"Everyone's getting bigger teams now," Bonnie said. "Except me, but I've got a team that's already bigger than it should be… unless Dedenne counts as Clemont's and not mine?"

She looked confused. "Actually, if Dedenne counts as Clemont's, then he has half his team being the Type he's supposed to be! Which is a big step. But if Dedenne counts as mine then it's still just one Electric type for him."

"I'm not sure if Serena is supposed to have a Type, but if she is then she's not worked out what it is yet," Ponyta said. "Actually, I wonder if we could try and work it out based on her name? How often do Pokémon trainers who specialize in a Type have it in their names?"

"Not all the time," Ash replied. "Otherwise I'd be a Fire-type trainer, or maybe a Grass-type specialist. But more often than you'd think!"

"You could also be a Pokémon Professor," Pikachu said. "Which I think has come up before."

"Maybe Serena's meant to be Psychic?" Clemont asked. "That's what Fennekin would be if she evolved, at least."

"Oh, good point!" Ponyta agreed. "That seems like a working hypothesis for now."

Next to Clemont, Luxio shook his head in wonder. "This is… nothing like I imagined it would be travelling with you," he admitted. "I don't think I ever thought through what it would be like actually travelling with you, but… this is definitely not it."

He flicked his tail. "The fact you can understand me, for a start…"

"It's something I've had to get used to, as well," Clemont said. "I'm doing my best, and I hope you let me know if I make a mistake."

He rubbed the back of his neck. "Goodness knows Chespin does…"

Luxio sniggered.

"So what Pokémon do you have, then, Ash?" he asked. "If you're not a Fire-type or Grass-type specialist – I've seen your Pikachu, obviously, and I think Lokoko is yours? Is Absol as well?"

He looked around. "What about that canine Pokémon there?"

"Arf," Zygarde contributed. "Woof is passé."

"No, Absol's technically wild, but I am an Absol on special occasions," Ash replied. "Zygarde's travelling with me until we get back to Kalos!"

Luxio went cross-eyed. "But we're in Kalos," he protested weakly. "How does that even work?"

"Surprisingly well," Zygarde answered.

"And I've got the most Flying-types, but, actually it might be better if I go down the list!" Ash suggested. "Let's go in reverse order, so, the most recent Pokémon I got is Hawlucha, who I think is currently Hawlucha: Mysterious Stranger."

Hawlucha sprang out of his Pokéball, to the accompaniment of a flamenco guitar riff, and landed on Zygarde's back where he struck a pose.

"Right," Luxio said. "I've never met a Hawlucha before, so that's my first."

"Then there's Fletchinder, and Froakie," Ash went on. "Fletchinder's a Flying-type and also a Fire-type, of course, and Froakie is pure Water-type but if he evolves he'll be Water and Dark type."

"If?" Luxio repeated. "Not when?"

"Pikachu," Pikachu said, lazily.

"Oh right," Luxio realized. "Sorry, it's just an assumption sometimes that a trainer will evolve their Pokémon if the Pokémon can evolve at all."

"Pikachu," Pikachu replied in a conciliatory fashion.

Luxio nearly tripped over his paws.

"Have I stopped understanding Pokémon?" he demanded, stumbling a few steps and picking himself up. "What?"

"I'm not normally much of a prankster, but given who's on my team I have to keep my paw in," Pikachu explained.

Hawlucha was still posing.

"Next is Giratiny!" Ash continued. "He's-"

"Sorry, did I mishear you?" Luxio interrupted. "Is this some foreign Pokémon I haven't heard of, or did you say Giratina and I didn't quite hear it right?"

"He's actually Unovan," Ash answered. "Or is he a citizen of the Reverse World? I'm not sure how citizenship law applies to multipart metacreation split across two planar realities, but the battle was definitely in Unova and Giratiny was actualized in the bit of the Reverse World coterminous with Unova. He's a small copy of the original Giratina!"

"...you know that Clemontic Shower we worked on together?" Luxio asked Clemont. "Can it be repurposed for headache reduction?"

"We haven't even begun to get into the details," Clemont warned. "Wait until you hear about his phone."

Going through the list took long enough that Bonnie – who'd already heard it all – asked if she could go off and explore.

