The day had come for them to take the train to Hogwarts. Harry, Hermione, and Dean were among the few students to board at Wyndon Station. The train was hidden in a wizardspace pocket called "Platform 9 3/4", so no muggles could reach it. The train would follow the usual railways south to Wedgehurst, before going even further, deep into the Crown Tundra, where Hogwarts was hidden.

Hermione had started reading a thick stack of books, declaring that she may have lost one argument with a Professor, but she'd be damned if she wasn't prepared for the next one. Dean pulled out a sketchbook and started drawing his Mincinno, Mickey, and he quickly started giving only monosyllabic responses to conversations. So Harry spent his time exploring the train, watching who got on at each station, before they finally pulled away from Wedgehurst, and the green fields started to give way to icy tundra.

He was starting to get tired of wandering around, and he saw that one of the compartments had an open door. The occupant was a redheaded boy, around his age, who was gazing pensively out the window. There was a Greedent, a chubby brown squirrel with a massive bushy tail and chubby cheeks, sleeping on his lap.

He poked his head in. "Mind if I join you?"

"Sure, come on," said the boy. "I'm Ron Weasley. This greedy little fellow here is Scabbers."

He poked at the Greedent with his wand, but Scabbers stayed fast asleep.

"He's a bit of a family heirloom," Ron said, abashed. "Who're you?"

"Harry Potter," said Harry.

Ron's eyebrows raised. "The Harry Potter?"

"What do you mean?" said Harry.

"You stopped the last war," Ron said.

"There was a war?"

So Ron explained the civil war sparked by Tom Riddle to Harry, at least the parts that an eleven-year-old knew, and that Harry was the 'boy-who-lived'.

"He comes for the Potters… and then hours later they're dead, but so is he. Did you… did you do anything?" Ron said. "To win it. Baby Pokemon can start fighting a few hours after their birth. Maybe you…"

Harry shook his head. "Sorry. I'm human."

"You seem… really calm," Ron said.

"I just learned I was a wizard too," said Harry. "It's not that much of a difference to learn I apparently did something amazing as a baby."

This, of course, did not have quite the intended effect.

"You just learned you were a wizard?" shouted Ron. "How? You're a war hero."

"I was a baby," Harry said, bemused. The wizarding world really was different from everything he knew.

"But— it's practically your birthright! Were you raised by muggles?"

Harry nodded to that. "I was. My aunt and uncle didn't want me to have Pokemon at all. They didn't tell me anything, just that my birth parents loved me but were also dead and never coming back. And I guess if my parents were wizards, it's my birthright."

Ron shook his head. "More than that," he said. "There's this old nursery rhyme. Everyone learns it as soon as they can walk—

Potter tends our homes and hearths,

Smith shall arm our sacred earth.

Prince to rule the common man,

Gaunt as bane for those who ran

Greengrass makes the land be tilled,

Bones ensures the dead keep still

Brown to join our hands in love

And Black to rule from stars above

The Sacred Eight, in dawn of time,

Sealed the shadows beyond the Line. "

"Interesting rhyme," Harry said. "Does it mean anything? The shadows beyond the Line?"

"No idea," said Ron, "at least, not beyond the literal meaning, like Potters work with clay I guess. So maybe you have a family Claydol hibernating somewhere. But those eight families are really important in wizarding society."

"Mr. Ollivander did say that it was almost criminal for my aunt and uncle to deny me Pokemon…"

"I'm sure you'll be fine," Ron said. "But you're one of the Potters. Pokemon training—wizardry—is in your blood."

There was so much that Harry didn't know. There were eight significant families — a 'Sacred Eight'—just like the number of Pokemon Gyms in the Galar Major League. Each of the families seemed to have some sort of purpose, related to the elements or to a Pokemon type. He decided to see if Ron might know more.

Ron didn't seem to. "I dunno about whatever makes the Sacred Eight 'Sacred', since the Weasleys are an old family but we're not 'sacred'… whatever it means. One of the traitors in the war tried to push the idea of a 'Sacred Twenty Eight' but nobody listened to him. Some families are old enough that… well, you kind of know what kind of wizard the kids will be. The Weasleys… well, we're Gryffindors, through and through."

He said this last bit rather morosely.

Harry asked what that meant, and Ron explained. There were four Houses at Hogwarts, each roughly corresponding to the fourfold division of wizarding society.

Slytherins were planners and plotters. They were responsible for the grand strategy of how responses to the Dynamax storms went, as well as liaisons with muggle government officials. They were expected to be masters of battling, but also to never battle; they were to have won their fights before starting them.

