Disclaimer: I STILL don't own Pokemon. What a surprise. That honor goes to Nintendo. Oh, but mind you—the character Rory is the property of my boyfriend and partner in crime, Agz--on this site he's known as Alan G. Zendra. It's thanks to his encouragement, influence, and inspiration that I am writing this story, so to all of you who like this, go thank him. But to all of you who DON'T like this story, go bother him. Or read his stuff, trust me, you will NOT regret it.

As a response to a review who noticed that Violet acted differently in terms of intellect during chapter 1. Well Violet, while remarkably less intelligent than others, still has her moments of common sense and intellect occasionally. By the end of the story however, every character will go through their own individual developments, and it's likely Violet will too.

Chapter III – Just Like UPS, Only Without the Trucks

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'All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.' Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)

Night had passed peacefully with nothing to disturb both Charmander and Trainer's slumber in their primitive makeshift house, safe and shut out from the many predatory Pokemon (or vengeful Beedrills) by the cage of roots and rocks beneath the giant, aging tree.

Jax was the first to awaken from a flash of orange light against his eyelids, trickled in through one of the many crevices in the mounds of stone. As the sun rose past the horizon, and the soft lavender of the clouds dissolved into fluffy white, more and more tiny, lithe beacons like the ones before them followed the first one, culminating into one spade, beaming relentlessly on Jax's face.

The Charmander groaned, eyes opening wearily, and hissed instinctually and moved to guard his face as the first thing he got a glimpse of was a blast of light. "Jesus," he muttered, watching light zigzag in from all possible directions, from behind his fingers, where a more concentrated angle of beacons bristled on his skin. "Talk about God's alarm clocks."

His eyes moved to a figure a few feet away from him, curled up on a mass of tangled leaves, pieces of vines, and giant patches of moss torn from trees—a strange form of bedding akin to a nest of some sorts, which Jax was also sleeping against—a human girl, cradling her backpack close to her and with the brim of her hat pulled down over her round face. Violet was still fast asleep, and the annoyingly gravely snores that came from her every time her chest shuddered with an inhalation was a testament to that.

Jax scowled, climbing to his feet and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "Violet," he whispered, walking over to her with the barest of sounds under his clawed toes. She didn't even budge besides that she clutched her backpack tighter—its solid form was thanks to the Kakuna still resting inside of it. Since they lacked Pokeballs, Violet had to carry it by more unconventional means. Jax spoke louder, nudging at her hip with a toe, "Come on, it's morning. Up and at 'em."

His efforts were rewarded with a snore, and a drop by a faction of her head that nearly made her whole hat droop over her face.

Jax was already discouraged from continuing with this method of awakening. He wanted to get out of the forest that had caused him so much frustration as fast as possible, like he resented it for just about every bad thing that happened the day before. Thank God all it took was a good night's rest to heal my legs, Jax confirmed that with the slightest shuffling of his feet, which were still a little bit cumbersome thanks to his premature awakening. He spent only five seconds trying to formulate a way to arouse Violet from her slumber before his mind grabbed hold of something that he decided would work.

Bending down to the girl's head, he grabbed her hat by the brim, and whipped it off her head, her odd, aerodynamic hairstyle bobbing atop her head before it wilted in a scruffy, blue mess. That was all it took, for the moment it was removed, Violet had rocketed to her feet, looking around frantically, eyes wide, face pallid, and one hand raking through her hair like she was convinced it was hiding there among the locks of teal.

"MY HAT!" she exclaimed frantically, eyes darting to and fro, "Whotookmyhatwhere'smyfreakinghat—" She froze in the middle of her babbling, to turn around and glare accusingly at her backpack. "IT WAS YOU, WASN'T IT!" she half-shouted, sounding oddly like a persecutor in a courtroom, "I should have KNOWN! You were always giving me those shifty looks and PLOTTING BEHIND MY BACK! Well now I've caught you!" She grabbed the backpack from where it had rolled off to the side after Violet had leapt out of her seat, shaking it in front of her so hard that the Pokemon keychains decorating its straps became multi-colored blurs, "FESS UP!"

The Kakuna said nothing.

No matter how amusing Jax thought the current situation was, he decided to end it there and now. "Hey, bedhead," he said, waving Violet's hat in front of him, "Is this what you're looking for?"

