We returned from our 'battle' in a surly silence, walking together only because we happened to be heading in the same direction- to the Pokémon Centre. Instead of walking alongside her, I made sure to cross the road and walk across the street from her all the way back. In such a small town and at such an early hour, there wasn't any traffic to stop me.
We stepped into our separate rooms without acknowledging one another. For some reason, our rooms were right next door... she must've arrived here an hour or so ahead of me, since that was about how far ahead of me she was in Marma Forest.
In the safety of my room, I took the opportunity to decompress and scream. After a few seconds of that, someone on the floor below gave me a thump through their ceiling and shouted something that I assumed was a variation on 'shut up', so I did. The scream had mostly served its purpose by then, anyway.
... I hadn't even known that there was a second floor of dormitories here.
"I'm taking a shower," I shouted through the wall, grabbing a towel and a change of clothes from the room's closet. I hadn't had time to do my hair earlier, but now that I had an hour to kill until breakfast... well.
The carpeted hall was deserted when I stepped out. She'd gotten the message.
Feeling refreshed and revitalised, I emerged from my long shower as a changed woman.
Amanda wasn't worthy of being my rival. She might have caught a lot of pokémon by now, but she didn't even have a gym badge, and she hadn't even properly battled me yet. Just forfeited twice.
I would just have to be a bit more patient. Enter some unofficial tournaments. I'd heard that they were good ways of getting your hands on some prize money, which I could use to get luxury items for my journey instead of just subsisting on the bare necessities- luxury items like Dusk balls and teleport sticks.
I walked up to the cafeteria, then thought better of it. Fergus was standing at the door. Before I could abscond to my room, though, he'd already caught sight of me.
"Hey," he called out, seeming more subdued than usual. "What happened out there?"
"What happened out where?" I asked, feigning ignorance.
"I just saw Amanda the most pissed off I've ever seen her," he told me. "Or the saddest, it's kind of hard to tell. What'd you guys do?"
"We... battled," I said. "I won."
My Pokédex had actually registered the battle as a victory in my favour, although I'd only gotten 2 points from it. I wasn't technically lying.
Fergus squinted at me, but eventually he shrugged. "Fine," he said. "Are you gonna tag along to watch me finally battle Archer?"
"Nah. I've got things to do," I said.
I half-expected him to get whiny about that too, but he took it in stride. "Whatever," he said. "See you around, I guess."
I really hoped not. The guy sucked. He'd probably lose to Archer and have to spend another day in Fennel Town. I didn't say as much, but he probably got the message, because he grimaced and stalked off without another word.
Not wanting to devote even one more thought to the guy, I pushed the door open and made straight for the food line. This morning I was due for some vitamins, which I scooped up in the form of a fruit salad. Fang was probably too large for the Centre by this point, and I wasn't really sure if lileep even had mouths yet, so I settled for releasing Caligula onto the table and offering her a slice of mango. She docilely accepted it.
According to my biology classes, pokémon in captivity didn't actually need to eat at all; it was more of a leisure activity for them, a more enjoyable way to get the nutrients they needed to repair their bodies than potions and healing machines. Anyone with half a brain could read between the lines there- if you wanted your pokémon to like you, you needed to eat with them every now and then.
"Alright, Caligula," I addressed the trapinch sitting in front of me. She responded to the sound of my voice by cocking her earthy head. "We're heading down to Cayenne now. It's a bigger city than Allspice, and the jungle there has much cooler pokémon than Marma Forest did, so we might be there for a while."
Caligula gurgled randomly. Startled, I reached for her Pokéball, ready to return her and get her checked by the nurses, but in a couple of seconds she stopped and resumed watching me in stoic silence.
I frowned and took out my Pokédex instead, to search for the keywords 'trapinch gurgling'. This was a chance to look up the diet of lileep too; with all those scientific journals on the species, there was surely something on the topic.
There was nothing about trapinch, which I guessed meant Caligula was fine, but there was a wealth of studies into the appropriate diets for lileep. Weirdly, there wasn't anything on the actual Pokédex entry for lileep (which was usually where the authorities put the easy-to-read, finalised information necessary for raising a pokémon), so I had to actually pick a study and read it. I chose the top-ranked study, obviously, and found that lileep had an inexplicable love of red meat. I wasn't sure what made it 'inexplicable', but it was good enough for me. I retrieved a plate of bacon from the front of the cafeteria and released Para onto the table, managing to aim the beam from her ball so that she landed right next to Caligula.