Hufflepuffs were loyal and dutiful. They were the on-the-ground logistics workers for wizarding society, as well as staffing the bureaucracy of the wizarding government. During Dynamax storms, they would be responsible for transporting new forces and evacuating exhausted trainers, but many older Hufflepuffs ended up taking office jobs where they could manage the flow of resources of people instead.

Ravenclaws were intelligent people who preferred study to battle. They spent their lives studying the Dynamax phenomena and pursuing improvements in the field of battle science. They were considered too valuable to send to the field of battle, and as a result many Ravenclaws ended up being very well-versed in the theory of making Pokemon stronger, but with weak combat capabilities themselves.

And finally, Gryffindors were the brave and the bold. Gryffindors were the first on the field, and the last to leave. Gryffindors plunged into the heart of the Dynamax storms themselves, with wild abandon, with steely resolve and fire in their hearts. Gryffindors struck hard and struck first, with no regard for their lives, only for the honor and glory that could be won by defeating the Pokemon at the heart of a storm, and saving the innocents of Galar.

At least, that was how Harry heard it. Ron seemed to describe it more as Gryffindors being the first on the front lines and the ones who had to fight the hardest.

Harry was enraptured instantly. If he was worthy of Gryffindor, that was where he wanted to go. But Ron seemed so unenthusiastic…

"And what House do you think you're getting into?" Harry said.

"Gryffindor, I expect, like all my brothers," said Ron. He moodily glared out the window; it didn't seem like he was all that pleased by the prospect. Harry said as much, with some confusion. Why wouldn't anyone want to end up in Gryffindor? Sure, it was the house of the hot-headed, but that's what heroes were!

"Well, it's how Gryffindors tend to end up," said Ron cagily, only glancing briefly at Harry before staring out at the Galarian countryside.

"Heroes?" said Harry carefully.

"The ones who live," said Ron gloomily. "Even they turn out a bit odd. My brother Bill, he's a master of ghost and rock types and sometimes it seems like he died ten years ago and his husk is just waiting to rejoin his soul."

"How on earth does that—"

"He's a haunted man," Ron said. "A powerful wizard, but I've seen him sitting at the kitchen table talking to the air and pretending that his dead friends are with him. And my brother Charlie, he's a dragon tamer, and I'm not sure he even likes talking to humans. They're brilliant, but they're not really… sane. And of course there's Dumbledore. Super strong, the greatest hero of the century, but also quite mad. But most Gryffindors? They're best at combat, see. They're bold, and brave, and they want to be heroes. So they end up on the front lines of the Dynamax storms, even when they're not ready. And if they're not lucky, they die. But if you succeed, you'll be remembered for centuries. That's what they say, anyways. I can't name anyone from a century ago."

Harry thought about this for a bit, and decided that he liked the idea of glory even if it carried the risk of death. That was why he was on this adventure. Where else would he belong? Being a Slytherin seemed… cowardly, being a Hufflepuff sounded like working at Grunnings but with magic, and he wasn't studious enough to be a Ravenclaw.

"So what house do you want to get into?" said Harry.

"Slytherin," said Ron. "I don't want to die."

Someone scoffed from the door. "A Weasley in Slytherin? Salazar forbid."

"Draco Malfoy," said Ron hostilely as a blond boy with arrogantly handsome features appeared.

"I'm impressed," said Malfoy. "I wasn't aware the Weasleys taught any of their children etiquette at all, least of all remembering names."

"How could I forget the name of the boy I've beaten at chess ever since I was five?" said Ron.

Draco sniffed and turned away from his friend Ron (at least, Harry thought it was pretty obvious that they were friends) to face Harry. "So, the famous Harry Potter. The name's Malfoy. Draco Malfoy. And these are Crabbe and Goyle."

He nodded at the muscled boys behind him, who seemed at most two generations descended from their latest Pokemon ancestor. Not that Harry knew if that was a thing. Though he hoped it wasn't.

"Hello," said Harry awkwardly. He turned to Ron for cues, but Ron seemed to be focused on glaring at Malfoy.

"I can show you around," said Draco. "After all, you'll find that some families are simply more suited for certain roles in our society. What House are you trying for, again?"

"Gryffindor," said Harry. He didn't like Draco very much. Draco seemed arrogant. It was hard to believe that he and Ron were friends, but Harry supposed there were weirder friendships. Even so, Ron let out a long sigh behind him.