Violet didn't respond to him immediately, she was too busy interrogating the Kakuna, asking questions about where he was on the night of June the eighteenth or if he knew her hat intimately. It was the almost hypnotic, collective series of clinks of the myriad of badges ornamenting her hat rubbing together that made her glance, eyes now so wide it looked uncomfortable beneath the bangs of turquoise, over to Jax. With a delighted squeal she dropped the backpack on the ground, clasping her hands together happily.

"My HAT!" she cried, dashing over to the Charmander and plucking it from his grip. Much to Jax's discomfort, she started hugging it close to her face and peppering it with kisses in between murmuring comforting platitudes.

Jax made a mental note to never, ever separate Violet and her hat ever again after this incident.

Joyfully slipping it back on her head, encasing most of her disheveled hair within it, she adjusted it to a rather stylish tilt. For a moment she just seemed to bask in its return on her head, before she realized that she wasn't the only person in the universe who mattered and reality came crashing back down on her, piecing the world back together.

"Oh, hey, Jax," she said cheerfully, "How long have you been up?"

--Seven Minutes of Uncomfortable Preparation Later--

It had taken some time, but Jax managed to push that morning's fiasco out into the forgotten, neglected corners of his mind where it would be left to gather cobwebs with the rest of any unpleasant memories he accumulated (such as 'The Time I Fell Into the Neighbor's Pool' and 'The Time That Squirtle I Was Flirting With Turned Out to Be A Guy'). Now the two were trudging along as usual, with Violet in consistently good cheer, the backpack re-strapped to her back, and her hat to never be disturbed on her head. Jax decided it should remain that way, especially since the once-quiet jingling of the badges on her hat had become more pronounced than usual after what happened.

Today's events or not, it was a welcome change from the haunting buzzing of the Beedrills from yesterday. Throughout the trek they found no sight or sound of any antagonistic bugs, quite surprisingly. Only the jingling of the badges, the tiniest sounds of blades of grass crumpling beneath their feet, and the chirping of distant Pidgeys and Spearows.

"I think we're almost near the exit," Violet remarked, looking at the foliage as they walked, "It's getting a bit thinner."

She was right. The trees were nowhere near as packed or the forestation as dense as it once was. The canopy above that once drowned out most all light had broken apart, now made up of just a few, cloud-like patches of leaves suspended by the tangled claws of branches high above. With that leafy barricade mostly gone, light poured through by the gallon, illuminating everything in front of them. They could almost see it, that door out of this forested hell, outlined in golden light, beckoning them to step through and be welcomed into freedom…

They were almost there when suddenly, the bushes in front of them burst apart in a shower of leaves, giant talons slamming and scraping at the ground haphazardly as their owner staggered and wavered, releasing caws and squawks from its two beaks. Yelping as she dodged being knocked over by a rough slam from the tall bird Pokemon's round side, Violet pinned her hat firmly to her head with one hand, and then grabbed Jax with the other, ducking off to relative safety—that was, a bush that hadn't been demolished beneath the feet and the barreling body of the monstrous avian.

Violet panted, looking at Jax with the same bug-eyed, panicked look she exhibited that morning, "What the HELL is going on!"

Jax yelped as he watched the remains of a branch, stripped of its leaves and still bearing the little stubs its vegetation once grew from, go flying in a spray of dirt. Some grotesque part of his mind started to rampage through his head when he noticed the very disturbing resemblance the branch had to a human spine.

"If I actually KNEW, I would have TOLD YOU BY NOW!" Jax hissed, his own expression a fine imitation of Violet's. The clumsy bird was dashing to and fro, a feathery wrecking ball with no discrimination as to what it smashed up—whenever something went flying or the sound of something being crushed rang out under the sound of its hammering footprints, Jax and Violet both flinched and edged back.

It was easier to see the creature now—it was a spherical body supported on long, powerful looking legs, towering high over both Violet and Jax with not only the help of its legs, but its two heads on the ends of long necks. Both heads didn't seem happy, and their elongated, needle-like beaks had been restrained by some sort of leash or rein—which, Violet's eyes lead downn to a very startled man struggling to remain on his mount's back and simultaneously calm his steed down.

"Hey," Violet whispered to Jax, blue and green eyes settled on the form of the man being tossed in every direction as he tried to halt the Doduo's rampage, "There's a man on his back."