Clemont thought about it, then said it was okay if she took a Dragonite with her, and poor Luxio didn't take that casual mention well. But Bonnie was okay with that, and so was Dragonite, and Bonnie took Dedenne with her to see what the area was like.

Twenty minutes later, she came back.

"Umm…" she began, a bit nervously. "Can I get some help? I didn't have anyone who could translate another Pokémon, and there were these kids with a Lapras… and they didn't want any adults involved."

"Hmm," Lokoko mused. "Do we know what they mean by adults? I suspect that I'm old enough to qualify."

"I know what to do!" said Ash's cap, which turned out to be Mew wearing Ash's cap on top of himself. "I'll sort it out!"

Mew vanished with a pop, leaving Ash's actual cap to float down.

"So that was Mew, was it?" Luxio said, shaking himself out to unfluff his fur. "A lot more makes sense about Ash now."

"So, hi!" Mew said, two minutes later. "I am an expert on being a Lapras!"

She waved to the three young children in the Lapras Defence Force, and by extension the Lapras. "I also heard about your concerns with adults! And I want to make two things clear! Firstly, yes, I am older than time itself; secondly, I am clearly not either responsible or grown up because those things are completely different from how old you are. So I'm okay to be here!"

Why am I here, again? Mewtwo asked.

"Proof of concept!" Mew replied. "Since I am the prototypical form of a Pokémon who is old without being grown up, and since you're so young that you're the youngest Pokémon here unless Lapras is significantly younger than my vague guess, it's a great example of how it's not just that I've stubbornly avoided gaining the benefits of age but that you can be grown-up and responsible and a bit grumpy even though you're still really little in age terms."

The Lapras Defence Force was silent for several long seconds.

"What?" Heidi asked, eventually. "Did either of you actually follow that?"

Jay and Kye shook their heads.

"Eh, you'll catch up at some point," Mew decided, then whizzed over to float in front of Lapras. So! How are you feeling? Bit warm? Homesick?"

"Both, actually," Lapras said.

"Thought so," Mew nodded. "I spent some time as a Lapras once and I was officially rated by Ash Ketchum himself as 'honestly, I kind of thought you were Clefairy,', which is a pretty good score. Anyway, step two is going to be for me to mediate a conversation with the Lapras Defence Force about how to get you home and how to say goodbye."

"What's step one?" Lapras asked. "Was explaining that step one?"

"No, just talking is free, it doesn't count unless I say it does," Mew said. "Step one is that I use Blizzard!"

Lapras was eventually returned to the sea, and to their pod, and the Lapras Defence Force learned an important lesson about trusting grown-ups to be at least capable of doing the right thing.

Mostly this was after Mew recruited Jirachi so that the L-D-F could visit the Eevee they'd saved in the past, and found out that Eevee had actually been returned to her trainer rather than just confiscated without any reason behind it.

Closer to Coumarine, though, they heard a scream of fright from a Snubbull.

Fletchinder blurred off with a whoosh of flame and displaced air, then came back before the others had really started to move.

"So I don't think it's actually a Pokémon in danger, but it still seems interesting," he said, circling Ash. "This way!"

Whoosh, and he was gone again.

"...did anyone actually notice which direction he was going?" Clemont asked. "Because that happened too fast for me."

"Yeah, it was this way," Ash said. "Let's see what it is!"

"What kept you?" Fletchinder asked, curiously.

"The concept that intervening space takes time to travel through," Pikachu replied.

"Oh, yeah, that," Fletchinder agreed. "That's a thing, isn't it… seems inefficient to me…"

He shook his head with a chirrup. "Anyway, this is where the thing was going on… that Snubbull over there was the one who was screaming, but it looks more like a rehearsal."

"That's right," agreed the Gallade standing nearby. "It's a Super Pokémon Battle Show. Hawlucha ties up Snubbull, and then I swoop in and rescue her and we have a Pokémon battle."

Ash's Hawlucha came out of his Pokéball.

"Hawlucha as a rudo?" he asked. "I, Hawlucha, demand to see this Hawlucha who is impugning Hawlucha's honour!"

A shiny Hawlucha swept down to land in front of him. "You are Hawlucha?" he said. "But I am Hawlucha!"

"Oh, no!" Bonnie said. "How will we tell them apart?"

She giggled.

