Molly had enjoyed hiking in her last life, there was something about taking a weekend, or even a week and seeing the natural beauty all around her. To stand at the top of the world and make a cup of tea, to arrive at the hut at long last and watch the faces of those around her as they ate their sad pasta and store bought sauces while she cooked steak, lasagna, or a dozen other memorable delicious meals. Molly had liked cooking in weird locations, there was a challenge to it she enjoyed, and again the looks on some people's faces was just fantastic.

Hiking had a hobby, a challenge, an enormous money sink, good exercise and yet, Molly didn't enjoy it anymore in this new world.

The views were still great, it was the wildlife that bothered her she decided.

New Zealand famously had no native mammals aside from a few species of bats, the most dangerous animal you could encounter would be a wild pig or a deer. There was a confidence that she stood at the top of the food chain, that the only danger around her was her own stupidity, other people and natural disasters like earthquakes, flooding rivers or landslides.

"It isn't the same anymore."

Molly had yet to feel well and truly scared of a Pokémon, barring her first experiences way back when but there was a tension to her that natives didn't have. No, tension was the wrong word, Molly was simply uncomfortable with the idea she was no longer at the top of the food chain. Perhaps she could take a Starly in a fight, but could anyone take on a second or third evolution Pokémon without one of their own? She wasn't sure.

Molly always thought the sheer focus on the Pokémon Trainer career wasn't just a bizarre cultural trait, but instead something that had been carefully cultivated. The Pokémon world was surprisingly safe considering the super powered animals running around everywhere, but when Pokémon decided to start killing people? Things go from 0 to 100 real fast, Gyarados were a prime example, there were dozens of historical records of that one species killing thousands.

It was these thoughts that ran rampant through her mind as she walked, as the Pokémon surrounding her, from the Bug-types to the numerous Flying-types in the woods around her watched her on her journey. There wasn't any intent behind it, just curiosity but still. She was uncomfortable knowing that her safety in this world would always be defined by the loyalty of the creatures she would surround herself in, otherwise it would be the whims of every Pokémon around her that decided her fate.

"Dus..."

The Ghost was tugging at her sleeve as if he had heard her thoughts. He refused to come out in public unless she tempted him with pizza crusts but out here? Miles from civilization, he happily enjoyed his time out of Molly's shadow. It was nice.

"Duskull."

She knew that tone, that look, the little ghoul wanted to be carried.

"I thought you were building up your endurance, young man."

She said sternly, putting her hands on hips in that classic teacher pose. Dante just sighed and raised one hand to wipe at his brow, a pointless gesture since Ghosts didn't need to eat, drink or sweat. He must have learnt it from her. She sighed, as if put out.

"Very well then, just this once."

It was a complete lie, both sides knew the truth, she loved holding Dante. It was pretty hard to put into words what exactly he felt like, frankly it felt like he wasn't all there which might be technically true but he was very squishable and isn't that what matters? Adorable isn't a world typically applied to ghosts but Dante was the exception.

"I suppose we have a busy day tomorrow."

He bobbed his body and made a noise of agreement. It was almost unbearably adorable.

After three days, they had started to get the hang of setting up the tent in a reasonable time frame, Dante had started to become vaguely competent. It was odd to Molly's hiking sensibilities to have a tent with such head height, she could actually stand upright and wasn't that an outlandish thought on a hike. The A-frame tent had headroom and a fairly spacious floor plan, it didn't have a floor but Molly had tarps if need be and she had been given it along with a light wooden bed frame so she wasn't hugely worried about mud. One of the officers had given it to her; it had been sitting in storage for three years after the officer had finished her journey and settled down in Daybreak Town.

She'd have slept under a tarp in this weather but the tent would be a lifesaver in heavy weather and she wanted her and Dante to be able to throw it up quickly if need be.