I watched for a couple of seconds as the strips of bacon vanished into the forest of petals at her head, but the sight quickly became unsettling and I looked away until the sounds of slurping died out. When I looked back, the plate was spotless.
"Eep!" purred Para, bouncing her head up and down again like she had last night. I shrugged and returned her and Caligula, and then I picked up my bag and strode out of the cafeteria. The TV in the lobby had been turned on, and it was currently showing scenes of destruction that I guessed were from Allspice Academy. It was lucky that we'd all left before that attack had happened, I thought idly.
Then a very familiar face appeared on the screen.
Alena Hale, current Champion of the Zan League, was standing in front of the Allspice Pokémon Centre. A Pokémon Centre that I'd been in, five days ago. Though she spoke only briefly, I hung on to every word.
"We're downgrading the rating of this threat to six-badge. Assuming that the spokespeople for the organization responsible for this mess are trustworthy, nobody within the school has been harmed. Our psychics and other surveillance corroborate this narrative. So far, the situation outside the school is under control. We hope to keep things that way."
The TV went back to a news studio at that point, so I lost interest. Six-badge threats, as far as I could remember, were kind of bad, but not really. From a trainer's perspective, all the designation meant was that all trainers who'd ever won six or more unique badges, who were currently in reach of the affected region, were legally obligated to help deal with the threat, whether it was to battle a bunch of bad guys or help with disaster relief. The League obviously kept track of what kind of pokémon you had access to, and where you were at the time, so you couldn't just not go if you were able to get there in time. Gym leaders had to have beaten all the gyms before they were allowed to register for the position, which meant that they were liable for all of the threats important enough to have ratings- six, seven and eight-badge.
There had been two gym leaders at the compound yesterday, though, and if I was getting this right the crisis in Allspice had started at some point yesterday too. I ruminated on the issue as I stepped through the Centre's automatic doors and headed down the road to Route 013. Whatever was going on, at least I wouldn't have to bother with it until I was a six-badger myself.
"Argh!" screamed a voice that was quickly becoming much too familiar for my tastes. I turned my head. Yeah, it was Fergus.
"What's up?" I said, not really wanting to know.
"He's out! Again!" He stopped a few feet from me, in a stance that looked suspiciously like the lead-in to a fighting-type attack.
"Who's out?"
"The gym leader!" he half-snarled.
"Oh," I said. "That's-"
"I can't believe this," he went on, seeming to have forgotten about me completely. "I was in the top five at school, and here I am, I can't even get into a battle against the one leader I have a perfect type advantage against. That's so..."
I kept walking. There was nothing to be gained here. It was high time that I got out of this town, anyway.
"Nice! Now get back!" My lileep slid backwards a little, disentangling her vine-like petals from the buizel we were fighting, and I hurled my Pokéball at the buizel as it struggled to claw her Acid out of its eyes. The ball caught it right in the middle of its back. The impact triggered the ball's capture mechanism, and it snapped open for a second, converting the buizel into energy and drawing it inside.
I watched the ball intently as it dropped to the ground and began twitching. One... two... three... click. My Pokédex dinged, indicating a successful capture, and I pumped my fist in the air.
"Yes!" This was the first ever pokémon that I had properly caught, instead of just having it given to me in a Pokéball. I'd made sure that it was a good one- buizel and their evolution, floatzel, were agile water pokémon with a strong offensive instinct and the ability to learn all kinds of good water-type attacks. It would be helpful for beating Cayenne's fire-type gym, and continue to be helpful for the rest of my career as a trainer.
I checked its details. Female, already knew a bunch of cool attacks, and pretty beat-up from the fight with Para. I put a potion to her Pokéball and fixed her up, then thought about a name for her.
"Undine," I said finally.
With that out of the way, I returned Para and continued on my way to get a look at Route 013's main attraction- the Zan Region's Safari Park. Built around a lake in the year 1952, it was a huge area of jungle and marshy terrain hemmed in by the famous Agamon Wall. Inside, there were colonies of species that were unavailable anywhere else in the region. Those pokémon could be dangerous, though, and so you had to have pokémon of your own- and three gym badges- before you were even allowed in.
I took a brief moment to reflect on how dumb it would be if you weren't allowed to bring your pokémon with you into a place full of nothing but unfamiliar pokémon.
