It's been a few days since he was officially inducted into the interpol as one of its agents. It still feels surreal sometimes, that he's now a fellow colleague of the people who the world viewed as one of their best and brightest in their respective fields.

The new task Looker gave him was simple. He and his pokemon have to grow as strong as they can in the shortest time possible because he really needs to catch up to their level of strength. By now, Hugh had met almost the entire roster of the interpol and they took turns to teach and train him as per Looker's orders.

"That's too weak, try harder."

The big imposing tanned skin man with biceps larger than Hugh's own thigh told him as he sat leisurely in a corner to watch Hugh and his pokemon duking it out with the man's pokemon. This man is Akamu, once a PWL agent in the Alola branch and from what he heard from Skye, had worked closely with Looker for many years until his resignation. When the PWL had given the greenlight to create the interpol, Akamu and his wife were the first people Looker had thought to recruit, indicating just how skilled they are in their expertise.

Akamu is the second-in-command of the interpol. In the event Looker cannot be contacted or is unable to give out orders, Akamu will take over in his stead. Thus, in a sense, Akamu is Hugh's direct superior as well.

Tried as he might, Hugh could not defeat any of Akamu's pokemon. It would be more accurate to say that there's no way he and his pokemon could outlast them in a battle of attrition. Akamu's pokemon are just so good at defensive tactics that even their strongest attacks and combinations did little to scratch their defences.

"Snacks are here, feel free to help yourselves to it!"

Mary appeared on the training ground with a tray of steaming hot buns to warm them up from Nimbasa's cold weather. This is Akamu's wife, a genius inventor with a fondness for children and tends to mother him a little too much because of his young age and also because he's now the youngest in the group after his addition into the interpol. Still, Hugh appreciated the kindness that the woman had shown him thus far because it made him feel less like a stranger among the super powerful group of people here.

While Akamu was mainly the person overseeing his training if he's around, he's not the only person responsible for it because that man has his own duties to see to and he cannot be in Nimbasa to coach him all the time. In fact, Hugh was starting to realise that most of the interpol agents are given a great deal of freedom as long as they can complete their tasks by the stipulated deadline. Akamu and Mary do not stay in Nimbasa most of the time due to Mary's involvement with some super groundbreaking and secret project elsewhere that the Unova League had commissioned her to help out with as an interpol agent and as her husband, Akamu follows wherever she has to go. Akamu will return to help if there's an assignment that needs his expertise, but other than that he doesn't really make an appearance within the interpol.

The other two people who don't regularly stay in Nimbasa are Nova and Shannon. Shannon is an Unovan, she has her own home to stay in. She's also a scientist, not a trainer like most of them are and thus her work doesn't need her to stick with the interpol as long as she can produce the results the interpol needs when they assign her a task to complete. As such, she doesn't really have a need to stay with the interpol, and till now Hugh still hadn't met the brilliant scientist that everyone claimed to be a genius although from what little Velda had revealed, Shannon is also quite a klutz.

He had only met Nova once when she returned just two days after he joined the interpol. She's a historian who is very adept at investigative work and her work brings her to many places. As a result, she doesn't have a fixed place of residence and couldn't usually be found in the interpol's Nimbasa HQ. However, she was easygoing and kind enough to impart to him a trick or two about ground type techniques as she was a Ground Specialist herself. According to Skye, she's also a very powerful trainer that people tend to grossly underestimate.

Then, there's Skye and Velda, who he's more familiar with since they are the ones who actually reside in the HQ most of the time unless they are out on missions or the like. If Akamu is not free to coach him, then usually it would fall onto either Skye or Velda to further sharpen his skills as a trainer. Skye and him are kind of like a pair right now with a senior-junior relationship since she was the one who introduced him to the interpol, and even if they tend to throw quips at each other half the time she's the one that he's the closest to. At the very least, if anything ever happens to him he knows that Skye will genuinely worry for him.

Then there's Velda. He would admit that he initially had a small crush on her due to her unrivalled beauty but every notion of that was thrown out of the window the moment she introduced him to her pokemon. Her ghosts were batshit crazy, and they scared the hell out of him with the kind of pranks they liked to pull on him behind Velda's back whenever he was in her vicinity. He doesn't even want to recall the terror of facing her tyranitar and charizard in battle, or just any of her "battle-hungry quintet" as she loves to refer them by. It couldn't even be called training. He and his team were utterly decimated by those five powerful pokemon that she often relied on if she needed raw firepower to overwhelm her opposition and everytime that happened it really made him question his self-worth. Just any one of those five pokemon could easily take out his whole team without breaking a sweat, that's how large the difference between the both of them is.

