"How does that sound?" Ash asked, during lunch outside Kukui's house. "I know Palkia could do a lot of it, but it'd be great to have you both involved because it'd show how much it doesn't depend on mass."
"And showing that you don't need to be a Legendary to do things with moves," Pikachu added.
"Yeah, I guess," Ash nodded.
"Ça me paraît bon," Clefairy judged.
"Thanks!" Ash replied, then looked over. "Huh? Oh, isn't that a Litten?"
The Litten looked plaintively at Ash's sandwich, and Ash held it up. "Oh, huh, you're hungry?"
A nod.
"Hey, Dragonite?" Ash said, looking around. "Do you still have all the things ready to make another sandwich?"
Dragonite gave a thumbs-up, and Ash turned back to Litten. "How much do you want?"
"Just let me get a bite," Litten said.
"Oh, sure!" Ash replied. "Nice to meet you!"
Litten looked confused, then jumped up and snatched the whole sandwich out of Ash's hand.
"Hey, that's rude!" Ash protested, as Litten ran off with it. "I'd have given you the whole thing if you asked!"
"You want another sandwich, right?" Dragonite checked.
"Maybe not just yet," Ash replied. "I want to find out what was up with that Litten, because that was just rude."
"Litten often do not trust people at first," Rotom supplied. "She may have thought you wanted to trick her."
"It's still rude," Ash said. "Hey, Zygarde, Pikachu, shall we go and teach her a lesson?"
"That sounds uncharacteristically vengeful," Pikachu worried.
"Huh?" Ash asked. "No, I meant teaching her how it's better to ask people, and explaining how she just needs to ask in the right place and she can get food even if she's still a wild Pokémon. Why?"
"Oh, right, you meant literally," Pikachu said. "Never mind. I thought you meant more in an Aten way."
Litten padded through the gardens, head turning left and right as she kept an eye out for any threatening humans or Pokémon.
She could tell by the smell that this would be a great meal, but she needed to get it home first, and that very same smell might mean she'd get herself in trouble.
Turn left, then right, along the path… Litten built up speed slightly to take the steps at a run, but before she reached them there was a mrowl from in front of her and a Persian stepped out into her way.
"That looks tasty, little kitten," Persian said, tail lashing. "Why don't you drop it so I can have some? It's too big for you to have on your own."
"Go away!" Litten retorted, dropping the sandwich so she could fight. "Or let me through! Either's fine by me, but don't stop me!"
"Why not?" Persian replied, pacing closer, then darted in to snatch the sandwich.
"Hey!" Litten snarled, then inhaled and used Ember.
Persian promptly threw the sandwich directly into the path of the Fire attack, blocking it and incinerating the food, and Litten's ears went flat.
"No!" she protested. "That was – but…"
"Silly little kitten," Persian said smugly. "It's a good thing I didn't need that, isn't it?"
"Hey!" a voice called, from behind Litten, and she stepped to one side almost automatically so she could look back without taking her eyes off Persian.
There was an Absol loping down the path, along with a strange, vaguely-familiar canine Pokémon and a Pikachu riding a surfboard.
"What was that all about?" the Absol demanded, skidding to a halt, and Litten blinked.
She'd never properly met an Absol before, but she was sure that wasn't how they sounded.
"Persian!" a human called, and Litten froze for a moment before jumping up on the nearby wall for safety.
"Persian!" the human repeated. "Come here, sweetie!"
Persian flicked his tail, then turned around, and Litten watched in bafflement as the Absol and his companions just… followed the Persian.
Except for the canine Pokémon, who stopped for a moment to sniff at the burned ex-sandwich, then a weird antenna thing lifted up on their back and flashed green for a few seconds.
"Excuse me, miss?" a voice said, from around the corner the Persian had taken. "Did you know your Persian was bullying a wild Pokémon?"
"What?" Persian yowled. "How can you – but – what?"
"You can speak!" a woman marvelled. "That's very clever for a Pokémon, and polite too! But I'm sure my Persian wouldn't be such a bully, he's a softy really."
"He stole a sandwich a Litten was carrying, then tricked her into setting it on fire," the voice explained. "I guess he's keeping behaving like that secret from you, but that doesn't make it right, so, can you make sure he can't get out and do that? If he's not doing it it won't cause a problem."
"Why you-" Persian said, then went oof.
"What move even was that?" he complained.
"Persian!" the woman's voice said, now shocked. "What do you think you were doing! We were talking! You're a naughty boy, mister!"
Litten had no idea what was going on, even when the Absol came back with his friends. Especially when that Dragonite came swooping in a few minutes later with several sandwiches, and gave one to Litten before asking where she wanted the rest of them.
"He's sick," Litten said, hovering over Stoutland as the elderly Normal-type started in on one of his sandwiches. "He's taught me so much, but… he's not able to go out for food himself, like he used to. I don't know what to do…"
"Well, I'm sure Dragonite wouldn't mind delivering food to keep you from having to get in trouble yourself," Absol suggested. "I could ask him to do that, and it wouldn't be much trouble – right?"