Besides the Safari Park, Route 013 in general was kind of unimpressive. The lush greenery surrounding the path and the golden beaches that ran along the west of the route were pretty, but as I walked down the road, I began running into more and more cars sitting on the edges of the road. A gaggle of giggling children sprinted in front of me, followed by an arcanine dressed in a ridiculous frilly blue dress.
I scowled at the casual disrespect of such a rare and powerful pokémon- there were no growlithe native to this region- but kept going. I was about to have to walk past the infamous Safari Beach, tourist hotspot and den of everything I stood against. Littering. Loud people. Crowds. Wasting time.
A child ran up to me. Spiky-haired and bubbling with enthusiasm, he stared up guilessly at me and said, "Hi, trainer lady! Can I see your pokémon!"
I put one hand on Fang's ball. "Sure," I said.
Before I could scare the kid into manhood, I heard a girlish scream erupt from behind me. I whirled around to see a poliwhirl punching the living daylights out of the arcanine I'd seen earlier. A burly-looking guy in shades and torn sleeves stood with his arms crossed next to the spectacle, looking about as built as a poliwhirl himself. The arcanine's trainer- if it was even a trainer and not an owner- was nowhere in sight.
This was exactly why you had to train pokémon to fight.
"Thunder Fang that poliwhirl!" My arbok correctly followed the order, lunging forward faster than my I could follow and plunging his fangs into the side of the poliwhirl. The bite discharged a wave of electricity through the blue pokémon's body, and it reflexively thrashed backwards, incidentally hurling the limp arcanine to relative safety.
"What's the big idea, huh?" demanded the poliwhirl's trainer, who had probably noticed that I was the only one in the vicinity with a ball out. "I'm just fighting that arcanine, get it?"
We were surrounded by a crowd of horrified onlookers, most of which had pulled out cameras and phones and were snapping pictures of myself, the other guy, and our pokémon. Fang had pulled back after the attack, and was now flaring his hood as he stared down the poliwhirl we'd just attacked.
"You're not fighting shit," I snapped at him. "That arcanine's the weakest pokémon I've ever seen. You want a fight, you'll fight me, you cowardly loser."
A vein popped in his temple. "Arright that's IT! poliwhirl Bubble Beam GO!"
"Glare!" I shouted as the poliwhirl inhaled. Fang's eye glowed an intense red, and suddenly the poliwhirl stumbled and released a pathetic sliver of drool from its front.
Its trainer growled. "Bubble Beam!" he shouted again.
"Thunder Fang!" I spat.
Fang lashed out with his fangs again, catching the poliwhirl in the middle of its swirly stomach. It grunted in pain and fell to one knee.
The crowd surrounding us cheered, almost right into my ears, and I ground my teeth in frustration.
"Shut UP!" I shouted at them. With an air of shock and hurt, they did as I said. If they were going to watch this impromptu battle between the future Champion of the Zan League and some loser for free, the least they could do was let me concentrate.
Even with the poliwhirl paralysed and on the back foot, I knew that I couldn't let my guard down. This guy probably had lots more battle experience than I did right now, and his poliwhirl was probably no stranger to getting hit.
As expected, it managed to get to its feet and adopted a fighting stance.
"Earthquake!" shouted the trainer.
I barely had enough time to react. "Screech! Wrap! Get off the ground!" Fang let loose a hideous scream and lunged at the poliwhirl at the same time. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed people near me stumbling backwards, their hands over their ears, but that wasn't relevant. What was relevant was stopping that poliwhirl from knocking out my arbok in a single attack.
When at last the poliwhirl managed to stamp into the ground, sending out shockwaves that almost sent me sprawling, Fang was wrapped securely around its limbs and body, safe from the attack.
"Screech again," I called out. The other trainer hadn't been as on the ball as I had, even though he was the one who should have been ready for his poliwhirl's attack- he was lying on the floor, groaning. Served him right for doing something as stupid as telling a pokémon right next to him to use Earthquake. The poliwhirl, without a trainer to guide it, stoically stood there as Fang screamed into its ears, over and over again. I grinned as its trainer, still lying in the centre of Fang's Screech range, slowly put his hands on his ears and gave up on trying to stand up.
"Now use Thunder Fang!" The electric-type attack finally finished off the poliwhirl in a shower of yellow sparks, and it collapsed, unconscious.
"Good job, Fang," I said as I returned my pokémon. I'd done that without making Fang take a single hit. The thought would've made me smile, but it was really down to that guy being an idiot. If he'd ordered his pokémon to use an attack that didn't incapacitate him more than it had incapacitated me, that battle could've ended very differently.
