"I want you three to make a Pokémon lecture!" Micheal announced.

"What?" I grumbled.

"So we know everything about the ones we have to fight!" He declared, slamming his paw on the ground. Okay, that was maybe a bit too much enthusiasm. Those berries did a number on him like an over-fuelled fireplace. "There's about fifty of them, right?"

"No, that's very wrong."

"All the more important!" Micheal said. "Do you see how out of the loop I am? Since we've got time here, it'd be fun to figure out what everyone can bring to the table."

"Yeah, having a campfire would be good," Valérie chipped in. "And we need the fire lion to know how to do that."

Oh, Micheal. We weren't about to do something this stupid.

—

"This is stupid", I groaned.

Indeed, we'd gotten stuck writing down everything in a small area full of dry, loose dirt. Lola, Valérie, and Micheal had left to do some more recon now that we had daylight. We couldn't use the pages Gab had brought over to write— no ink we could use, and no will to accidentally write over something important. Finding out that my stingers essentially became giant pencils against the dirt, I'd done most of the work— listing off all the types, which of them applied to the group, and which to watch out for. There were other facts, like abilities, and possible evolutions, but if half our group didn't understand types... we needed to cement in the basics first.

"How is this stupid?" Chloe asked, fluttering about. She'd had to fly around to get a good view of our makeshift PowerPoint slide.

"We don't even have internet," I shrugged. "It'd be easier if we could pull up Bulbapedia or something."

"I thought you were all the database you needed," Gab retorted.

Our eyes sprang to her, and Chloe couldn't help but laugh.

Yeesh!

"Well, we don't even have usable paper! We're writing in the dirt," I grumbled.

"We've been doing all right so far," Chloe pointed out. "Try to think of it as a cool memory exercise!"

Only Chloe could think of memory exercises as cool. With her being one year younger than all of us, I couldn't help but feel that she hadn't been hit with the general high school mood yet. I didn't know how else to explain it. I felt that this much enthusiasm for education was just waiting to be snuffed out in a year or so. She continued to suggest things to add to our rapidly diminishing writing space, hopping around the words already written down.

"For abilities, do we go the Mystery Dungeon route or the main game route?" Chloe asked. "I mean, since Mystery Dungeon applies so much, humans turning into Pokémon and all..."

"What's the difference?" I asked.

"For starters, they have different effects," she answered. "Also, a Pokémon has all their possible abilities at once."

"Not in Super," Gab pointed out. "Only before Gates, right?"

Of all the moments to realize I should've played any Mystery Dungeon game, now was a terrible time. I couldn't even place the abbreviations in my head. It probably didn't matter anyway. Gab might have called me out on ego, but she'd accurately represented the importance of my knowledge to this stupid presentation.

"Oh, come to think of Explorers, we should watch out for Oren berries!" Chloe gasped, Gab writing it down with her finger.

"Uh, yeah, duh, they should heal us a bit", I said, walking over to where Gab was writing. "We ran into them too early to properly use— hey, you spelt 'Oran' wrong."

"Oren. In Mystery Dungeon, there are decoy items that do the opposite of what they're supposed to," she said. "Oren berries give you damage."

"Don't get me started on Reviser seeds," Chloe laughed.

"Why would we be eating seeds in the first place?" I crossed my arms, the stingers sliding into a comfortable position for once.

"Stop being a grump," Chloe whined. "This is a valid point."

"Yeah, but I'll never hear the end of it if something's wrong in here."

Chloe gave Gab a questioning look, which she returned with an eye roll. As much as I hate to admit it, that was the one that shut me up.

Whatever game we were supposed to be in, if one specific game at all, it didn't matter. Minor things like learnsets we couldn't even look up were not crucial to our quest. Only getting home was. I think we all knew that the only way was through.

Presentations shouldn't need to be that important.

"We come bearing gifts!" Exclaimed Lola, right as Valérie dropped all the berries she was carrying, letting them tumble on the grass. How Lola got her to go along with it, I'd never know.

"Oh, good!" I said. I'd spotted a few Persim in there.

With the group back together, the presentation was underway. Close to the presentation area, there was a old, moss-covered fallen tree next to its flat stump. That became the makeshift couch, as people leaned on it to listen.

"Are we ready to get this over with?" I asked.

We hadn't rehearsed, so this was going to be a fun one. Lola and Valérie shrugged, while Micheal gave a fervent nod. "Yeah. Go ahead."

Lola agreed. "Let's learn some Pokémons."

I took a deep breath. "Ok, first off, Pokémon- or any Pokémon name, for that matter- stays the same when it's plural."

"We really came here for a grammar lesson?" Lola whispered to Valérie.