Jax squinted a bit at the russet, constantly-moving form that the Doduo was, barely making out the bruise-colored form being jerked around like some sort of rag doll. "You're right," Jax said, then looked concernedly at Violet, eyebrows furrowed. "How are we supposed to get him off?"

Violet was at a loss—she wasn't willing to step anywhere near the berserk Pokemon, and every time her nearly petrified courage started to resurface from the muck it had been forced into, a piece of a tree, cracked rocks, or leaves and dirt went flying past like tattered projectiles to shove it back down. It had nearly drowned when somewhere, in the back of her mind, a lightbulb went off, flooding her brain with warm, revitalizing white.

"I got an idea!" Violet declared, slipping off her backpack, "Okay Jax, I'm going after that—"

"EXCUSE ME?" Jax sibilated, grabbing her by the striped sleeve of her shirt and tugging her back down to his level so he could properly chew her out for coming up with such a reckless, stupid idea, "You can NOT be this stupid. You can't go running after that thing when it's tearing apart everything! It'd trample you!"

Violet waved her arms, trying not to let herself be dissuaded by the cold truth. Swatting away mental images of her body being kicked about like some fleshy soccer ball, she said, clutching her backpack in both hands, "No, I have a plan. Trust me."

There was a startled cry, and the sound of more grass being ripped apart and uprooted. Jax's eyes traced the jumbled mess of muddy footprints and devastated forestry, his own confidence sinking into the quagmire that Violet's had been swallowed into. It had been against every bit of his conscience's advice, but he finally said, somewhat numbly, "Alright. So enlighten me about this plan."

He was met with no response.

Immediately, Jax's mind shot out of the swamp it'd been trapped in, as did his control of his eyes and limbs, when the only reason to explain Violet's silence flashed, once, in his brain. Turning his head around, his jaw nearly hit the floor when he saw, indeed, that nobody was standing there.

"Alright, you big, ugly, two-headed—"

Jax's head swiveled around to the direction of where the sound of a very familiar voice had come from, and his blood ran cold in his veins, slithering like slowly hardening cement, as he saw Violet standing within the range of the Doduo's beak and claws. Much to his stomach's chagrin, the mental image of the Doduo gouging Violet with those sharp beaks its heads possessed had latched to his mind, and whenever it was pulled away, it was replaced with something even worse. Jax cursed ever watching that Splatter Flick Madness marathon when he was living with Oak.

Violet continued repeating what she had shouted under her breath, obviously unable to find an appropriate insult for a giant, two-headed, flightless bird. Regardless, she had certainly caught its attention, as it whirled around, beady black eyes boring down at the girl from seven feet high up. With a loud crowing sound that vibrated from its two necks, it reared up and lifted its feet, like it was getting ready to trample her. A foot slammed on the ground, scraping at the dirt like it was sharpening its claws, leaving deep divots in the ruined soil. It was getting ready to charge, and within seconds, it had launched itself at the 13-year-old, who looked like she was just about to wet herself in fear.

"Oh shit," was the first thing that came out of Jax's mouth.

Just before Jax was going to fling himself out from behind their sad excuse of a bunker and sink his teeth into the Doduo's hide, Violet managed to kick her body into overdrive, hands working in fluid motion. The backpack was discarded, leaving only the Kakuna, grasped in her hands like a football. Hopping back, she flung the Kakuna with all the power her arm carried, and watched it as it connected with one of the Doduo's two heads.

The Doduo collapsed to the ground with a thunderous thud, its mount yelping as he, too, fell with it.

There was complete and total silence, like the whole atmosphere had been frozen just for this moment, and this moment only.

And then it was broken by Jax, completely aghast, and his expression incredulous, shouting, "What the HELL WAS THAT?"

Violet didn't respond immediately, she was too busy trying to catch her breath and stop herself from shaking, which seemed all but impossible, especially when it was exacerbated by the erratic throbbing of her heart. When it was over, or had relatively receded, and she stopped fanning herself with her hat, she slipped it back on her head (although at the wrong angle) and pointed to the sky, saying, "That was a Tackle attack."

It took immense effort from every muscle in Jax's body to keep himself from running over and strangling her at that moment.

--An Hour Later, Back in Viridian Forest--

"I hate this forest."

