossdeep was an island. I couldn't be like Ash and start my own fucking petting zoo with a herd of thirty taurus. Unless I got my own party limit increased via an advanced trainer licensing exam or caught exclusively psychic types, I was stuck at six.

In exchange for the sponsorship, we ten were required to participate in PR campaigns, wear the gym logo in tournament appearances, and generally bring good press through our success. We could also be tapped to carry out special tasks on behalf of the gym such as courier missions or, when we were appropriately advanced, lectures at trainer schools across the region on the advantages and disadvantages of psychic types. We were effectively brand ambassadors meant to prove to the rest of the region why Mossdeep was worth the respect it received.

Again, I knew I was incredibly fortunate. Even young-Aaron knew it. I knew that had I ended up with a mediocre score on the TLE, my mother would not have sponsored me, son or no. Still, even if she insisted on not giving me any special treatment, a gym sponsorship was huge. Right behind the Champion, Elite Four, and the regional lab, a sponsorship from one of the top eight gyms made you a trainer worth watching.

Which was why the nurse looked at me like I was insane. She looked over Artoria when we arrived. She knew my ralts was female.

We still had an hour or so until dinner and I was teaching Artoria the finer points of guarding, kendo style.

Artoria held her silver spoon-sword in the posture I taught her. At some unseen signal, she took a step to the side and slashed an imaginary opponent in one fluid motion. Nuki waza, or evasion technique, the most basic of the oji waza. She got ready to do it again, fifty repetitions per form.

"Stop," I told her. "Mind your footing. Your toes should point towards your opponent as much as possible. Align your toes with the direction of your sword. It's a little uncomfortable at first, but you're letting your back toes point outward. I can see them poking out through your robes."

'Yes,' she barked, immediately moving to correct herself. I loved watching her train; a halo of white flames I'd come to associate with resolve and determination surrounded her fully.

"Do you know why the placement of your toes is so important?"

'All power comes from the foundation. If my feet are pointed away from my opponent, I will turn my sword. Hesitation is weakness. Nothing less than full commitment will do.'

"Correct. There are no blocking techniques in kendo, only parries and counterattacks. If you block, you'll only be worn down and that's especially true of you when compared with more physically powerful pokémon. Nuki waza is the most important thing you can learn right now."

'Yes!'

I watched the little ralts practice and surreptitiously took some video to send to the twins. They'd fallen in love with her in the short time we'd been on Mossdeep.

"I didn't know Mossdeep Gym's trainers knew martial arts," came a voice behind me.

A brunette with a comely face and hazel eyes smiled down at me. She was in her mid-twenties, probably a nursing resident. In her hand was a cup of coffee from Moomoo Farms, a farming collective in Johto that branched out to dominate the dairy market across the Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn regions. They took over the vertical supply chain, selling everything from ice cream and cheese to coffee directly to consumers. From what I could tell, they were a bit like this world's Starbucks, but with less of a soul-sucking megacorp vibe.

"I'm special," I drawled. I looked her over and saw some amusement, though much of it was colored by friendly curiosity. "Artoria decided she wanted to be a swordmaster so I'm going to help her along."

"Artoria? Is that the name of your ralts?"

"Yeah. Coffee break?"

"Yup. She knows she can't become a gallade?"

"No, really?" I gasped. "I had no idea. I'm sure the Mossdeep Gym would love to hear about this groundbreaking discovery."

"Yeesh, sorry, no need for the sarcasm, buddy."

"Yeah, sorry. I've been hearing that all week. Just about everyone I've met told me that, as if I don't already know. Aaron by the way."

"Brenda. Well, are you going to be a coordinator? That could be kind of cool, a fencer gardevoir. You could probably show off some neat tricks like that."

"If she wants," I said. "Honestly? We'll probably give it a try at least once. I do have a plan for how to make her build work though, don't worry."

"I'll be looking forward to it then. Are you going to get her a bigger spoon when she evolves?"