She had purchased a chair and table for herself, the chair was the stereotypical director's chair, and the table was a fold out frame where you slotted the pieces of wood to form the table surface. It was nothing less than a small miracle that these along with the tent and bed frame fitted in the rectangular Storage Cube she had been given but they did... If you were willing to spend a bit of time shoving it all in there.

As Dante pulled out the sleeping bag and pillow, and set about making the bed, Molly refused to travel without a pillow in both lives, good sleep was important. While Dante finished the final touches of the tent, she set herself to preparing dinner. Food in the Pokémon world was weirdly familiar, you could find dishes that Molly knew shouldn't exist without the historical contexts that led to their creation. Which bothered her when she thought about it, she wasn't sure if it was just pure chance or evidence of more people in her position. However that little thought had been massively overshadowed by something that bothered Molly even more, people ate Pokémon. Molly had gone through an existential crisis about the whole thing when she first came to. Well, she had gone through quite a few existential crises, hell some were still ongoing like her current age debate but the eating Pokémon one was one she had to solve rather urgently unlike the age debate she was still having to this day.

"Not the time for existential crises Molly."

She had a gas stove but again, she wanted to practice her bushcraft. She was nearly a decade out of practice, plus there was a charm to cooking by fire. She began shaving slivers of wood off the dry sticks Dante had gathered to make a pile of kindling and tinder. She had fire starters she made from cotton buds but it hadn't rained in a few days so the wood was dry and she could make a nest of shavings to start the fire, it would save her from making more firestarters when she got back to civilization.

"Dante, can you dig a channel again?"

Placing the kindling she had made in the channel he dug, she lit it aflame by dropping a match into the nest she had made. She didn't use a Magnesium fire starter, she had always seen those as a gimmick. She had plenty of matches and a few lighters spread amongst her cubes and bag, if she lost all of those, she still would have Dante and his improving Will-O-Wisp for fire. If she lost Dante, well she was screwed in more than one way.

She quickly fed the growing flame the slivers of wood she carved and progressively added more fuel to the flame. There was a simple pleasure to creating a fire but she delegated it to Dante's eager hands so she could set about prepping her ingredients and placing them into the pot, potatoes and leek diced, a handful of mushrooms quartered, some salt and then a bit of water. She'd need to wait before the fire had enough coals for her to cook her meal without burning it so she set it aside and sat down on her camp chair, leant back and watched the sun set over the hills.

Molly hadn't gone full vegan, or even vegetarian, for a few reasons, mostly because she didn't have to, everyone else had. Pokémon Rights groups had a lot of weight in this world compared to what she remembered from Animal Rights groups on Earth, it was a vegetarian's wet dream basically. They had put an end to Pokémon being eaten decades before Molly had been born, along with a dozen other conservation goals like safeguards to prevent unethical breeding or overproduction of Pokémon Products like MooMilk, the establishment of National Parks.

Not every Pokémon had been spared the plate, Magikarp and many other fish species weren't considered sentient enough to qualify, which in Molly's opinion wasn't wrong. She had been happy to eat pigs and cows, and they were significantly smarter than every Magikarp she had ever met and she had gone out of her way to confirm that fact. It was widely regarded if a fish was dumb enough to get stuck in a net, it was dumb enough to eat. Additionally when the Pokémon Rights movement was finally gaining momentum and laws began to change to ban the consumption of Pokémon, some reasonable people had stood and said "My Pokémon is an obligate carnivore, what the hell am I supposed to feed them now?" Thus Magikarp had been left to the literally chopping board when compromises of getting rid of your Pokémon that eat Pokémon, and feeding them dead humans had failed to gain traction. Strangely the public wasn't too enthusiastic about those.