Violet cursed violently, kicking at an unfortunate stump that happened to be in her path. Fortunately for the unfortunate stump, it happened to have a rather large edge on it which then stubbed Violet's toe. Letting out a caterwaul of pain, Violet staggered away from the offending stump, nursing her injured toe. Up ahead of her, Jax was walking with a parcel slung under his arm and a decidedly bland look on his face.

"Oh come on, Violet," he said, completely ignoring the girl's antics from behind him, "The guy broke his leg during the fall. It's only fair we deliver the parcel for him…" Jax sighed and rolled his eyes, then muttered, "Or we could have disagreed and he could have sued us for personal damages, AND pay the medical bills for him and his Doduo."

Violet finally caught up with him, wearing a makeshift bandage out of leaves wound over her foot, and walking with a slight limp (plus she was cringing uncontrollably every step or so). "But I can't believe we have to go through this whole forest all over again!" she continued to complain, drawing her fingers through her hat and into her hair so she could scratch at her scalp, "I mean, we were RIGHT AT Pewter City! RIGHT AT IT! And what happens?"

Jax knew she was rambling to herself, so he decided to just pretend she didn't exist for the next few minutes.

"…we have to play Mr. and Ms. Knights In Shining Armor, otherwise we get faced with legal action. How wonderful is that, Jax, how wonderful is th—" her words trailed off to a yelp as she tripped over a rather large root curving up from the ground and landed flat on her face, her hat landing a few inches away from her. Protectively, and not even moving from her position, she grabbed it and put it back on her head, like she thought it was going to be snatched away by some vile apparition the moment she least expected it.

Jax bit his lip, desperately trying to look for a bright side to the dark and annoying situation they had found themselves inescapably trapped in. He juggled the package in his hands a bit, wondering idly what was in it. The package itself was pretty light, so it was probably nothing artsy, and he didn't see any 'FRAGILE's stamped over it. 'Come to think of it,' he pondered, while Violet tried to fight off a rather menacing Caterpie with a pointy branch, 'Who's it addressed to? The guy only said it was to be sent to Pallet Town…'

Curiosity killed the Charmander, who rotated the parcel around in his hand until he came across a block of lettering scrawled onto the side. His eyes scanned it briefly, widening as he realization came, once again, and smashed him with the force of a charging rhinoceros.

"You have to be kidding me."

--Forty-Five Minutes Later, Pallet Town—

The incessant rapping of a set of bony, freckled knuckles against a solid door peppered at the air like the chattering of a woodpecker—incessant, monotonous, and above all, annoying, as Violet remained resolute at the door of Professor Oak's lab, dutifully knocking on it without the slightest falter in her position. Next to her, Jax twitched and rubbed at his head as the constant sound started to get to him, and it was probably to the great relief of everybody in Pallet that he nudged Violet away from the door with a bodily push.

"I think he's got the point, Violet," he muttered, standing almost defensively before the door, like he was, despite the fact that with his size, Violet could reach over him and just continue like nothing happened, blocking her from resuming her bombardment.

Violet sniffed and adjusted backpack straps self-consciously. "I'm just making sure," she said off-handedly in between cleaning herself of any stray grass stains or unsightly blotches of dirt and lifting her hat so to smooth down her wild mess of hair. Unknown to her, it didn't even remain tidy for a millisecond before it sprung back, and the bangs drooped everywhere as normal.

Jax looked at her through the corners of his eyes, an eyebrow arcing. "And what do you think you're doing?" he asked, curiosity piqued by her unusual behavior.

Violet was now polishing the chains holding the Pokemon keychains onto her backpack, much to his amusement. "Making a good impression," she said, voice distracted, "Come on Jax, we're DELIVERY PEOPLE. We need to look nice and clean." Finally, she seemed to reach a state that at the very least satisfied her, and she took her place back at Jax's side, just as the doorknob started to turn. In all actuality, she just looked like how she normally would, only trying too hard.

Jax muttered to her out of the corner of his mouth, "Funny, you didn't seem so enthusiastic back in Viridian Forest, where you were getting attacked by shrubbery," he remarked, words scathing.

Violet only mutely, and uninterestedly, pantomimed the movement of his mouth with her mouth and her hand, like it was a sock puppet. After that two-second-long moment of enjoying her immaturity, Violet finally said, "Jax, I'm a girl of dedication," she said proudly, thumping a fist to her chest, "When ya get right to it, I'm your go-to-gal for your needs. You need some water for your bath? I'm on it!" She pointed to the air, her posture now exaggerated and stiff, "Some groceries? No problemo!"

