Hours had passed and his master had not returned. Pelly sat bolt upright on the pile of books, only his tail moved in a metronome like fashion. The minutes dragged by like hours as Pelly waited. It must have been around three o'clcok in the afternoon when Pelly heard a sound from below the window. He leapt off the books onto the window sil and poked his head out. Below him a Sandshrew was running its nose through the flowerbed. The Sandshrew, sensing it was being watched looked upward. He was obviously an old Sandshrew, his skin was rough and dull, and he almost had a graying goatee under his chin. Despite all this his cerulean eyes were as bright as possible. "Good day to you." Hailed the elderly Sandshrew. "Hello," replied Pelly, "might I ask who you are? I'm kind of new here. My master brought me here about a week ago." "Myself, my name is Horace, I've been here for." At this Horace paused, as if trying to remember, "twenty years.possibly twenty-one." Horace lifted his nose out of the flower bed, simultaniously dropping the distracted tone in his voice, "You must be Pelly," he remarked nonchalantly to the stunned Skitty, "You see, I make it a habit to remain well informed on this base. You might not have noticed me then but I was there when your master met with mine about a week ago, you popped up in the conversation and I made a note of your name."

Pelly considered this for a moment and responded. "You can understand human? I was not aware that they were talking about me."

"Yes, I can, I'm trying to learn to speak it but I am starting to fear that Sandshrew are not physically capable of many of the sounds."

Pelly's interest was temporarily waning, he had found a tuft of hair on his leg that wasn't straight. "Oh, ok," he responded absent mindedly, "I never really bothered. Master feeds me and loves me, and I love him back, I never figured that anything else mattered."

Horace was stunned, how could a fellow pokémon's attitude toward life be diametricaly opposed to his. "What do you mean nothing else matters? Do you have any idea why your master is here?"

"No"

"There's a flipping war going on! You ditz! Why do you think he went up in that plane?"

Pelly could have cared less, all that mattered was that he was gone. He searched the periferal of his vision but as far as the eye could see there was no war going on so he shrugged in answer to Horace's question and went back to preening himself, wishing his master would come back.

Horace was seething. This callous pinhead of a Skitty was so totally disattached from the world he hadn't even bothered to realize there was a war going on. "I'll tell you why he's up there," Horace started after a few moments of stunned silence, "he's up there on a bombing run over the enemy. He is in danger! He is risking his neck for the freedom of everyone else in this country, and you don't even give a darn!"

Pelly was dumb struck, "My master is in danger? Why would he go into danger? Danger is dangerous, sorry for the redundancy but it's true. Why couldn't he just stay home with me and sit by the fire?"

"Because he cares about you and he cares about his country. Don't you see, he goes into danger so that you can have peace."

Pelly sighed "I see your point but that is stupid. What is the point of war? All I see are people pointlessly fighting, and all I can do is ask why. Why are there wars? Why do we need to fight? There is enough land, enough food, and enough water to support everyone."