-Chapter Three-

[The next morning]

If anyone asked, I was shivering from the nonexistent cold. Definitely not from going off the family's grounds for first time since they brought me home. At least I'd convinced Paul to carry me. Well, less convinced and more he grew annoyed with my slow pace. If anything though it was his pace that was absurd, not mine. He was walking through medium-length grass without checking ever-so-carefully ahead of him, perhaps with a ten-foot pole. There could be all sorts of dangerous, tiny pokemon hiding anywhere in the grass.

Thankfully we made it to the schoolhouse without getting devoured by some sort of vicious land-carvanha. Unfortunately that meant we were alive to meet the stares of strangers. I did my best to hide inside my bushy tail, but I kept one eye peeking out to search for danger.

More than a few of the students stared and a few girls tried to pet me but thankfully Paul's signature glare scared them away. He was less successful in fending off Mrs. Young.

"Oh my, who's this cute little creature."

"She's an Eevee."

"No name yet? All that fluffy fur, she must be barely more than a kit. You just bring her home?"

"She's five."

"Oh. She's nearly as old as you are."

Paul met her silent question with yet more silence until she gave up and left him alone. I wondered for a moment if it was strange that I didn't have a name. It wasn't like there were any other eevees around the house to get me mixed up with. There were too many other new things to process though to spend much time on the matter.

No one else sat with Paul which meant I had more than enough room to sit on top of his table. It was handy in that I'd be able to see his paper as he worked, but I worried I'd be reprimanded for lying on the furniture. Though, perhaps that was a foolish thought here. I wasn't the only pokemon up on the tables. One classic nerd-boy with glasses had a bug on his hand. It looked like a worm with a spike on top of its head. Unlike caterpie, it firmly fell into the category of being more creepy than edible. It didn't help that it was chittering in some strange, possibly demon-spawned bug dialect rather than poke-Common.

Besides the bug, one girl had a particularly feisty magikarp sharing the table with her. It was none too pleased with being out of the water. In between gasping for breath it had a barely intelligible rant going about how some day it was going to become big and strong and conquer and/or destroy all of humanity. I hoped she'd just brought the magikarp along to eat for lunch or that monologue could get seriously distracting.

I switched my focus to the board before the ill-tempered fish could affect my sanity.

[Later that day]

"Eev…" That was intense. Was this really what humans did all day? No wonder Paul wanted me to do his homework so that he'd have time in his days for games. To think that he had to suffer through hours and hours of being taught things.

I supposed learning wasn't the worst thing in the world. It was sort of neat to learn human tricks. Tough though. It was a good thing I already had some practice thinking with human words because a lot of what Mrs. Young talked about didn't translate easily to poke-Common.

At least recess was unequivocally fun. The slide particularly, except for that time the plump boy nearly flattened me when I lingered too long at the bottom. Maybe tomorrow I'd figure out how to work the swings. I'd watched a trio of girls at it for a while but so far the exact method still eluded me.

I hoped I could catch a quick nap before doing Paul's homework. I might've just sat on a desk most of the day but cramming everything I'd heard and seen into my brain was exhausting. It might've been one thing if it was just math but apparently he had to learn all sorts of things in school. And, apparently, so did I. My duties were expanding to include doing all his homework, not just math or coloring.

"Eev." I rolled next to the couch. Maybe if I stayed perfectly still I could pretend I was a stray couch cushion for a few days until he forgot about this whole school nonsense.

I snorted. Paul was far too stubborn for that. I was going to school for as long as he was. I could only hope that wouldn't be very long. Humans couldn't torture their young with school for too very long, could they?

"Veevy," I grumbled, getting back on my feet. I couldn't relax enough to nap with all the homework hanging over my head. Better to get some of it out of the way first.

One thing was sure, it was definitely easier to do the math homework after having sat through the accompanying lesson. It took more time to carefully shape the numbers so that they were readable than it did to figure out what the answers were. After that I moved onto some familiar and perhaps even relaxing coloring. It wasn't until I reached the reading and writing homework that my stomach dropped.

It wasn't all gloom and doom. I'd learned how a lot of new words were spelled today, including how the 'sh' sound worked to spell 'fish'. I thought I knew enough to hopefully avoid the dreaded frowny-face sticker… as soon as I spent like a million hours learning how to write letters that didn't look like little scribbles.

This was going to be a long night.