"Hawlucha considers this to be acceptable!" Ash's Hawlucha declared. "Because, really, it's a bit stereotypical to have the shiny one be the villain but it's nice and visually distinct, and good use of masks can sort it out."

"You have a Hawlucha as well?" the organizer asked. "That's… well, actually, that gives me new ideas about how to organize things! We could have it be a Hawlucha-versus-Hawlucha battle as the climax of the story!"

Gallade glanced at Ash. "You're that kid who can understand Pokémon, right?"

"That's me," Ash replied, in Mew.

"Can you let the boss know I'm okay with that as long as I still get a fight scene?" Gallade requested.

"I've got an idea as well," Serena said. "What about if, as well as the battle being Hawlucha against Hawlucha, we provide special effects?"

"Oh, right!" Fennekin brightened. "You mean like this?"

She flicked her tail, and Serena caught fire.

"Whoa!" the organizer gasped. "What just happened?"

"Don't worry, this is just what Fennekin is doing," Serena replied, twirling her finger, and the flame gathered together into a single point. "She's getting good with Mystical Fire… actually, here's an idea. What about if the Evil Hawlucha has lightning, or something, and then everyone else stops for a moment while Fletchinder flies in, perches on Good Hawlucha's arm, then leaves, and for the rest of the battle Hawlucha's using flame moves?"

"I could change my mask to fit!" Hawlucha enthused. "I would be undergoing rebirth as Hawlucha, the Phoenix!"

"Just don't say rebirth and phoenix around Ho-Oh, or you might actually end up as an Articuno," Pikachu advised. "Suicune isn't here so I have to do this bit for her."

"Hmm," said one of the guests, that evening. "What do you think?"

"Well, I thought it was quite an impressive bit of performance art, really," his friend replied. "Pokémon battles are hard to do justice in a theatrical format, but that one seemed to manage quite well."

"That's true," the first guest agreed. "Hmm… I'm wondering what to put in the review. Any thoughts?"

"Well, I liked the twist where it turned out that actually both Hawlucha were the good guy," his friend said. "Though of course you can't spoiler that in a review… impressive bit of work, though."

"Oh, the bit where the non-shiny Hawlucha gained the power of heavenly fire and then it didn't burn the shiny one, which was proof that he wasn't actually the villain there," the reviewer nodded. "Yeah… I could say that the story is surprisingly complex? And that there was technical brilliance on display."

He nodded to himself. "That seems reasonable enough."

"What I want to know though is how they did that fake Fletchinder," the friend mused. "It just appeared out of thin air, then vanished again, but it was real enough to perch on Hawlucha's arm during the bit when the rest of the cast had suddenly stopped moving. That must have been very impressive work by someone backstage… maybe it was just extremely well choreographed?"

"It must have been, given how that Gallade was fighting against both Hawlucha at once, and I didn't realize until just now that he'd been beaten earlier by one of them and both battles looked realistic," the reviewer said, blinking.

"It's really helpful for rehearsals!" Ash said. "So one of you uses Double Team and stands to the right, and the other uses it and stands to the right but facing the other way so it's the other direction, and then you're battling images of one another and you can practice getting the just-about-not-hitting bit for the powerful attacks. It's just one of the ways you can use illusions for training!"

"How, exactly, do you come up with all of these ideas?" the organizer asked.

Ash shrugged. "It makes sense to me?"

"One of our current working theories is that Ash's way of battling and training with Pokémon is sort of at ninety degrees to normal," Ponyta said helpfully. "Which means that combining his way of doing things with the normal way of doing things is inevitably a massive boost, and Ash is already doing that. More than once. Somehow. Perhaps it'd be better to call it a not-working-very-well theory."

"Well, we're going to audition for other members," the organizer decided. "That way we'll be able to include a more varied spread of talents! To be honest our small number of performers was causing us a few problems… imagine what would have happened if there'd been an injury in rehearsal! If it was Gallade, for example, then either Snubbull and Hawlucha would just have to battle one another and there's not much of a plot, or at least one of them would have to battle themselves…"

"I am sure Hawlucha could battle Hawlucha successfully!" Hawlucha said. "The problem is that Hawlucha would also lose."

AN:

Ash probably has the knowledge for several significant qualifications, he just expresses it in… somewhat of an unconventional format.