The other exception which had sparked debates in even Molly's living memory, was lab grown meat. It had started being developed before her second birth but had successfully reached the point it could be commercially available to everyone when she was about five. Many Pokémon Rights groups had moved to limit the sale of lab grown meat stating that beyond ethically feeding Pokémon, it filled a market that didn't need to be filled. The position wasn't completely unworkable but they had messed up hard when they assumed everyone agreed with them. When chefs had come out of the woodwork arguing that with proper legislation framework, they could bring back traditional and cultural dishes they had been unable to create for decades, they had framed it as reclaiming their history now that it was ethical to do so. Their opposition didn't have the tact or nuance of their predecessors who had succeeded decades ago, failing to prevent it and a culinary renaissance had kicked off.

"No meat tonight though, better to save what we have left for later."

Molly had moved the pot over the fire and waited for the ingredients inside to cook before adding a cup and a half artificial Farfetch'd stock and two half heads of broccoli and cauliflower cut into little chunks, stem included and two spoonfuls of flour. She stoked the fire and gave the pot a good mix. Gratin was a generic name for a dish with cheese and breadcrumbs on top but it was the name her first mother had called this dish so she stuck to it. Once the pot had reached boiling, she moved it further away from the flame, it needed to simmer now, she'd move it back over the coals when the fire had died down.

"Tomorrow we're hopefully going to get a new teammate Dante, you're okay with that right?"

The Ghost perked up and only nodded eagerly, she had asked before but his aversion to adding more Ghosts-types to the team made her wonder. His loyalty and devotion was frankly a little disconcerting in its intensity since she wasn't sure how she had earned it when every other Ghost-type Pokémon was kinda a dick at the best of times.

"Long day tomorrow, are you sure you don't want anything to eat?"

He shook his body, since he didn't really have a neck. She wasn't surprised, he always refused the offer of food, Ghosts didn't need to eat food like other Pokémon, instead existing off more esoteric sources of food that researchers still struggled to understand but she kept trying, wanting something other than pizza crusts and bread to reward him with.

She leant back into her chair and started to watch the fire, her dinner needed to simmer for twenty minutes before she stirred in the sour cream, and then added cheese and breadcrumbs over the top. She'd have Dante grill the cheese and breadcrumbs using Will-O-Wisp, he was starting to get good at the Move and she had him practicing controlling the heat it outputted, she was hoping she could get him to simulate an oven with enough practice.

He loved fresh bread the most, she was hoping she could teach him how to make it and get him to bake it while they're out in the wilderness.

"Oh god why?"

Three hours of progressing up the mountain, only to hit another dead end. She wasn't about to start rock climbing up the cliff face before her, that's why she was here, to catch a Pokémon so she'd never have to. She sat down on a flat rock and pulled out the ziplock bag of maps she had. She had spares in a cube but it was good to keep these things on hand.

The plan had been simple: head to Roost Point, rock up to a gathering of Altaria and Swablu and announce her intentions, give her sales pitch, fight a few battles with Swablu to prove her strength, and leave with a Swablu who chose to join her. Sure Molly could just catch one of the Swablu around here but that was fucken dangerous. If she was going to do that, she would have caught any random Swablu off the literal street, not travel miles on foot and up a decent sized mountain to catch one in front of it's entire accumulation and expect no response from said group. She had woken up before dawn and left just as the sun was starting to peek over the horizon so she had plenty of time before the sunset, no that wasn't the problem.

The problem with her plan was she was starting to find out why the accumulation of Altaria and Swablu made their home here, the area was as far as she could tell, impossible to reach by foot. Sure the maps she had found looked like there was a smooth slope up the mountain if you look at the contour lines but the gaps between contour lines were further apart than she was used to or the map she had was just bad. This was the second dead end she had come across thinking there was a path and she couldn't see any other way up by foot on this map. It was time to take a risk.

"Dante, I think you're going to have to carry me up the cliff face."

Dante gave her a look, silently asking if she was sure. Molly nodded, and received an earnest salute. She packed the map back into her bag and pulled her raincoat out. It wasn't raining but she brought one that served as a windbreaker as well. This world had some fantastic clothing for hiking and you could get a discount if you were a new trainer between those two she managed to find some fairly good gear.