"Typical," said Draco, disappointed. "The House of Suicidal Would-Be Heroes. Are you sure you don't want to try for Slytherin? Maybe then Weasley could follow you in as one of your grunts. You'd be doing the both of you a favor."

"Alright, that's enough," said Ron hotly. Even though Draco seemed to be giving a backhanded compliment, Ron knew his worth. "You and me, Pokemon battle, right now!"

"You know what, Draco," said Harry, "I think it's rather time you left, isn't it? Bye bye now."

"What do you mean, Potter? I thought we were getting along!"

"Alright, bye, Draco."

And with that, Harry shut the door in his face.

"Why did you stop me from fighting him?" said Ron, a mixture of anger, relief, and confusion on his face.

"Ron, was challenging him to a Pokemon battle the Slytherin thing to do?" said Harry. This was half-rhetorical, half-genuine. As an outsider to the wizarding world, he had no idea whether something was "Gryffindor" or "Slytherin", and frankly the whole idea of basing a society around school divisions seemed absurd. Yet at the same time, several Pokemon types seemed arbitrary to outsiders who weren't up to date with modern Pokemon research, so there was possibly some deeper reason driving this absurd emphasis on school sortings. Or perhaps, more logically, they simply named the school divisions off of existing needs in their society.

"No, it was…" Ron groaned. "I am destined for Gryffindor."

Harry patted him on the arm. "Nothing wrong with that. I just felt a tad out of place, is all. Never did like listening in on conversations between two friends."

"Now wait just a minute!" Ron said. "Malfoy and I aren't friends! We hate each other!"

Harry raised an eyebrow. It seemed that Ron and Draco were naturally rivals. The concept of rivals was a big thing in media featuring the stories of brave, intrepid young Pokemon trainers conquering the world together, and generally had a much weaker basis in reality, but maybe there was something odd about the psychology of wizards that doomed them towards rivalry.

"Alright," he said. "If you say so."

Ron fidgeted. "I wasn't, you know, just challenging him to a fight here. The train should have a battle car."

"I think I saw it earlier," Harry said. He slid the door back open. "Hey, Draco, how about a tag battle?"

"That would be pleasing," Draco said, trying to be suave, though this was diminished somewhat by the way he pumped his fist.

They made their way to the railway car, picking up Hermione along the way. A few other students also came along to watch, mostly other first-years, but a few upper-years as well. Hermione had graciously volunteered to referee, as she wanted to put what she was learning from her books into practice. She held a barely-scuffed book, labeled "Proper Battle Formes and Address."

"This will be an informal two versus two tag battle, with Draco Malfoy and Vincent Crabbe on one side, and Ronald Weasley and Harry… of the Potters on the other," said Hermione, referring back to her book. "The battle will continue until both participants on one side are unable to continue. No wizard spells will be allowed for use, and wizards will be restricted to only commands. Challengers, send out your Pokemon."

Draco had released his Pokemon before Hermione had finished speaking.

"This is my Dreepy, Orion," he said. The Dreepy was a small green Pokemon that floated a few feet off of the ground. Its body was serpentine, though it had two arm-like appendages halfway down its body. Its head was triangular, with pink horns at the end, and two big yellow eyes that looked like headlights. Harry had never seen one like him before.

"He's quite rare," Draco said arrogantly. "Very few people have ever seen Dreepy in the wild, to be frank. It took quite a bit of my family's resources to find Orion here, and they entrusted him to me. You should be honored to have a chance to see something so rare, Weasley, it's not like you'll ever have enough money in your lifetime to afford one yourself."

Ron smiled. He pressed one of his Pokeballs. Harry wondered if he was going to send out Scabbers, but Ron didn't. Instead, he threw a Pokeball, shouting, "Go! Hood!"

Hood was also a Dreepy.

Draco's eye twitched. "How, Weasley?"

"One of my brothers spends more time with the dead and the living, and one works with dragons," Ron said. "How hard do you think it was for them to find a Dreepy?"

"If the other battlers could send out their Pokemon, please…" Hermione said bossily from the side.

Harry sent out his Eevee, Honor, who nodded at him, raring to go. Harry had taken some time to assess what moves Honor knew. While the Pokemon League occasionally imposed a four move limit for exhibition matches, in true combat situations, which wizards prepared for, no limit was imposed. However, battle science suggested that muggle Pokemon could truly master at most four moves at once, and that any others would be used with lower efficacy. He suspected that wizards didn't have to deal with such trivialities.

