Guts dashed – as did the pikachu, Junior. But where the electric rodent sported only a few disheveled spots where the sparkling stars of Swift had landed, his own Pokémon was suffering from paralysis, her limbs jittering at random. She was moving, but every other second a spasm would force her to rearrange her legs lest she go tumbling.
“Thundershock!”
The attack came out fast, the clap of thunder washing over Hoshi’s face as Guts dodged – but no, a streak of blackened, burnt fur revealed itself as she rolled to her feet. If the paralysis hits at the wrong moment and she fails to dodge completely… She gained a few feet as the pikachu recharged, then promptly lost them as the faster rodent outpaced her.
This isn’t working, Hoshi accepted. I’ve gotten used to being either faster or stronger than my opponent – what the fuck am I supposed to do here? The moment they stopped chasing, the pikachu would be free to rain down Thundershocks, and turning it into a slugging match with Swift would do pretty much the same. She isn’t familiar enough with the move to run and shoot at the same time. I should’ve shelled out for fucking Dig instead…
No, that would have just kicked the problem down the road. The truth was that Swift did fill a big hole in Guts’s skillset, the pikachu just had his Pokémon beat at her own game. Faster, with a better ranged option – and higher durability, if Surge had trained it right… which he would’ve, since he’d been doing this since Hoshi had been in diapers.
Another exchange, another injury, black streaks accumulating on the rattata’s fur like she’d been rooting around in a pile of charcoal. “Swift, then charge!” he ordered. It was the only option he could think of; to use the unevolved electric type’s refractory period against it. Fuck, if I’d read the Thunder Wave and focused on dodging…
A quick stream of three stars struck the yellow mouse in the back and hindquarters as it retreated, and for once some of the gained ground stayed gained. Yes! “Again! Attack, then close in!”
Surge laughed. “Ha! You wanna play that way?” His sharp, malevolent face seemed to loom over the entire field. “I’m game! Junior, show us some real lightning!”
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“And this… won’t hurt him?”
Nerine and Puce huddled, obscured behind an incongruous middle-of-the-room filing cabinet, the older girl’s koffing bobbing between them. Nerine sighed through her nose as she whispered, the stress of the situation compounding her exasperation. “No, Puce, he’ll be fine.” Unless your koffing misunderstands the order, or the guy has health problems, or… “Come on, we’re burning time.”
Puce wrung her hands for a moment more, before the steel returned to her eyes. “Okay.” She turned to her Pokémon, cupping her hands over the purple, beachball-sized sack of poisonous gas’s… ear? And leaning in. I guess that’s as good a word as any. “Potato, I need you to listen really close, okay?”
The koffing bobbed, its eyes on its trainer’s face, and the absurdity of the situation almost made Nerine laugh out loud – luckily for the mission, she was able to stifle it.
“I need you to float over, and hit that man over there with Smog – but it needs to be a special Smog, okay?” Puce’s eyes held more conviction than the teenager had ever seen, more than she thought the wallflower could ever possess. I… underestimated her, I guess. “It needs to be perfectly clear. See-through, without any smell or taste. You can take as long as you need to, but it needs to be a Clear Smog, do you understand?”
As far as Pokémon intelligence went, koffing were far from topping the list. They were filter feeders, avoiding the label of sedentary only because of their airborne nature. They were basically plants.
But sometimes, the bond between a human and Pokémon transcended language. Potato blinked, sighed out a soft sound that made Puce smile, then silently ascended to bump against the ceiling.
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“Ha! Come on kid, show me what you’ve learned at that pansy-ass rich-boy school of yours!”
Surge’s bellow was accompanied by a peel of thunder as Guts took yet another glancing blow. On one hand, Hoshi was frustrated and vaguely disgusted with himself; a better trainer would have either put together a half-decent strategy by now, or given up to preserve their Pokémon.
But on the other hand, he was amazed at his girl’s tenacity. There’s still a chance. As long as we can move, as long as we can hit back, there’s a chance! “Keep it up, Guts! Swift!”
Twinkling stars emerged from his rattata’s mouth, pelting Junior in the face and bowling the pikachu over. Hoshi’s heart was pounding, adrenaline thick in his veins to the point he felt like he could feel each capillary winding through his meat and bones. We’re losing… but it’s still a fight! We’re doing damage! With every attack, Guts took an attack in retaliation – receiving more damage than her opponent, as was plainly obvious – but she also inched closer to melee range.
“Wrong answer, kid!” Surge replied with a shake of his head. “Junior, no slacking! You can take a bigger hit in your sleep – so on your feet, soldier!”
