=-Tools Of The Trade

It takes more than a kind heart and a strong backbone to raise a Pokémon. There's specialized equipment involved. Some of it you'll need to own; other pieces of it you just need to know about.

This is by no means a complete listing. Some of the tools I'll list in this section have multiple variations, in which case I'll just list information on a basic model. Other items are mostly of use only to the battling Trainer or other specialists; as this is a book meant for every potential Pokémon owner, I didn't want to devote a lot of space to information meant for such a narrow subset of my audience (don't worry, battlers; the book I'm about to refer you to will more than make up for this omission).

For Further Reading: A Wild DISCOUNT Appears! How To Buy Everything You Need For Your Pokémon Without Breaking Your Budget by Professor Leland Lesko

Poké Balls

By far the most important Pokémon-related tool is the Poké Ball. It serves as both capture-device housing, and it's not an understatement to call it one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity. It has helped stabilize civilization itself.

The Poké Ball has its roots in the humble apricorn. This fruit's outer shell was discovered to have special properties that made it excellent for imprisoning Pokémon. Unfortunately, it was too small to hold even the most diminutive, and the cost of harvesting hundreds of apricorns to build one Pokémon-proof room was prohibitive. The world's most brilliant scientists assembled in Saffron City to try and find some way to make use of the fruit.

Weeks of fevered brainstorming produced a prototype Poké Ball: a hollowed-out, hinged apricorn shell, equipped with state-of-the-art technology like a shrinking machine, a suction device, and a miniature computer that could lock onto a target. The next night, the scientists hired a local trainer and ventured into the surrounding wilderness. Before long, they encountered a Gengar.

The trainer fought with magnificent skill, his Nidorino and Jigglypuff wearing the wild Pokémon down. Finally, with the Gengar weakened, he threw the experimental device. It bathed the target in a shrink ray, pulled it inside, snapped shut, rocked once, twice, three times…and was still.

The group of pioneers sighed in relief. Second perhaps only to Gyarados, Gengar was the most feared Pokémon of Kanto…and they had shown they could capture it. The concept had proven itself.

Almost overnight, hundreds of apricorns were harvested and hollowed. The best trainers from around the world were given the new devices as part of a bargain. They were told to catch all the Pokémon they could near towns and cities, and they could keep them. They agreed, of course; it was a dream come true. As they fanned out into the frontier, they naturally encountered the most aggressive, daring Pokémon. As they were captured, it was the shyer, more timid ones who were left behind to reproduce. This was a consequence that even the scientists hadn't foreseen; travel from town to town would become much safer simply because of the dispositions of the remaining Pokémon. Even those that do still dare to attack humans are, by and large now content to simply chase them away or at worse knock them unconscious (annual fatalities from wild Pokémon attacks are presently near zero).

There was another unintended side-effect. The trainers soon had more Pokémon than they could handle. So they founded Gyms and recruited apprentice trainers to help manage their collection, in exchange for teaching them their secrets. Rivalries between Gyms soon sprouted up, and this in turn led to the foundation of the modern Pokémon Leagues.

But I digress.

As the frontiers were tamed, an interesting change in viewpoints occurred. Many trainers began to feel somewhat guilty about keeping their Pokémon imprisoned in such a small space most of the time. Breathing wasn't a problem, as the apricorn shell was oxygen-permeable, but confinement was.

A team of scientists led by Dr. Satoshi Silph found a solution. They created an artificial alloy that duplicated the properties of apricorns, and molded it into spheres. They were equipped with the same devices as the hollowed shells, as well as two new inventions.

One was a projector that bathed Pokémon in harmless radiation. If another trainer tried to capture a Pokémon that was saturated in this energy, the sphere would be short-circuited and the attempt would automatically fail (if the owner chose to free said Pokémon, it would be bathed in different radiation that cancelled out the first dose).

The other invention was a dimensional plane-shifter. The shrunken Pokémon would be pulled through a tiny hole into another world (more on this in a later chapter). They would return to normal size and the hole would close. Whenever the trainer triggered the device again, the Pokémon would take the journey in reverse (this took several minutes, so the returning "passenger" would not arrive startled). A complicated targeting algorithm, along with several secret, redundant back-up systems (in case of accident or a villainous organization trying to "hack" the Poké Ball), ensured only the desired Pokémon would be summoned.

And so what we think of as the Poké Ball was born. And with it came another startling transformation in the relationship between humans and Pokémon. Now that they were no longer confined to a small space, they became much more affectionate and loving toward their trainers, who in turn began to see them as friends, as pets, even as members of their families. As new generations of Pokémon were born and raised in a human-dominated environment, they became domesticated, and as they became domesticated, they began to seem necessary. Non-trainers began to acquire them. They started to perform all kinds of work, or were simply devoted companions. They had gone from unpredictable, destructive creatures of the wild to everyday, useful colleagues.

Today there are numerous varieties of Poké Ball. Hollowed apricorn shells are even still being produced by craftsmen (largely in the Johto region), which a dedicated segment of trainers prefer to use.

You might not become a battler, but I recommend you always have a few spare Poké Balls on hand. You never know when that one species you've always wanted will be there in the tall grass.

For Further Reading: Play Ball! How A Tiny Little Sphere Changed Our Lives by Professor Hank Ruth