The most useful moves for this situation would probably be Bite and Swift for pure offense, though Ron had implied that Dreepy was a Ghost-type Pokemon, so Swift wouldn't be of any use against it. Honor also knew Growl and Helping Hand. Harry suspected those two moves might be useful, though he wasn't sure yet. There was of course also Quick Attack, but Harry wasn't sure he wanted to get within range of the other side's Pokemon, and Sand Attack, but there simply wasn't enough dirt to create much of a mess in the train car.

Crabbe, meanwhile, sent out a Krabby. Krabby was a river crab Pokemon, with an orange top shell and two large claws. Harry knew that Honor would have to avoid those claws, as they would be painful to be caught in.

"No matter," said Draco. He turned to the audience. "I will show you all that I, Draco of the Malfoys, am a truly gifted trainer by defeating Harry of the Potters and a Weasley. Thank you for coming to my public debut as a Pokemon trainer!"

He turned to Crabbe. "Crabbe, have your Krabby keep Eevee busy while Orion hits-and-runs."

Crabbe grunted. "Mini-me, Metal Claw on Eevee!"

Krabby scuttled forward at a moderate pace. Harry frowned. This was not really a threat. "Honor, use Quick Attack and dodge it," he said, a note of uncertainty in his voice. Maybe there was something more subtle to this strategy.

"Keep him engaged, Crabbe," Draco said. "Orion, use Astonish on Dreepy!"

Orion turned translucent, then vanished from view except for its bulbous yellow eyes. Harry turned to Ron in alarm. Astonish was a Ghost-type move, and the Ghost-type had the unfortunate weakness of being weak to attacks of its own type. If Draco's Dreepy Orion managed to land a hit, Ron's Dreepy Hood would be in trouble.

But Ron was smiling. "Hood, Sucker Punch," he said, just barely loud enough for Harry to hear.

Sucker Punch was… it wasn't a very nice move, but it was an effective one. It wasn't so much a formal technique as a state of mind. There was a sort of natural rhythm to most Pokemon battles, where each Pokemon struck and was struck in turn. Sucker Punch subverted that rhythm; the Pokemon that was using it primed itself mentally to strike slightly before that rhythm, catching the other off guard.

Harry turned his attention back to Honor. Honor was dodging the swift strikes of Crabbe's Krabby, but he didn't want his Eevee to get seriously injured before they even reached the gates of Hogwarts. There was probably a way to finish this battle quickly.

"Honor, use Helping Hand with Ron's Dreepy!" Harry said. Honor dashed away from Crabbe's Krabby, which began scuttling in pursuit. Harry estimated it would take at least thirty seconds for it to catch up, but thirty seconds was all he needed.

The bulbous yellow eyes of Draco's Dreepy drew closer and closer. Honor tensed, while Ron's Hood hovered there unassumingly. Doubt started to infect Harry's mind. Did it really make sense for a first-year wizard to have a Pokemon that knew Sucker Punch?

"Helping Hand's no use if your partner doesn't use a move," Draco taunted. "I guess fame isn't everything, Potter. Now, Orion, strike that—"

And it was right at that moment that Honor pounced and Hood lunged forward. They struck the space beneath the bulbous yellow eyes, and Draco's Dreepy flickered back into existence. It was thrown back, landing with a thump on the ground at Draco's feet. He rushed forward. "Orion, are you alright?"

The Dreepy stirred, but did not rise. Draco took out his Pokeball and recalled it. "Beginner's luck, I'm sure," he said. "Crabbe, I'm counting on you."

Ron caught Harry's eye, and nodded. The two of them were in sync now, and Crabbe's Krabby stood no chance. It collapsed to the ground, spent, in less than a minute.

"The battle is over," said Hermione. "The victors are Harry of the Potters and Ronald Weasley. Congratulations."

Draco glared across the battlefield at them. "I thought I was going to get a real fight when you challenged me, not some cheap tricks."

Harry was about to retort, but Ron beat him to it. "Cheap tricks? You mean strategy? If you think strategy is cheap tricks, we'll be seeing you in Gryffindor."

"This isn't over, Weasley, Potter," said Draco with a cruel smile. "I'll beat you into the mud next time."

"Bring it on," Harry said.

Draco gave a curt nod, his cold smile still upon his face, and then he left.

Hermione walked up to them, and she seemed to be mostly interested in Ron's Dreepy. "I have so many questions," she said. "Where did you find this? How did you teach it Sucker Punch? What is it, really?"