Isn't she just two years older than him? How on earth is she so much more skilled than he is if that's the case? Is she too skilled, or is he too weak?

Velda is the type to warm up to others slowly, and despite her powerful background she's very easy to get along with and is very polite. She has a flygon too, a member of her "battle-hungry quintet" and he would no longer be fooled by the flygon's friendly personality because he had seen for himself the kind of havoc it can wreck when under Velda's command. He has a vibrava, a rare species of pokemon that could only be found in deserts that would one day evolve into a flygon too. So, he made use of this opportunity to ask her for tips on how to properly raise and train one. It proved to be the right decision to make because Velda's a literal walking encyclopaedia when it comes to pokemon thanks to her hailing from an ancient line of pokemon breeders. She had taught him so many things about how to raise and evolve a vibrava that he wouldn't have ever known otherwise.

Then there's Looker, the "slavedriver" that Akamu will always warn him about when the man was brought up in their conversations. It's not often that Hugh gets to be coached by Looker personally but he quickly learns to dread any lessons with that man who is his ultimate superior that he answers to.

If Velda's ghosts were unhinged, then Looker's were insane. Thanks to his experience with those two trainers Hugh had made a silent vow to himself to never ever cross a Ghost Specialist unless it's a life-or-death situation because these two are insane. Their ghosts are insane, the both of them are insane taskmasters, and everything they do is just downright insane.

Just look at Velda. Who on earth would dare to hug a litwick for warmth and use it as a hot water bottle? It's a well-known fact that litwicks use their flames to absorb life force from people or pokemon around them because that is what fuels their flames, so even their own trainers would exercise caution when approaching them. So, how on earth is Velda not dead from hugging a litwick to sleep when she was napping on the couch in the common area for two whole hours? That's… impossible!

Then just look at Looker. Just… look at his sableye and the kind of spooky things it would do just to creep him out, like silently stalking him for the entire day while making sure that he knows that it is stalking him. That ghost is creeping him out just for the fun of it. That accursed ghost takes sadistic pleasure in seeing him squirm in discomfort and there's nothing he can do to stop the ghost from stalking and following after him in complete silence. Nothing.

No, in fact, nobody in the interpol is normal. He doesn't know about Akamu, Mary, or Nova since he didn't spend as much time with them as he did for the rest, but Skye frequently engages in such complex conversations with her pokemon as though she can understand what they are saying. He can understand if she's talking to her pokemon through telepathy but the only psychic type on her team is her sigilyph. How on earth was she talking to her pidgeot, asking it questions, and then continuing to speak as though she actually received a coherent reply from it?

The abnormalities were driving him crazy to the point that he wanted to tear his hair out in frustration.

"Do you really understand what they are trying to tell you?"

His curiosity got the better of him and he finally decided to direct his queries to Skye since she's the only one in the group who he felt most at ease with. She simply took a pause in helping to groom her pidgeot, blinking her eyes at him as if she didn't get his memo.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You… talk to them, and then they reply, and you then talk back to them as if… as if you can understand them," Hugh struggled to describe what he wanted to convey and his hand gestures were certainly not helping. Great, now he's starting to trip over his words too.

Skye shared a look with her pidgeot.

"Should we tell him?"

Her pidgeot squawked back.

"Yeah, where's the fun in that, right?"

"See?! This is it! This was what I was talking about!" Hugh jumped on his feet and pointed an accusing finger at the trainer-pokemon duo. His serperior voiced her agreement with a soft hiss from where she was coiled up comfortably beside him.

"How long do you think it would take for him to arrive at the correct answer?" The pidgeot squawked a few times and briefly stretched its wings before closing them again. "Seriously? That long? I think you are insulting his intelligence, he doesn't seem that dumb to me." The pidgeot let out a purr-like noise and a snort. "Hey, be nice, you are lucky that he cannot understand what you just said."

"You are just pretending to understand what your pidgeot said to you just to mess with me, aren't you?" Hugh narrowed his eyes at Skye with an accusing glare. Skye simply shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly.

"Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. Who really knows?"

Pidgeot cawed.

"No, Crown, I'm sure that he's smarter than Aria. That glutton only ever thinks about food."

Pidgeot let out two more caws.

"You want to go and fly? It's rather cold outside, you know, are you sure?" The pidgeot audibly huffed in annoyance. "See, I knew you wouldn't like to go out in this weather."

At this point Hugh was very certain that Skye was simply doing this to mess with him just because she can. That's definitely something that she would do if she could.