Dragonite shook his head. "Not at all, Ash."
Litten tried to relax, but tilted her head. "So… why did he call you that? Not Absol? And why don't you speak the way I imagine an Absol should? Your voice doesn't sound like your name at all… unless I'm just really confused about a Pokémon I've not properly met?"
"Actually, I'm speaking Mew," Ash explained. "That's because that's who taught me to speak like a Pokémon. I knew it was going to be awkward, because you were so scared, but… well, once I changed to track you down and find out what was going on I realized that it'd be wrong if I wasn't careful about this. And now I can see you were just helping a friend."
He stood back, then turned into the human Litten had stolen a sandwich from.
"What," she said. "What?"
"What?" Stoutland asked, raising himself up with a huff of effort. "Something wrong?"
"That Absol just turned into a human!" Litten said.
"Right sentiment, wrong way round," Pikachu provided.
"Litten, I know you might not trust humans," Ash said. "And that's okay. Trust is weird and awkward sometimes, and you can't really force it. But if you want help, for yourself or Stoutland, just ask, okay? I'll understand."
"And, because she might not know it's an option, I'll ask Dr. Agonite to come around later," Dragonite added. "Just to check on Stoutland. Okay?"
Litten could only nod, mostly through lack of any idea what else to do.
"Okay, class!" Ash said, the next day. "So today we're going to be talking about gravity! What do you know about gravity?"
"It's a Pokémon move, isn't it?" Sophocles asked. "It's one that stops flying Pokémon from flying?"
"That's one thing it can do!" Ash told him. "But that depends. If you make gravity stronger then it stops flying Pokémon with wings from being able to fly as easily, because they fly by having wind flow over their wings or by pushing down, and it means Pokémon who use psychic powers to fly have to work harder to fly. But for Pokémon like Drifloon, they fly because they're lighter than air, and so stronger gravity actually lifts them up more."
"...what?" Lana asked. "How does that work?"
"It's because if you make everything heavier, you make everything the same number of times heavier," Ash explained. "And the difference between how heavy Drifloon is and how heavy the air is gets bigger. It's like how the difference between two and three is one, but if you double them both then the difference between four and six is two."
That made some of the students, and their Pokémon, nod in a sort of confused way.
"But that's not all you can do with the move, Gravity," Ash resumed. "When you're on this planet without any moves going on, gravity's always basically the same strength, and it's like everything's being pulled downwards based on how much of it there is. But when there's gravity alteration going on, then suddenly you can make things pull in different directions!"
He sent out two Pokémon, Clefairy and Rowlet, and Clefairy twitched her fingers before pointing them upwards.
Rowlet fell onto the ceiling, and bounced with a sleepy sort of chirp.
"Rowlet's demonstrating which direction is down for him," Ash explained, as Clefairy twitched her fingers again and made Rowlet orbit Ash's head. "And Clefairy's showing how you can use Gravity to make things lighter as well as heavier. In fact, which direction do you think Rowlet is feeling gravity now?"
"None at all?" Kiawe suggested. "He's floating."
"No, then he'd just be not moving, right?" Mallow replied.
"I think I know," Lillie said, holding up her hand. "The only direction he's feeling gravity is towards your head."
"Yeah!" Ash agreed. "So Clefairy's actually doing two things to gravity right now, one of them is cancelling it out for Rowlet, and the other is making it so Rowlet's feeling gravity towards my head, but that one's changing all the time."
He signalled, and Clefairy switched to making the whole class feel lighter.
"This is what it's like in about a third of normal gravity," Ash explained. "But watch out, because even though you feel lighter you still have as much mass – it's easier to lift something up, but it's still just as hard to stop it if it's moving."
Rowlet took off, making pleased chirrups about how easy it was to fly, then Ash waved over to the open side of the classroom.
"Another thing that gravity can do is make things curve!" he said. "In fact, that's why something curves down when you throw it, because it's being pulled by gravity, we just think of that as normal. But if gravity is in unusual shapes, you can get some really cool things happening – okay, Palkia, go ahead!"
Palkia returned to normal size. His gemstones flared, then he fired a blast of water into the air.
It curved upwards, then downwards, did a half-loop around a particular point, and splashed into the ground behind where Palkia had apparently been aiming.
"It's usually hard to see the shape that gravity makes things go into," Ash explained. "That's why we're using water, but just about anything can do it so long as it doesn't weigh the same as what's around it. The tricky bit is that things that move faster have less time to be pulled around by gravity, so their paths bend less."
"It was a lot simpler when Gravity just pulled things down," Sophocles said.
"What does down mean?" Ash asked him. "Because, if you think about it, it's just a word for the way gravity points."
He pointed. "Now, let's go and get an idea of what changing gravity's like! And don't forget to thank Palkia afterwards!"
AN:
Yep, Litten is still there.
And gravity's important to learn about, because it's physics.