Jax only stared at her, hardly moved or impressed by her whole charade. "You're just hoping that Oak'll pay you with something," he said numbly.

Quite unsurprisingly, Violet had nothing to say in her defense, and could only just seethe in silence as the door opened.

Only, it wasn't by Professor Oak.

Peeking behind the door, in place of a certain sexagenarian professor that both of them knew and loved, the head of a girl was staring out at them, her face framed by the sparse, fluffy, coral-colored hairstyle that hugged close to the curve of her scalp from beneath her unusually shaped hat—some sort of dome, decorated with triangular fringes that made the girl almost look like she was wearing a sun. Her eyebrow raised in a very Jax-ish manner as she looked from Jax to Violet, back and forth, carefully scrutinizing them.

"…You two don't look like a delivery guy," the girl remarked in a husky baritone, a hand emerging from behind the door to stroke thoughtfully at her chin. Violet blinked in response, whereas Jax just looked absolutely confused. "Heck, only one of you look like guys, and you're not even a human…"

The confusion warped into something almost defensively forward as the hand clenched itself into a fist and jabbed righteously at the air, barking words impatiently, "WHAT DID YOU DO TO THE DELIVERY GUY!" she

Suddenly, Violet half-lunged at the girl, striking a rather dramatic position reserved for professional detectives interrogating criminals and crooks in film noir. Since they weren't in film noir, however, she just looked rather ridiculous. "Us!" she snapped, getting right to business, "What have you done with the professor!"

The girl looked shocked, her rock-solid defense fading as quickly as the expression set in. "Excuse me?" she exclaimed, outraged, only for Violet to bellow at her again, sounding too much like she was trying to impersonate Humphrey Bogart—and failing—to sound intimidating.

Although on a small scale, she DID completely and totally shock Jax, and he looked nothing short of horrified.

"Did you eat him!" she demanded, much to the girl's revulsion, and Jax's embarrassment. Before the Charmander could open his mouth to tell Violet to put a sock in it, the girl interjected.

"EAT HIM? ARE YOU FLIPPING MENTAL!" The girl shouted, stunned, before she said, quite sincerely, "Wouldn't he taste horrible?" It was almost like her tone and expression had changed on a dime, flipping into motion at the speed of light and the movements of muscles, that seemed to be rather flexible on the unusual girl's face.

Violet's at first relentless posture disappeared on the spot, replaced with actual thinking, reflected in her suddenly casually thoughtful appearance. She scratched her head beneath her hat. "You know, I don't think so. He's kinda wrinkly, so…"

"Right," the girl agreed, nodding her head in approval. "And I don't think he'd appreciate it. It'd almost be like that nursery story… I forgot its name… Hamster and Greytell or something like that…"

"Am I the only one who sees the insanity in this topic?" Jax interrupted from the sidelines, sounding both aggravated and a little flabbergasted by the chosen subject.

Suddenly, the door was pushed open with a creak, exposing the rest of the girl, and the lab behind her. She was definitely roughly around Violet's age, if not a little older, and a little taller, with a lanky, gangly physique. Much like Violet, her clothes were casual, and brightly colored as well, seeming to fade from colors of greens to an entirely different one—yellows--by the waist, perhaps an intended effect of some kind of dye. The girl's eyes moved to the Charmander, mouth open to say something, when a look of recognition flashed over her.

Violet and Jax barely had time to follow her pupils down to the parcel in Jax's claws before she had snatched it away from them, holding it aloft happily. "Yes! This is it!" Her happiness was temporarily interrupted by a look of worry, as she prudently looked at the package, almost like she were expecting it of some action of treachery at any given moment. "Or IS IT?"

While Jax was completely lost, Violet was now watching the one-girl show with acute interest.

The girl tilted the package around in her hand so the side with the writing on it was upright, "Lesseeeee…" the girl murmured in sing-song, reading over the scripture. Sure enough, she gave a curt nod, "Yep, this is it. Come on!" And once more, the cheer had been restored back into the girl, and Violet realized just why her face seemed so flexible as a massive, radiant grin stretched from cheek to cheek, nearly reducing her eyes to twinkling slits.