I looked around at the part of the route we'd been on. Almost everyone had been driven off by the combination of the poliwhirl's Earthquake and Fang's Screech, and the road looked like an excadrill had been taken to it- jagged lines emanated out from where the poliwhirl was lying, and the earth had been upturned completely in several places.
To my annoyance, the boy who had asked me to show him one of my pokémon was still standing nearby, staring at me in awe. He was open-mouthed and silent, which I supposed was an improvement.
"Was that enough for you?" I asked him.
"That... was... so cool," he breathed. "Omygosh what kind of pokémon was that? What type was it? Electric? I bet it was electric, it was so loud and-"
"Go away!" I snapped. "Don't you have parents? Friends?"
He shut up. I left him standing there, alone, amidst the wreckage left by the poliwhirl's Earthquake.
Seeing all these people around had killed my desire to see the Safari Park's walls. That was a trip that would have to wait for whenever I had my third badge and wanted to expand my team, which would be a while yet. Instead, I stuck to the main road, ignoring the curious stares of tourists who had heard (or felt) the commotion from my short battle earlier.
As I neared Cayenne itself, the bushes and trees of Route 013 gave way to more urban features- asphalt on the road, dinky concrete buildings, traffic cones, proper parking spaces. The sight of increasing numbers of cars and buses, and the thickening sounds of traffic, told me that I should get off the road, so I picked a side and started walking on the stunted grass that ran alongside it.
Cayenne was in clear view at this point; from here it was a spiny mass of vibrantly painted buildings, separated from the dense jungle around it by a narrow belt of roads. To its west lay the shimmering blue ocean- to its east, the towering peak of Mount Zan, and several shorter mountains that crowded in the distance behind it. I grinned. Cayenne was an even bigger city than Allspice, and it was way more accessible (despite the jungle ringing it). That meant one thing: tournaments. Even though I doubted that anybody worth impressing would be watching tournaments that I was currently eligible for, as a single-badge trainer, they were a great way to get a head-start on making real money.
According to the map function of my Pokédex, there was a relatively small stadium between the north entrance to Cayenne- where I was- and the Pokémon Centre inside. Since the walk from Fennel Town hadn't been taxing at all, I decided to give it a look, in the hopes that they were currently hosting an event. It was on the way, anyway.
When I got there, I was greeted by an unusual sight. From the outside, the stadium looked like it had been split in two; one half was a rundown, grey block interspersed with filthy windows, and the other was painted with alternating vertical bars of two bright shades of green. It was on the green half that I found the door, an imposing steel affair with visible bolts and a large crossbar, and a tacky neon sign.
"Ridin' Fighters Battle Stadium," I read aloud, slightly incredulous. I sighed and went in anyway.
Inside, I found the reception desk, a potted plant that was probably plastic, a few seats that were definitely plastic, and a boring-looking man who was probably meant to be behind the desk.
"Hi!" said the boring-looking man standing in front of the desk, looking and sounding inordinately cheerful for someone who was only working in the industry of pokémon battling in the broadest of senses.
"Why are you so happy?" I asked him.
He looked confused. "I... I don't know."
"Are there any matches on right now? For, like, watching?"
"Uh, yeah," he said. "A six on six between two five-badge trainers, I think."
That was pretty good. "And that's the door there, right?" I gestured to the door at the end of the reception room.
"Yeah," he said, sounding more sure of himself now.
"Cool." With that, I marched up to it and pulled the handle. It didn't budge.
"Whoah, whoah, stop!" The man clapped an arm on my shoulder.
I managed to restrain myself from decking him in the face. Instead, I calmly put his hand back where it belonged.
"Explain."
Confusion touched his face for a couple of seconds, but he recovered before I lost interest. "I need to scan your dex first."
"Why?"
"Because... you could be carrying illegal stuff? There's a detector in the doorway for anything on your person, but... technology and stuff?"
I almost hesitated when I thought of Para, but I managed to pass him my Pokédex without triggering any change in his stance. He had no idea. Hopefully, the computer he was scanning my dex with wouldn't either.
It didn't. He came back out from behind his desk and handed me my Pokédex, then took a small grey thing out of his pocket and pressed it. The door behind me swung open automatically in response. So it was a remote.
"Have fun," he said, waving me through the door. I thought he might've been a little half-hearted, but who could blame him?