I sighed. "No, I'm just getting rid of a few pet peeves along the way. You know, as a bonus."

Valérie gave me a look, crossing her arms.

"I know you and Chloe are our Pokémon encyclopedias", she started, overlooking our Emolga classmate, "but I'm not sure I want to leave my future in the hands of the guy who didn't even do his part of the 1984 PowerPoint."

Oh. Oh, of course she'd bring that up. "It was one time!"

"Yeah, the one time a presentation counted for 30% of our grade," she grumbled. "Maybe do your work instead of spending two of our five minutes going on a tangent on time travel."

"That was a thematic comparison, thank you very much, and Julia agreed to that bit! Two against one!"

"Two against one doesn't matter when the book isn't even remotely about time travel—"

"Look, can we stop piling on him?" Micheal talked over the growing laughter from everyone else. "This really isn't what we should be concerned with."

"Also, you should see I did most of this presentation," I shot in, showing off my writing stinger that still had a cover of dirt on.

Valérie rolled her eyes and sighed, leaning more of her weight on the fallen tree. This was going to be a long one. Thankfully, Micheal made himself a good moderator.

There were a few hiccups along the way (for example, Valérie adamantly refused to believe Ghost was a type until even Gab backed me up), but we mostly got our point across. I think. The important thing was to establish the group's possible abilities, different stats and how they might apply to real life... and our massive weakness against Rock. We were two not very effective Flying types, one Bug, and one Fire. That left one neutral Dark, and one super effective Fighting type... with garbage defence. We'd need to sort that out when moves came into play.

Then came individual Pokémon species. Thankfully, everyone could wrap their head around the simple concept of a giant bee and they'd seen me evolve from a Kakuna, so we started with that one. Emolga was also easy. We just had to say "flying Pikachu" and everyone got the gist of it.

Micheal, as a Litleo, already had the general idea. Since he was a Pokémon that might have the Rivalry ability, though, we'd have to account for it later. Lola surprisingly knew enough about Absol, at least for someone who'd never played a Pokémon game. What didn't surprise me was her gushing about her newfound ability to predict disasters.

That left Valérie and Chloe.

"I'm glad edgelord over there is happy with her superpower," Valérie said, "but what am I even supposed to be?"

"A weird gnome?" Lola smirked.

"Oh, a gnome?" Chloe exclaimed, with utmost sincerity. "That would explain a lot."

"... That was a joke, pal," Lola stated.

"Oh."

I spoke up. "Valérie, no matter what it's based off of, you're a Meditite. The only thing in its Pokédex entry states that it trains really hard and eats one berry a day."

"That doesn't seem efficient. I'll keep eating, thanks."

"Gotcha."

"And Chloe?" She asked.

"I'm a Swablu now, but soon enough I'll be a super cool dragon," she giggled, with an uncharacteristic violent glint in her eye.

"Wait, why would Pokémon have a monster who's not supposed to eat?" Valérie reprised. It was like she'd just now heard the paraphrased Pokédex entry. "Where's my energy supposed to come from?"

"I don't know, maybe you eat auras?" I said. "You're a psychic—"

"That doesn't make sense. They're not tangible."

"It was a hypothesis, leave me alone!" I grumbled.

Gab raised her paw. "I think you should eat what you can, but maybe fasting is what makes the psychic powers come? If that makes sense?"

She barely had time to look away before Valérie started to rant again.

"I don't believe you! How is that any more logical?"

"Oh my God, Valérie!" Micheal snapped.

The forest fell silent, and Micheal's ears and tail drooped a few seconds in. Evidently, that came out louder than he'd planned. As the one well-mannered guy of the group, it was a bit weird to hear him shout like that. I mean, not as weird as it would be for Gab, but close.

He sighed. "We can come back to that later. We should be done with the Pokémon stuff for now, right?"

"We haven't covered moves at all—" I started.

"Great, we'll do it later then!" He smiled. His ears were back up. "Let's talk about survival skills. That's also important, right?"

His blatant attempt to change the subject was overlooked and forgiven. We did kind of need a break. Burnout with this group hit like a truck. I nabbed a Persim berry from the pile and sat against the stump, glaring at my now useless dirt PowerPoint.

"Okay!" He started. "Chloe, we obviously have your star trick for time, so I assume you know more things like that?"

She nodded. "YES! I have one for the day too. If the sun's over there, we have about three hours of daylight left."

Even Lola was baffled by that one. "Excuse me, what? How do you know that one? Can you point north too?"

"No..." she admitted.

"That's a start though! Any other skills we should know about?" Micheal asked.

Chloe raised her wing. "Oh! I think Valérie speaks a bit of French..."

This was answered with a few snickers, and I piled onto the past week's sarcasm.