She gestured to the two standing, one dumbstruck and wondering if that expression was going to hurt her, and one whose had now deteriorated into something entirely unreadable, to the lab. The girl marched in as the two followed, leading them out of the enormous room that served some sort of lobby, thanks to its position as unarguably the largest room in Oak's lab. As they trekked through it, Violet idly noticed that things seemed busier than usual—scientists and engineers working for Oak were hard at work wherever they turned as they navigated through the building like marching hamsters through big, mechanical maze. The girl was leading them all the way, her gait nothing short of chipper and her grin not even showing one sign of closure, hell, even her eyes seemed to sparkle with immortal bliss. It was as if she were the lightning rod, drawing it all to her center, whereas everyone around her was just dedicatedly working. At long last the girl stopped before one last door and opened it, stepping into a room flanked by tall, cylindrical capsules and a desk, where Oak was working on something indistinct quite ardently.

"Hey dooc," she crooned, holding the package triumphantly before her, "Your package is here! And look!" She gestured with the parcel over to Violet and Jax with a slight sweeping motion, "They're mailing people now too." At first Jax was starting to wonder if another Violet existed in the universe before he caught the sarcastic edge to her voice that he was quite familiar with.

Oak managed to glance up at the two girls from what he was so feverishly engrossed in long enough to yelp and grab a tarp from under the table, then, before any of the three spectators could see it, had draped it over the table, completely concealing his work save for an unusually shaped bulge. Letting out a relaxed sigh, he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and turned to Violet and Jax.

"Well, if this isn't an unexpected surprise," he said with a chuckle, "I was worried that I'd have to send one of my aides after you two."

Violet folded her arms. "Uh, what do you mean?" she asked, slowly piecing together the situation. By the peak of an eyebrow she had begun to form an uncertain conclusion, her hesitancy leaking into her words, "You WANTED us to be here?"

Oak nodded briskly, then took the parcel from the girl's hands. While nowhere near as joyful as his messenger, he undoubtedly appeared excited by the contents of this mysterious package. "Yes," he started, working away the covering of the parcel almost immediately. It was peeled apart layer by layer: first the tie holding the wrapping on, then the paper, then the lid of the box and the top half of the Styrofoam packaging within, until he finally removed two objects from the box, a proud grin on his face. "I wanted you here to accept this."

They were vaguely square, red, and covered with the same PokeBall painting in black that Oak had on the front of his house on its cover, resembling more of a digital book than anything else. One was in each of Oak's hands, to the left extended to the strange girl at the door, and to the right to Violet and Jax. Gingerly, Violet took hers from him and examined it carefully, eyeing a rather large, green button-like attachment like it was her arch nemesis. After everything that had occurred in the whirlwind of a day that she'd been chased, dragged, and marched through, she felt she had the right to scrutinize everything—and she probably did.

"What is it?" she asked after a second of experimenting with it, and struggling to open it with her hands. The 'pages', or the two flaps of the machine refused to move by even the slightest, even after attempting to pry it open by all the brass tacks (save for masticating, as Violet decided what she held was certainly not edible).

Finally the girl beside her had accomplished what she hadn't by pressing some sort of button in the back of it, making it open up automatically, much like a book, its pages unfolding for an awestruck child. Two screens beside a row of buttons labeled with different options were inside, as well as a tiny, rectangular speaker beneath the lowermost screen with a dilator used for manipulating volumes. Violet blinked, then followed suite, staring at the device like a child would a new toy, and in some respects the scenario was the same.

"They're your Pokedexes," Oak explained, dusting his hands off as he looked from girl to girl while they appraised their respective devices, "Mechanical dictionaries, if you will. They automatically record the full information of Pokemon you catch, and even record snippets of data of Pokemon you've merely encountered."

A proud sigh showed that he was very fond of his greatest achievement, but that little moment was all he allowed himself before he patched up the rest of whatever questions there might have been, "You two left so quickly after you got your Starter Pokemon—you left behind your Pokedexes. I've run out, and it takes quite a while to manufacture these, so I asked one of my cohorts in Pewter to send a pair out here."

Violet's attention was completely pulled from looking over her Pokedex, though not for what Oak's speech was mostly about. Her gaze centered unbelievingly on the girl, "Hey wait, you were here?" she asked skeptically, "You know, to get your Starter Pokemon?"