"Probably."

"But… Why a spoon? I mean, it's not just your ralts, is it? I've seen so many psychics carry them around that it can't be a coincidence."

I laughed. "Yeah, it's a little silly, huh? But for whatever reason, Arceus decided that psychics have an unusual affinity for spoons, especially if they're made of silver. We don't really know why either, but barring a few exceptions, every psychic can use a spoon as a medium. It's actually become a whole subfield of study for us."

"Even a chimecho?"

"Yes. Even a chimecho, a pokémon that barely has limbs, can hold a spoon. In fact, if a chimecho channels its voice through the spoon, the reverberating note becomes noticeably clearer and even bypasses shoddier mental defenses. A chimecho that channels Heal Bell through a silver spoon has a longer range too."

"That's… bizarre."

"Pokémon usually are," I said with a sagely nod. "Are you a nursing resident?"

"Yeah, I'm in my final year of nursing school so I'm putting in my hours here."

"What's the funniest thing you've had to treat someone for?"

"Some kid thought you could evolve magnemite by sticking three of them together with superglue… I felt so bad for those poor magnemite."

"Oof, and they let him?"

"Her. And yes. She was at least smart enough to get them blissed out on a ton of electricity beforehand so they weren't in a state to protest. Probably saved her a lot of electrical burns to be honest."

"Huh, I didn't know magnemites could fall under a food coma."

"You'd be surprised." She drained the last of her Moomoo coffee and chucked it into a nearby trash can. "Well, thanks for the conversation, Aaron. I'm going to go get back to work. You know where the canteen is?"

"Yeah, I'll be around for dinner."

X

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I ended up booking a stay at the pokémon center for two weeks.

Artoria and I fell into an easy rhythm. We awoke at the crack of dawn and headed out to the training field where I oversaw her kendo forms. We practiced until she was winded and her form started to grow sloppy.

Then, we tired ourselves out running suicides from one end of the field to the other to build up speed and stamina. Both Artoria and I found it miserable; Artoria because she wasn't meant for hard physical activity and me because I lamented my lost physique.

After that came her psychic training.

As promised, we worked on new ways to improve her power and control. For this, we had two primary ways of training. I first had her channel her psychic power into the spoon and use it to lift things. She had to touch a ball with the end of her spoon and psychically connect the two, dragging the ball without actually scooping it up. I then had her use Confusion to hone the edge of her spoon and carve a wooden block with it. Unsurprisingly, her design of choice was a knight.

While she practiced her mental abilities, I read.

One of the requirements of being a gym-sponsored trainer was that I would keep up to date with the region's current events, from politics and the economy to subjects more closely related to myself. Notably, the region was seeing steadily rising rates of natural disasters. The vast majority of them were minor, such as a small flood here or a sinkhole there, but when taken as a whole, it painted a worrying pattern, especially since I knew what was coming.

Worse, Teams Magma and Aqua were each pointing fingers at the other, claiming their opposition was inciting wild pokémon into acting out against human habitations in order to advance their own twisted agendas.

I scoffed. Pot. Kettle.

'To think they started from the same origin,' I thought.

Hoenn's two teams could trace their origins to the Slateport Urban Development Project thirty-one years ago.

Originally, the importation and use of heavy slate in construction destroyed a lot of the marshlands that used to be Slateport. As a result, concerned citizens flocked from other cities and started the Hoenn Environmental Conservation Front, or HECF. Their peaceful protests meant nothing and the then minor town was expanded into a full city, which would eventually get renamed to what it was.

Three years after Slateport's completion, the HECF split into two. Really the split was a long time coming as people felt peaceful protests weren't good enough to stop humans from encroaching on the habitats of pokémon. Moderates were driven out from both sides until only the radical elements were left. Those split along the middle, forming Magma and Aqua to protect their respective biomes.