Ron smiled bashfully at her. "I have a lot of brothers. One of them's an archaeologist and one's a dragon tamer. They found a pair of these little guys on a joint project a few years back. After a few years they managed to get a few eggs out of them, and I got one of the first hatchlings. They're Dragon-types, but they match some fossils in the strata, and the way they move suggests that they're Ghost-types."

Hermione paused. "Are you sure about that? I thought most Ghost-types had… well, I thought you couldn't actually see the true form of most Ghost-types."

Harry had heard this as well. Ghost-types were powerful and incredibly useful in many battle situations, as many of them could become impervious to physical attacks or flying detritus. However, they were almost impossible for most people to train simply because they had odd effects on most people's senses. Many peoples' senses went haywire in the presence of a Ghost-type, and only a select few could bring out the full potential Ghost-type Pokemon as a result.

"Oh, are you muggle-born?" Ron said. "Most wizards and witches and people with enough magical heritage can perceive ghosts in full."

Hermione nodded. "I see. So, it's quite odd for a first-stage Pokemon to have a Priority move like Sucker Punch. Is it an Egg Move?"

"Wait a minute," Harry interjected. "Priority, Egg Move… those are battle science terms. I thought you hated battle science!"

"I dislike battle science because I understand it," Hermione said calmly. "I spent a few years focusing on theoretical battle science before I got tired of how… simplistic it was. My new research was a lot more promising, at least until I learned I was a witch. So, Ron? Your answer?"

"I'm pretty sure it's an Egg Move," said Ron. "That's when a Pokemon learns or inherits a technique from one of its parents?"

Hermione nodded.

"What do you mean, that you don't like battle science, because it's simplistic?" said Ron.

"Perhaps we should talk about this elsewhere," said Hermione, furtively glancing around. "It looks like some other students want to have a quick battle."

Once they had found a private compartment — Harry had tagged along because Ron was a rather cool Pokemon trainer — Hermione elaborated.

"Battle science was only formalised as a science a few decades," she said. "And its antecedents aren't so much Pokemon biology as Pokemon folklore. There's very little research being done on how Charmander produces its flames, but a lot of study dedicated to debunking myths about specific Pokemon. At its core, though, the assumptions of battle science rest on an unholy mixture of ad-hoc justifications for barely-verified folklore. Both the theory and the empirical methods fail. You can encode the odds of critical hits occurring in your battle simulations, but that still won't tell you the outcome of a match. And the idea that all Pokemon personalities can be defined by twenty-five distinct natures, each corresponding to a specific attribute of battle prowess— that reeks of just-so story, the sort of thing that's made up to explain a feature of the world that can't be explained in any other way."

"It gets results, though," said Harry. He was still a little annoyed at how she'd mocked how he'd described the bonds between humans and Pokemon. "Trainers who follow battle science principles do better in most official tournaments. Advances in battle science are useful, even if the field itself isn't true. Just because you don't agree with it—"

"Are you seriously telling me that you can distinguish between a Pokemon with a Calm nature and a Relaxed nature? Without being told beforehand which is which?" Hermione shot back. "For two fully trained specimens, over half of the differences in performance between the two could as easily be explained by nurture."

"So what did you study, then?" Ron said. "What ended up being more interesting than Battle Science?"

Hermione smiled at his interest. "I studied the integration of Pokemon into human societies and how that has affected our development as a civilisation. I was still in the thought experiment phase, because it's utterly impossible to find any human societies that didn't develop side-by-side with Pokemon for comparison, but the field of study often relies on comparative studies of how different regions have developed sociologically. My most out-there thought experiment is on what a world without Pokemon at all would look like. My best guess is that if there weren't Pokemon, ten years old wouldn't be considered a threshold of adulthood at all."

"At all? That's absurd," Harry said.

"Why would it be?" Hermione said. "Pokemon are equalizers. Age, gender, race… these don't mean a thing if you're good at training Pokemon. And religious justifications for adulthood are right out— almost every religion reveres a Pokemon in its cosmology, so who knows if religion would exist at all. But… I never accounted for the existence of magic in my thought experiments. If magic was real and Pokemon weren't, that would change how I'd expect the world to look entirely."

Harry certainly thought it was a nice dream. At ten years, most people were legally able to go on a Pokemon journey and begin serving their nation, or else otherwise consider how they would spend the rest of their lives. There were other thresholds of adulthood, too, of course — sixteen was the proper age for vehicle operation, and eighteen was generally considered full adulthood in every way that mattered — but to not be considered an adult at all at the age of ten? That was either horribly repressive, or a sign of a gentler world where children could be children.