"Fantastic. If all we need to beat the big bad dungeon boss is a speech in flowery language, we'll call on you. Count me out, though."

Micheal shot me a look. I understood it as a warning. I avoided his stare and finished my Persim berry.

"Let's talk about shelter," Valérie said. "Last night was fine, and I guess we can do with no fire because it isn't that cold, but it's gonna be tough when there's rain."

"We can make a lean-to," Micheal said. "We'll add that to the list."

He padded over to the dirt drawing pad and swished away the entire section on species. I got up. If he was going to destroy my creation, I might as well have control on rebuilding it.

I wrote down more and more suggestions, including dry wood for a fire and Persim fronds for... something. I didn't remember what; Gab had suggested it and I couldn't hear her clearly.

This was just turning into summer camp.

The sky had started to get the slightest hint of yellow when we finally got to the moves discussion. Thankfully, no one had desecrated that section. I made my way through the pawprint-infested area, sick of arguments over the drinkability of the nearby stream's water, and pointed to the movesets list.

"We're talking moves now," I said, trying desperately to clear the cloud of boredom in my head. "Survival's fine but we're not going to use bad water to beat up a Pokémon."

"Yeah, sure," Micheal replied.

Chloe hopped to my side shortly after Gab walked over. "Muddy Water's bad water, and that works."

"Fantastic, Chloe, you see any Water Pokémon here?"

She huffed, and Gab told the others to come over. Again, the slide was already ruined beyond repair, so everyone could walk over anything that wasn't the movesets list.

When talking movesets list, I mean a rough one. Most of the other stuff was written down fine from memory, but this? Let them call me a fake fan for not knowing movesets for a potential of nine random different species of Pokémon. Ten if you count Kakuna, but that one was over with and the easiest one.

"Okay," I started, tracing circles around a keyword. "This has the same basic idea as types. A move can be any type, and you're not limited to attacks of your own type."

"Yeah," Gab agreed. "Flash is Normal-type even though I'm not."

So far so good. There wasn't even any feedback from a certain Meditite.

I reprised. "Of course, there's different kinds of attacks, like physical and special. They're more like melee versus long-range, the only real difference is whether or not you make contact."

Chloe chipped in. "Well, that and they rely on different stats."

I continued. "Yeah, I guess all species deal physical and special damage differently, and deal with it differently too."

Lola jumped up. "Got it. Now, what can we actually do?"

Chloe landed on Lola's head, and she surprisingly didn't shake the Swablu off. "Oh, gosh, there's so much! Micheal can spit fire, Valérie can punch rocks to rubble, I can do some flying attacks, you can slash at stuff with your claws..."

"I'm gonna poison the enemy," I grinned. "And probably shoot some needles at them, or something."

"Um..." Gab raised her hand. "I don't think we're quite there yet..."

"Yeah..." Chloe admitted, hopping off Lola. "We'll be lucky if we can manage a Quick Attack."

"How fast it that?" Valérie cut in. She'd put on a smile I was kind of scared of.

"Blurry, at least?" I shrugged. "I don't know, and you can't do it anyway. It's probably just Gab. Maybe Lola."

"Rolling around at the speed of blur," Lola laughed. "That's stupid. I like the sound of it."

"That's all fine and good," Valérie moped, "but how do we even access moves?"

We did have one person who'd executed a move so far. All eyes turned to Gab, her ears drooping from the sheer eye contact.

"I don't know," she shrugged. "I just tried it."

"Elaborate. You mean focusing on it?" Micheal asked.

"No? Yes? Maybe?" She stammered. "It was like going on autopilot, but I had to find the button to start."

"My theory is that it's like innate muscle memory," Micheal said. "Like a reflex we have because it's in our new brains. We just have to figure out how to tap into those."

"I did learn to fly fast," Chloe bragged. "It might've been that instead of logistics."

"All right," he said. "We just need to listen to instincts, then. Gab, go try a Quick Attack."

"Um—"

Valérie sighed. "Yeah, yeah, we'll hold the notes for you. Now go!"

Gab walked to the stump and closed her eyes, focus intense on her face. I could practically see her thought process, her mind repeating our hypothesis over and over. Finally, she threw herself in a pirouette and turned her back to us. Her tail, meanwhile, swished furiously against the dirt. The sight was so calculated yet pointless that I couldn't suppress a snort— but even Lola had had the decency to stay quiet. I couldn't help it when I didn't have anything to block my mouth with. It still earned me a look of disappointment from Micheal.

"What move do you make of this?" He asked, ignoring the sight of Gab three seconds from a full-blown embarrassment-fuelled anxiety attack.

I thought for a second, then grinned when I realized just how low of a level we all were. "I think it's Tail Whip."