The pikachu sprung up, more angry than pained, and scuttled back while charging its next bolt. Hoshi’s teeth were pressed together like a vice, but things weren’t completely hopeless. Surge tends to end his fights quickly, win or lose. He hasn’t realised it yet…
This… is a fight of endurance! If we can close into Bite range, we might be able to turn the tables!
“Charge in, then use Swift! Aim for the legs!”
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Puce had never really had friends before. Oh, sure, there were her schoolmates at Celadon Preparatory, but those bonds were thin and brittle things – they had always broken the moment the social web had moved just a little wrong, a parent’s business deal falling through or someone saying an inconvenient string of words more than enough for friend to turn into enemy. Puce hadn’t been the only person to get hurt by those severed bonds, but she didn’t have… anything, really, to fall back on like her peers.
She wasn’t smart. She was bad at sports. Her body was… unladylike, to say it kindly. As all her acquaintances grew up and got real jobs, or started relationships, or just… lived their lives, she continued to sit in place, a stone that couldn’t move under its own power.
But now…
She wasn’t delusional. Really. She knew that this was wrong, that she shouldn’t hurt people or help criminals or accept a fake trainer licence. But now… This is better, isn’t it? Even if Moony called her Puke, and Mister Sampo took every opportunity to ignore her, and Mister Mutsu yelled all the time…
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It was still real. The bonds were real, tested over weeks of wet misery and hard work and training like their lives depended on it, and Puce found that as her mind pulled this way and that, they were also strong. Stronger than her morals, at least. So as Potato, her big, dumb, lovable Potato, floated up above the League computer with her eyes shut tight and her cheeks puffed out, she prayed.
Please. I know I’m a bad person for this… but if there’s something listening, please help us! They might be mean sometimes, but… these are the only friends I have!
And, as she and Nerine huddled in the shadow of a filing cabinet, she thought she could see it – a distortion in the air, so faint it might just be a trick of the light, forming an expanding bubble as Potato strained. Dripping down, slowly, almost lazily in the still air of the basement, until it enveloped the man sitting in the office chair.
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Crack! went the pikachu’s attack, missing by a hair’s breadth as Guts closed in. “Junior, Quick Attack!” came the order as Surge realised there was no escape, a wild grin still on his face – and Hoshi’s returning smile was bittersweet, because even now, after all this work, it was still entirely possible they would lose.
Guts is on her last legs, while Junior is… not fresh, not even close, but still a damn sight better. Swift was, on paper, a better move than Thundershock – not only was it stronger, it homed in on the enemy automatically. But that was assuming equally strong Pokémon, fighting with equal amounts of skill; in reality, a single frenzied training session wasn’t enough to equal a lifetime of coaching from the best electric type trainer on the continent. “Get in there and Bite! We’ve come too far to lose now!”
The rodents leapt in – and at the worst possible moment Guts spasmed, the lingering electrical damage of Thunder Wave getting one last laugh. “Guts!” Hoshi screamed, his vision tunneling until it was just a lavender blob held in place as a yellow streak closed in. “Push through! I know you have one attack left in you!”
Junior’s Quick Attack landed at the same time the Pokémon did, the mouse smoothly pivoting to deliver a roundhouse kick with all of its weight concentrated on the tip of a single paw, a picture-perfect move that must have been practiced for dozens of hours to be executed with such short limbs. Guts had her head knocked to the side-
But she hung on, vindictiveness or determination or something allowing Hoshi’s girl to withstand that last, final attack. With a savage squeal she bit, chomping down on the pikachu’s leg and tugging with all her might, lifting the heavier rodent into the air and slamming it down.
“Junior!” Surge bellowed. “You ain’t out yet! Thunder-!”
“Quick Attack!” Hoshi commanded, his voice overpowering his uncle’s, and a second slam sounded out with audible finality. For a moment Hoshi’s heartbeat was all he could hear – and then the crowd erupted.
“Junior is unable to battle! Lieutenant Surge is out of usable Pokémon!” the referee, who had completely disappeared from Hoshi’s senses since… he didn’t know how far back, announced. “Challenger Mutsu wins!”
Dazed, his body coming down from the height of battle, Hoshi recalled his Pokémon on autopilot. He stared at the ball for a moment, nearly unconscious, before his adrenaline spiked again. “I won?” he muttered to himself.
