Do you ever just feel bored and you want to write something but you have no idea what to write? Then, something stupid just pops into your head, and you run with it? That's what this is. I hope someone out there finds some amusement in it.
"Pikachu?" Ash asked his buddy one night on the road. Pikachu looked over at his best friend, his caretaker, and his trainer.
"Pika?"
"You know Thunderbolt, Iron Tail, Electro Ball, and Quick Attack, right?" It was a rhetorical question, Pikachu knew, as Ash was looking at his pokedex right then. "Do you remember when you knew Volt Tackle, or Double Team, or Thunder, or Agility, or Double Edge, or Electro Web?"
Pikachu tilted his head at Ash, as if to say, 'Do I look stupid to you?' Ash blushed. "Well, it's just, you remember all our adventures together, and I can't help but wonder why you can only remember four moves, you know?"
Pikachu's voice was all sarcasm at that moment, "Pika-pi, pikachu."
The young trainer's eyes widened. "Wait, you're telling me that you do know all those moves?! Then why don't you ever use them?" Pikachu's eyes gave him the look again, the one that let him know that for all his travels, all he'd learned, he was still just a stupid kid.
"Oh… I'm the one who orders you to use moves. I suppose that makes sense. Then why does the pokedex only say you have four moves?"
Pikachu jumped down from the tree stump he was sitting on and made his way to Ash's side. The two gazed down at the pokedex in Ash's hand for a moment. Then Pikachu leaned forward and touched a virtual tab underneath the four moves. The list expanded and Ash saw the full range of Pikachu's moveset, seventeen moves in total.
"I feel like we've been following some arbitrary plot device that can't possibly correlate with reality for all of our past adventures. Imagine what we could have done if I knew that your memory wasn't worse than someone with a serious case of dementia!? We could have actually won a league! Well, maybe." Ash's voice resonated through the forest around them. "I thought that Arceus or someone had just decided to make it that way to fulfill his audience's expectations, like how he keeps me ten to keep me in the proper age group!"