They had practiced Dante carrying Molly before so they quickly started ascending with Molly being bridal carried with her bag held on her lap and her glasses firmly in her hand, just to sate her paranoid thoughts of something falling as they went up. Molly kept her eyes firmly on the cliff face instead of the increasing distance between her and the ground. She had what she considered a reasonable fear regarding heights.

The rugged rock face in front of her was eye-catching, what with its blurry rocky.. Rocks. And those rocks there, and wow if you look over there? Is that? It's more rocks! Molly desperately kept her eyes on anything except the now very distant ground, like that rapidly approaching blob of blue and white.

"Oh sh- We got incoming!"

This was exactly what she was worried about happening, something attacking them while Dante literally had his hands full.

Molly squinted, closing her right eye so she could see clearer, her eyes had different prescriptions and the left one was basically normal. She relaxed a tiny bit seeing that it was only a Swablu and waited for it to get closer, it was absolutely aiming for them.

"Down now!"

The way Ghost-type levitation or at least Duskull's worked was pretty simple. Ghosts innately had the ability to apply force in any direction, they had control over how much force they applied at any time and could push themselves to move at speeds they couldn't normally, like Dante was doing now to both pull his own weight of 22kg and Molly's weight of 56kg upwards. Molly might not have known that you had to practice Moves to learn new ones, but that didn't mean she wasted all the time she had already spent training Dante. Once she had a reasonable idea how Dante's flight worked, she spent hours making him lift weights with his levitation so he could push past his limits for much longer, and it worked.

They plummeted.

No longer having to work against gravity and applying all of his force to pull them down, they all but vanished and the Swablu's dive passed over them harmlessly. Molly's stomach rebelled as Dante halted their descent and she forced herself to look around. After quickly taking in the area around her, she did some quick thinking. Dante was extremely fast for his species thanks to Molly's training but she had never once had him practice slowing down, if they kept going at the same speed from before they'd slam into the ground before Dante halted their velocity, which was normally a good thing since Dante could just phase and halt his velocity underground where only a few Pokémon could target him. If they went slower, the Swablu who she could already see turning around would get one or two more swings at them and it'll be harder to dodge.

Molly made a mental note to put Dante through the beep test and made her choice.

"Put me down over there."

She pointed at the outcropping she was reasonably sure could take her weight. Dante only hesitated for a moment before quickly moving her onto the ledge a few meters down. It took her weight and he turned around and promptly socked the diving Swablu in the face, the telltale signs of Astonish being used seemed to have little impact but the force of the blow certainly made an impact, the Swablu had practically ran into Dante's fist. They both fell back a bit, Dante glanced at Molly while the Swablu flapped its wings to regain stability.

"Normal type! Use Confuse Ray for now and keep close to it."

They had countermeasures for Normal-types, it was certainly annoying but she didn't come this far without fighting a Normal-type before. She put her glasses she had clutched in her fist this entire time and instantly regretted it. It was so much easier to ignore the height when she was panicking and her vision was crap. That said she saw what she was looking for, the round object laying right next to her bag. She took a breath, steeled her nerves and started carefully moving closer to it without getting too close to that edge…

She grabbed it and stepped back to her earlier safe position and waited for the moment to strike. Timing was everything with battles. The two had made a few exchanges of blows already, the Swablu was faster but once it started moving it was practically locked into that direction for a few seconds, Dante had more range of motion. He shifted to the right, dodging a Peck attack and went in closer, the Swablu realized it wasn't going to land a Peck and changed tactics. Dante reeled back from a Disarming Voice at nearly point blank range, canceling his Confuse Ray. She had fought Swablu before but this once was easily the most aggressive she had seen, constantly going in for melee attacks instead of the mid-range attackers she was used to. That said both sides were right now recovering from each other's Moves, so Molly took a step forward, shifted her body weight and threw.