But even then, the two teams weren't always violent. Radical, yes. Violent, no. They were the sort to strap themselves to trees with chains, not the type to try to assassinate Devon Corp's president.

The violent kind of radicalism came about only after Archie Aogiri and Maxie Matsubusa took over the teams years after their founding. They transformed the teams into paramilitary organizations and cults in all but name, using their newfound power to carry out their personal vendettas, especially against one another. They were so bad that it was only a year later that Champion Drake labeled them terrorists.

Rangers and police typically rooted them out whenever they made too much trouble, but like any terrorist organization from my old world, truly ending them was a tall order thanks to their decentralized command structure. Each team had their leader, two executives, and a handful of lieutenants that oversaw several individual cells, a remarkably flat organizational structure that meant most of them knew very little about the group's overarching objectives.

And of course, Archie and Maxie disavowed any responsibility whenever a cell was captured, pointing fingers at each other or at "imposters" and "rogue elements."

They started with good intentions and were coopted by idiots who turned conservation into a weapon.

We kept up our training until lunch, after which we either saw the town or went right back to our training routine. Unsurprisingly, the pipsqueak knight named for the legendary king was rather insistent on training, more training, and even more training. I had to scoop her up and stuff her in my pocket to get her to rest sometimes.

Evening was the best time for relaxation, but she insisted on turning even that into a training exercise so I taught Artoria chess, poker, and blackjack. The goal was to teach her to read expressions and associate them with the emotional impulses she received passively. That, and hopefully instill in her the value of cunning and tactics.

When we weren't playing games, I also took to browsing the Mossdeep Gym Archives for any hints on training a ralts. The problem wasn't that I had little information to go on, quite the opposite. I had way too much information to sort through.

As expected of a family that had been around before the Leagues, more than five hundred years in fact, we had a whole host of records lost to others. And, it wasn't sorted in any way but chronologically.

The ralts line had always held a special place in our hearts and that meant every elder of every generation seemingly had some great insight to impart about the pokémon. Hell, there were even intergenerational arguments where one would correct what his great grandfather had written, only for his own son to insist that his father was a charlatan and the ancestors were right all along, all the while knowing that the people he was talking about were long dead and buried.

Back home, we had an old alakazam, my dead grandfather's starter, who was the guardian of the library. He resided in one of the oldest buildings on the island, one of the few that remained untouched by the modernity brought on by the Mossdeep Space Center. Out here, I didn't have him to help me sort through the bullshit.

Still, I did glean some useful information, such as how to best train a ralts do learn Double Team and some of the tricks she could use when combining it with Teleport.

X

We were in our tenth day at the pokémon center when Artoria and I had our first taste of battle. We had just finished a lunch of fried magikarp and some sort of peppery arugula salad when we were called out in the canteen.

"Hey, you," someone behind us said. I turned around to see a boy around my age with black hair styled into a full hawk. He wore a black and yellow shirt depicting some kind of submarine paired with some sturdy shorts and hiking sneakers. Behind him were three more trainers our age, two boys and a girl. "You're that weirdo that's trying to teach a ralts Cut, right?"

I nodded genially. "That's me, what's up, dude?"

"Well I'm challenging you to a battle!"

"I reject."

"Yeah, right he- Wait, what?"

"I'm not obligated to accept a challenge just because you make one," I said patiently. I took a small bite of my magikarp filet. It tasted a bit like fried catfish, though less peppery and a bit meatier, like a cod. "Think about it. If that were true, then people with lots of badges preying on rookies would be far more common. The idea that a trainer needs to accept every battle is pure nonsense."

"W-Well, why not?"

"I don't really owe you an answer, but sure. I think Artoria here would gain more from training by herself than from sparring with another pokémon right now. What she needs most at the moment is technique mastery, not battle experience. Sorry."

"Hehehe, you got rejected, Enzo," one of the other boys, the tallest one with a laptop of some sort tucked under one arm, prodded. "Weren't you going to show us how strong Biter is?"