"Hyper Beam!" shouted the girl closest to the entrance I'd come through. The ninetales in front of her opened its mouth and, in record time, unleashed a beam of searing hot energy on the mantine hovering across the field from it. Both pokémon looked pretty battered, but as the mantine was blasted back by the attack, I could see that the ninetales was the winner of this bout.
The trainer opposite her cursed and returned her mantine, then immediately sent out her next combatant- a burly vigoroth.
"Bulldoze!" commanded the vigoroth's trainer as soon as the vigoroth landed. It reacted instantaneously, pounding the floor with a vicious punch. A huge wave of dirt exploded out from underneath the vigoroth, slamming into the ninetales before it could recover from its own Hyper Beam.
The ninetales lady scowled, and at that point I realized that I was watching Daria- the older trainer who had made sure I was okay after my fight with Fang.
"Pain Split!" The ninetales screeched, pinkish energy flaring from its eyes, and suddenly it stood up straighter. Correspondingly, the vigoroth sagged a little, as if suddenly tired. "Heat Wave!"
The energy from the nintales' eyes turned blue momentarily, and then a wave of white-hot fire scoured the entire battlefield.
The vigoroth stood its ground, seemingly unruffled by the attack despite the fact that it had been hot enough to bend the air around the battlefield. "Rock Slide!"
A single huge boulder materialized above the vigoroth's head and flung itself at the ninetales. Mid-air, it fractured into a horde of smaller, jagged rocks.
"Protect! Hyper Beam!" The hail of stony shrapnel rained down harmlessly on the ninetales' translucent green barrier, which then evaporated to make way for the ninetale's second Hyper Beam attack. The wide beam struck the vigoroth hard, eliciting a grunt, but it managed to avoid being blown back like the mantine had been by digging its claws into the ground. Daria scowled again- she'd clearly been hoping that the attack would be enough to finish her foe off.
"Bulldoze again!"
"Protect!" The green barrier winked back into existence for a moment, but fizzled out as the Bulldoze reached the ninetales' position. The ninetales was flung upwards by the impact, but it managed to find its footing mid-air. As it landed- on all fours- the two trainers gave their next commands simultaneously.
"Quick Attack! Inferno!"
"Duckdoze!"
The ninetales shot forwards with blinding speed, intent on the vigoroth in front of it. Just as it seemed it would connect, the vigoroth slid out of the way and, in the same, fluid motion, slammed its fist into the ground.
But before the Bulldoze could hurl it into the air once more, the ninetales spat a blazing orb of fire into the vigoroth's face, at point blank range. The vigoroth gave an unearthly screech and fell backwards, continuing to scream at a volume that drowned out all other sound.
Abruptly, the screaming stopped. Red-faced, the vigoroth's trainer stowed a pokéball back into her belt, then marched forwards, her other hand awkwardly outstretched. Daria's ninetales bounded up to its own trainer and curled around her ankles, clearly pleased with its own performance. She gave it a scratch behind the ear and then returned it so that she could help close the distance between herself and the other trainer.
They met in the middle and shook hands. So the battle was over. Their mouths were moving, but I couldn't hear them from the stands when they weren't shouting commands at their pokémon. It wasn't like anything they were saying could be very important, anyway.
Remembering Daria's promise to me in Marma Forest, I strode up to them. This was my chance to battle a real pokémon expert. How had she even gotten five badges already? The season had only started five days ago, on the day that I'd gotten Caligula, and as far as I knew the gym leaders had mostly been tied up with whatever was going on in Allspice for the last two days.
The only explanation I could see was that she'd gone through the circuit before, maybe a couple of times, and had access to a really fast flying-type- or a pokémon that knew Teleport. If that was the case, she'd probably already participated in the Ruby Conference. I would have to look up videos tonight, although I'd never heard the name Daria in relation to high-level training before. Maybe she hadn't been able to get through the first round of battles for some reason.
"Um, hello?" said the female trainer who Daria had just beaten.
"It's me," I said, addressing Daria. "Janet Prosper."
Daria nodded slowly. "Oh, I... remember you. Marma Forest, right?"
"Yep. You caught my ekans! Except he's an arbok now."
For some reason that made her grimace. "Right."
"Can you battle right now?" I liked to cut to the chase.
"Um," Daria hesitated, "no. I used everyone I had on me in that battle. Don't like asking them to fight two different battles back to back."
"That's fine," I said. "How about tomorrow?"
Daria sighed. "Fine," she said. "I'll book it with the guys here, and message you the time with the Trainer Tracker app. Is that fine?"
"Absolutely," I said.
Tomorrow was going to be a great day.