"Hmph, yeah, carry on your act for as long as you like. I'm not going to fall for the same trick ever again," Hugh crossed his arms and turned his head in the other direction, feeling so stupid for actually falling for this shoddy little act. He really likes Skye as a friend and as a senior but must she really ridicule him like this? Pretending to understand pokemon? That's such a ridiculous notion.

The pidgeot let out what was unmistakably a mocking laugh. He didn't need to be able to speak pidgeot-nese to understand what it was saying.

"Unfezant and I will get you one day, just you wait," Hugh declared through gritted teeth, referring to the many training sessions they had with Skye and her pidgeot. He and his unfezant had never beaten Skye and her pidgeot, not even once.

"Maybe Crown was right, you are stupider than I thought. We gave you so many clues too," Skye sighed and facepalmed. "I thought that as an Unovan, you would have arrived at the obvious answer after so long."

"You are not going to trick me again."

"Whatever, suit yourself, you little runt," Skye casually waved him off with a hand and returned to grooming her pokemon.

"I'm not little!"

"You are only twelve. Little suits you just fine."

"Velda's only fourteen and I don't see you calling her little!"

"Have you seen her ghosts?"

"... Good point," Hugh conceded. There's no way he would ever want to get on Velda's bad side just for that alone. Her gang of ghosts is something that he learnt very early on to give a wide berth to if he didn't want to be on the receiving end of one of their endless pranks. Some of their "pranks" can be very terrifying too.

"Actually, that said, how on earth did she manage to allow her ghosts to touch her? Ghosts don't allow anyone to touch them, period," Hugh asked aloud and this time, both Skye and her pidgeot gave him such a flat look that he knew for sure that they both saw him as an irredeemable idiot.

"W-What?"

"Seriously, you still haven't got it? With all the obvious clues that we had been hinting at since day one?"

"W-What clues?"

"God, he's hopeless," Skye muttered out loud as she returned to grooming her pidgeot's crown feather. This time, that massive bird pokemon didn't even bother hiding its condescending laughter.

"And here I thought Unovans would easily arrive at the answer. I was wrong, I was wrong. You were right, Crown, he's an idiot."

"I'm not!"

The pidgeot's squawk clearly conveyed how much it disagreed with his statement.

"No, seriously, none of you found it strange that Velda can touch her ghosts like that?" Hugh asked with incredulity colouring his voice because what Velda did was supposed to be impossible. "It's… Have you seen her hugging that litwick yesterday? It's a litwick! They absorb life force from people around them whenever the flame on their heads burns brightly and that litwick was burning brightly for two hours straight! How is she not dead yet?"

"She's Velda, ghosts will never harm her. Well, most ghosts," Skye replied with such a nonchalant attitude as if this abnormality was normal when it clearly was not.

"You… This… This doesn't make any sense," Hugh covered the sides of his head with his hands in frustration, an infuriated whine leaving his lips. Is he actually the only sane person in the interpol?

"Seriously, I have nothing else to say when the answer to that is already so goddamn obvious," Skye deadpanned, finally done with grooming her pidgeot and started to pack up the grooming tools she was using.

"What answer? All I have are questions and more questions!"

"Look, what is Unova known for that other regions do not have in abundance? You are an Unovan, so surely you know this, right? What kind of people can be found here that could very rarely be found elsewhere?"

"Uh…" Hugh thought very hard about Skye's question and Skye gave him a few encouraging nods, eagerly anticipating his answer.

"... Unovans?"

The silence that fell between them was louder than anything he ever heard. He could actually taste Skye's disappointment in him.

"You are beyond saving," she declared and walked out of the room with her pidgeot, leaving him behind to stare cluelessly at her departing back.

"I… How is that a wrong answer?! Unovans can be easily found here in Unova and not elsewhere… how is that wrong?! Skye, wait up! Skye! How is my answer wrong?!"

Character and pokemon list:

Name: Skye Bale, 16, Female

Affiliation: Interpol Agent

Code Name: Zephyr

Pokemon Team:

1. Pidgeot (Crown), male

2. Gliscor (Glide), male

3. Skarmory (Dia), female

4. Crobat (Beats), male

5. Jumpluff (Cotton), female

6. Dragonite (Tino), female

7. Noivern (Echo), male

8. Emolga, (Emi), female

9. Hawlucha (Hawk), male

10. Sigilyph (Cosmo), female

11. Aerodactyl (Aria), female

12. Masquerain (Heli), male

Name: Hugh Matis, 12, Male

1. Unfezant, male

2. Simisear, female

3. Bouffalant, male

4. Vibrava, male

5. Eelektrik, female

6. Serperior, female

Name: N (real name unknown), age unknown, Male