It was a good throw, Molly had a lot of practice from throwing tennis balls at Dante, he learnt to dodge and she learnt how to throw stuff, which would help if she needed to throw a Pokeball. All that training paid off beautifully, the rock struck the Swablu right above the left eye and bounced off falling down to the ground below. Dante who had recovered faster and had not been pelted with a rock in the face dove for it, catching it in his hand.

"Grapple it!"

He roared and charged the Swablu, grasping one of it's wings and holding it tight he began laying into the Swablu with his other hand, bludgeoning it with the rock. Dante might not know any Moves that could damage Normal-types yet but he could beat something up with a rock. Molly's tactics were efficient. The Swablu struggled but it couldn't form the type-energy needed to use a Move under Dante's relentless assault.

Molly began to relax as she watched it, her nerves vanishing with the certainty that came from watching a would-be attacker getting pummeled. She still wanted to get off this bloody ledge though. The rock crumpled in Dante's hand and the ghost looked to her for what to do next, the Swablu was clearly unconscious at this point, Molly opened her mouth to give an order and-

Hesitated.

Molly pulled herself up a large boulder in her path, there had been a track, a whole two days back. Now she was bush bashing or whatever the mountain equivalent was and making her own trail through the wilderness, which wasn't actually as bad as she had expected. She'd done some bushbashing in New Zealand but both the plant life and animal life were vastly different here and it was much easier than she was used to. Her old homeland's native bush was both extraordinarily dense, if you went off the trail you could encounter such a dense bush it was practically a wall, even in the alpine. Here the plant life was a bit more mellow, and more importantly there were large Pokémon who could easily push their way through the thicker bits and create paths for others like Molly to use.

It was a bit nerve racking to follow game trails that included tracks from Pokémon like Ursaring but she had a schedule to keep and she was already two days ahead of her best estimate thanks to using them, which helped calm her down. Something she needed after that last fiasco, she was still frustrated about the whole thing.

Which only resurfaced when the Swablu Dante had been carrying up the mountain for the last ten minutes started to come to. Molly had used one of her very expensive Potions on the bird so it should be fine, if very sore. Potions, like a lot of things she remembered from the games, were pretty new and had only hit the market half a decade ago. They were pretty expensive however and she left with only five of them.

She fixed it up and took a closer look at the Swablu, it was clearly female and it's small blue feathers on its body were all messed up down the side of its body where Dante had broken a rock beating it, spraying a potion on it had done nothing to fix the now broken feathers. However she couldn't really see any damage where she hit it with a rock though which made her doubt her 'I could beat a Starly' theory.

The Swablu had finally noticed Molly glaring at her and let out a quiet meep.

"Starting to realize you fucked up huh?"

Molly sat down on a mossy rock and pulled her thermos out. She'd boiled some water to make porridge this morning, poured the rest into the thermos and tossed a teabag in. That was a few hours ago, the tea was lukewarm and she had never removed the teabag. Needless to say it was perfect.

"We treated your wounds and didn't leave you for dead even though you tried to kill us, you absolute piece of shit. We didn't go after you, we didn't do shit to you and you still tried to kill us for what?"

She took a swig of her tea, never once breaking eye contact with the Swablu, Dante floating behind her, silently giving her support. The Swablu was clearly in pain, her beady eyes had been watering from the start and it had only gotten worse when she started shouting at her.

"You're lucky we didn't drop you off that cliff like you tried to do to us. Kindly fuck off and never try that shit again on anyone."

She watched as the Swablu made pitiful noises as if she was apologizing before realizing Molly had no interest in hearing it. The bird jumped into the air and flapped her wings, once twice and seized up in pain, before promptly flopping over and falling flat on her face, startling a laugh out of Molly. She tried again, fell once more and then turned to look at the two of them with a sad look on her face.

"Oh goddammit."

Author's Note: Took a holiday and was not going to write on my phone. Also writing without any characters for Molly to bounce off messed me up a bit.

Next chapter should be significantly faster to come out.

Swablu get?