"Shut up," he whined. He turned and pointed at me. "I bet you're afraid Biter's going to use that ralts like a chew toy. Coward!"

"Petrified," I drawled, projecting as much of my boredom as I could. I didn't need Artoria thinking I didn't have any faith in her.

Looking at the three of them, they couldn't be more than a year older than I was. Or, they could still be in trainer school and just happen to have a starter early, some kids did that, went ahead and made their own arrangements if they thought they couldn't cut it to a gym sponsorship. Judging by their clean clothes and brash styles, they were likely either recent grads like me or skiving off trainer school.

Still, if they were a year older than me, that year would give them a big advantage. Pokémon didn't mature in a single year in the wild, but in the hands of a halfway decent trainer, they could evolve quite quickly. Something about the bonds between trainers and their pokémon promoted rapid growth by synchronizing our auras or somesuch. Hell, this field of study was what made the legendary Professor Oak such a goddamn legend in the first place.

I was about to reject again when Artoria picked up her spoon and front flipped over the table, landing between me and the trainers. She brandished her spoon and aimed it head first towards them.

'Apologize, knaves,' she shouted in every one of our heads. Her voice was as pure as always, like a clear bell ringing next to a mountain spring. 'Apologize for calling my lord a coward.'

I sighed. "You don't need to defend my honor, Artoria."

"D-Did she just talk?" the token girl of their group squeaked out.

"No, don't be ridiculous. What you're hearing is telepathy, a way for psychics to communicate with humans. Almost every psychic pokémon can learn how and it's a mark of a powerful psychic pokémon."

"Y-Yeah right, I bet any ralts can do it."

"Any ralts can," I said with a shrug. I hadn't lied to them once and wasn't about to start now, "but usually not one so young. They need more experience to build up to telepathy. Artoria is just really, really talented."

"Well it looks like she wants to fight."

'Apologize,' my little knight growled again.

Seeing a way to get what he wanted, the now named Enzo let out a smug smirk and crossed his arms over his chest. "No," he glared down at my ralts. "I don't think I will. What're you gonna do about it?"

'Then you will suffer my blade!'

"Yoink." I reached down and scooped her up before she could lunge towards them.

A ralts physically assaulting someone sounded hilarious on paper, but this ralts had been practicing nothing but Mana Burst and Mana Edge for almost three weeks now. With the kind of psychic power shown by a pokémon of Mossdeep Gym, and the daughter of mom's starter at that, she could do some serious damage. As it was, it was only her unwillingness to harm me that kept her from blasting free of my grip.

"Are you sure about this?" I asked all involved.

'My lord, he has besmirched your honor. This knave will pay!' Artoria shouted in my mind like someone from a period drama. I'd really have to have a chat with her about just where she was getting her material.

"Yeah, Biter's gonna eat her alive," Enzo crowed.

I sighed. I should have seen this coming. If anything, it was a small miracle that I was left alone for ten days. Why wouldn't Artoria's understanding of knightly honor keep her from fighting? I should have guessed that she would jump in headfirst at the slightest insult to my person. I was her liegelord after all.

I stuffed the rest of the magikarp into my mouth and washed it down with some sitrus berry juice before standing. "Fine, let's go. Artoria, we'll be talking about your lack of discipline."

Author's Note

It's true. Kendo has no blocks. Techniques are divided into shikake waza (lit: "challenge technique') and oji waza (lit: "countering technique"). In practice, kendo kata involves one person doing an attack and the receiver countering into one of the four point areas: men (head), kote (wrist), do (body), and tsuki (throat). Tsuki is usually frowned upon because it's unsafe for beginners to do.

In actual competitions though, almost every kendoka blocks at least some of the time. It's frowned upon as it's not kosher, but between blocking and losing, you block.

Knightly honor is funny until it drags you into unwanted battles, eh?

Nah, still funny.

Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. You can find them all on my Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/fabled.webs.