The girl nodded, then pointed with an odd air of overinflated dignity at the PokeBalls, three of them in total, strapped to her belt. "Came here bright and early yesterday," she narrated, happily patting one of the three spheres like it were a puppy. "And I got to pick up one of my favorites. There was quite a crowd…" she frowned all of a sudden, halting her tangent.

For some reason, Violet didn't think it looked quite right when she frowned—like she wasn't used to it, or it didn't suit her in some way, and after how exuberantly happy she had been throughout most of their meeting, the latter was the most plausible answer. "…I don't think I saw you there, did I?" she queried, idly fanning herself with her Pokedex as she quietly recalled everything that occurred in her quest's beginnings, like she could easily memorize every face that was present at the laboratory.

She probably could, because her features lit up all over again as an answer came to her. Turning to Violet on her heel, she held out her hand genially, folding the Pokedex back up with the other. "I'm Rory," she said genially, and the toothy smile that occupied her face before made its grand return.

Violet took a moment to absorb the girl's story and to try and battle her way out of being frozen solid with disbelief as to how she slept through a whole crowd entering Oak's building. She ultimately departed her mental brawl as the victor, however, and stopped herself from staring dumbly at Rory's hand to take hold of it and shake it firmly. Warmth seemed to sprawl from her fingers to intertwine with Violet's, filling her body with some sort of golden happiness that so naturally showed from this perpetually mirthful individual, and while Violet couldn't muster a smile as large as hers, she did flash a grin that was her own, braces and all.

"Violet," she introduced herself briefly.

The moment the girls parted, Rory seemed to re-comprehend Jax's presence, or at the very least materialize him as something beyond someone waiting at a door, because the minute she saw him again the corners of her mouth seemed to tug another centimeter. "Oh, I forgot to mention," she started excitedly, "You have a Charmander too?"

Jax, who was somewhat silent throughout the whole presentation and introduction sequences, cleared his throat. "Temporarily," he filled in for what Violet loathed to say. "I'm only going to be here for a little while."

Violet pouted and looked away disappointedly, like she was trying not to face the truth behind the conditions of their agreement. Rory sighed and 'tsk'ed sympathetically, "Darn shame," she said, look empathetic. By the end of the sentence her voice became faraway, sort of a mumble beneath her breath, like she was thinking very intensely to the point she was about to enter a meditative state. No such thing happened—instead, something behind her eyes lit up, every feature on her expression reading the same thing: Eureka.

With that ethereal lightbulb glowing like a second sun fresh under that dome of a hat she wore, Rory strode over to Violet and slung a skinny arm around her shoulder, a devious edge to the grin on her face. "Hey, you haven't had a Pokemon battle yet, have you?" she asked, words deliberately paced, the undertones so obvious and thick that it nearly weighed down her words with its heavy implications.

Violet took a moment to think herself, nibbling on her lower lip. She looked away from Rory, her mismatched pupils rotating to face one of many suddenly interesting fluorescent bars that kept Oak's laboratory thoroughly lit. Hesitantly, she asked, "Does being chased by Beedrills and throwing my Kakuna at a Doduo count?"

The two girls looked at each other, unblinking—one breaking out into a wide grin, unaware of how the senselessness of her adventure may have come across, and the other just at a loss of words, and her grin lingering like it was glued there. Rory was the first one to speak, albeit not with much articulation. "O…kay then," she muttered, relinquishing her grip on Violet's shoulder—but not without a hearty pat, "We oughta get you some experience, then!" She snatched a Pokeball from her belt and tossed it in her hand experimentally, smirking as she did so. "You up for it?"

There is no need to detail that Violet's immediate answer was yes, jolted by a burst of adrenaline that Rory's contagious attitude had administered, and that all the way out of the lab and out the front door, Jax's thoughts were filled with nothing but growing trepidation.

Because unknown to Violet, an undertrained Charmander and a Kakuna a brutal, unbeatable fighting team did not make.

Chapter III Completed…

Author's Afternote: Okay, I admit that the chapter's end was a wee bit rushed, but it was getting a bit too long. In the next one, there'll be lots of action, I swear. Rejoice, action lovers, rejoice. And no, I'm not just going to do some kinda cop-out where the Amazing Flying Kakuna makes an appearance.