“You sure did, Hoshi! Come’ere!” came a voice only a step away, directly in front of him, and then he was enveloped in a hug. “Damn fine battle! When I saw that little rat I thought, ‘Is that the best that damn rip-off school can get for my boy? He should’a come to me and gotten something with a little kick!’ But you sure proved me wrong! Ha!”
Hoshi hugged the giant back, his weak arms rapidly regaining their strength. I fucking won! And even more – this was the one-on-one win he’d been looking for since the day he’d received his Pokémon, an unambiguous sign that he was, in fact, not a shitty trainer. “I fucking won!”
His uncle laughed again. “Feels good, don’t it? Usually I’d give you your badge now, but how about we wait until your whole group goes through? Make it a whole thing?”
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Nerine slipped back into her seat, feeling like she’d just fought the worst battle of her life. Arc, this is worse than Uncle's survival training… and I still have the actual battle, too.
Down below, Ryan’s bagon tanked a crackling electrified punch from an elekid, the baby form of the more common electabuzz. Its expression was shocked as the dragon retaliated with a mouthful of fire, the attack doing substantially more damage – assuming Nerine’s eyes were reliable at the moment.
An idle thought of oh, that’s a rare Pokémon around here floated through her head, but she was too wiped to really pay attention to anything until a nudge to her shoulder brought her a little closer to reality.
She looked Casca’s way, blinking. “So?” the woman mouthed. Nerine continued to blink owlishly for a moment, before her brain worked its way through the one-word question. She raised her chin in a subtle nod, mouthing her response back silently.
“Mission complete.”
I’ll let them know we have to book it in a second. Just as soon as she could catch her breath. Don’t wanna be here when they find Mister Maybe-A-League-Official, after all.
Jormungandr ended things decisively, and the crowd roared as the referee yelled, equally loud. “Goldfinger is unable to battle! That’s two for four for our challengers; so far they’ve managed a fifty percent win rate, well above average!” Oh, someone else lost after Moony. Her bet was on Casca; despite her impressive Pokémon, she had a serious type disadvantage.
As Ryan walked into the centre of the field to receive his accolades, Nerine’s eyes started to droop. A hand on her shoulder forced her awake enough to turn to Puce and communicate something, but then reality frayed away at the edges, narrowing until it disappeared.
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Of the six of them, only two had received badges – and not only had they needed to take a rain check on Puce and Nerine’s challenges, they’d also missed the afterparty Surge had promised.
But as Puce explained what had happened – while carrying the girl on her back – Hoshi gradually came to see his youngest subordinate’s sudden collapse as… well, a good thing wasn’t quite the turn of phrase he was looking for, but it certainly provided a good excuse to split before some janitor or whatever discovered a fucking body.
“And you’re sure he wasn’t dead?” he questioned, his tone drawing a cringe from the woman.
“No! He was- Nerine gave him some antidote, he was breathing fine when we left..!” She paused, apparently remembering they were in the open and moderating her voice. “He was fine. Potato is still a baby anyway – I don’t think she could kill someone that fast even if I, uh, told her to.”
Okay, but you left him in the fucking basement and- fuck! “You’re sure he didn’t see you? And that the bug actually went in? I swear to Arcus, if you killed some guy and didn’t even-”
A hand on his shoulder stopped him. “Hoshi,” Casca softly spoke. “You’re freaking out. It’s fine. Nobody’s dead, you and Ryan got your badges and prize money, and…” She smiled. “We did it. Mission complete.”
He breathed. “Yeah. Okay.” Okay. “Sorry for that. I’m…” He didn’t even know what to say, and so let the sentence trail off.
“Heh,” Ryan chuckled. “I suppose I understand your feelings. These last two months have been… let us say, an adventure.”
Nerine woke up halfway to the hospital, and the group split up a few minutes after she adamantly refused to enter the building; Ryan and Puce took the struggling teenager inside, the larger woman easily carrying her as Ryan explained things to the nurse at the front desk, while Hoshi hovered in the waiting area, Kenny left to work off his frustration at losing in the parking lot, and Casca went to grab something to eat from a nearby restaurant.
The diagnosis was revealed as simple exhaustion, and the group of six reconvened and decided to have their own little celebration – in the morning, of course, since despite the mission only taking a few hours they were dead on their feet.
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On Monday, September 27th, 2010, Hoshi Mutsu woke up before his alarm, as he often did.
He carefully extracted himself from under his sheets, and was halfway to the bathroom when he paused. Wait. Something’s off. I’m hearing..?
He turned and padded across his apartment, throwing open the window and revealing the deep purple of a pre-dawn sky, not a cloud in sight.