I spent a little over a year with Sabrina (who was seriously unbalanced, by the way) learning new ways to use my psychic power and refining my technique. It turned out that teleportation is easy, but logic-breaking drawbacks sometimes meant the zubats followed you when you teleported to the bathroom to avoid a swarm. The gym leader was not happy to find me levitating hordes of the damn things out of the restroom, and the people in the gym were laughing at me for weeks. Including Sabrina, when she thought I wasn't looking.
Swapping places with allies was only a bit harder than regular teleportation, and I figured out how to do it with inanimate objects too (because appearing to be a ninja amused me). The more I learned the more I started to get flashes of what people were going to do or say before they actually did them, and for a while I had one of the gym flunkies convinced I could read his mind by answering questions he hadn't asked me yet. Unfortunately actual mind-reading is beyond me, at least for this Jump. When the guy finally figured it out Sabrina collected a lot of bets, which just goes to show how much better a precog she is than me.
Using the same technique I'd otherwise used for teleportation to stretch or compress space was interesting, but holding it for any length of time was exhausting. According to the PokéDex there were reported instances of gardevoir creating tiny black holes using the technique (still ridiculous!), but I eventually came to the conclusion that no matter how quickly I learned finesse (which DID help), I wouldn't have the actual power for that without decades of practice. I also didn't want to be turned into spaghetti and sucked into the gravity well of my own idiotic attempt to dispose of some piece of garbage or another. I wondered what would happen if I put a black hole in the middle of a swarm of zubats. Would that count as catching them? Probably not. They would definitely be defeated, though.
It was also around that time I started seeing some really strange stuff when people were sleeping nearby, and Sabrina shut me down hard when she figured out I'd manifested some strange variant of Dream Eater. Her strangely silent student (that's me) got an earful about violating people's privacy and then a few days of lectures on how not to do it, since I hadn't yet figured out how to stop. She showed me how the technique was supposed to be done, and it turned out that once I'd connected to someone's dreams I could alter them, suppress them, or drain them for energy as was normal for the technique. She ended up calling my technique Dream Walk instead of Dream Eater, since it did more. She also figured out how to do it on her own and got a lot spookier. I never wanted to get a wake-up call from Sabrina again. So. Many. Zubats!
The only other way I could fold space easily was making myself basically weightless. I think that must have been guaranteed by Psionics since it explicitly capped the skill at gardevoir levels and they all had that ability. Using this I was able to pull off unassisted flight by combining it with telekinesis, but learned the hard way to stop slowly. It did not reduce inertia, at least not the way I was doing it. Something to figure out in the future, I guess. I was also doing it wrong, not that I knew that at the time.
Barriers were taught next, and I figured out how to block and reflect physical projectiles well before I understood Light Screen. I could simply stop physical things will a wall of force or reflect them with a bit of force and (brief) space-bending so they went back where they came from. In order to learn to block attacks that had no physical form I had to figure out how to wrap my head around a whole new set of concepts, which was like learning how to bend space all over again. It was a little like theoretical physics and a little like magic, in that some things just arbitrarily did or didn't work. While practicing for it at one point I plucked at something I shouldn't have and messed up time in the training room, for which I got yelled at. Untangling that mess with Sabrina taught me how to speed up and slow down a target's thought processes kind of like a poor-man's Haste/Slow spell, which led into other status effects.
Inflicting status effects (though that's not what they call it here) was easy enough, but I couldn't do them the same way they were demonstrated. It was more like I learned how to confuse, disquiet, and put people to sleep separately and could also hit them with telekinesis if I wanted to. Sabrina assured me it wasn't unusual for people to have different abilities, which also helped when I learned I couldn't use Imprison properly. Locking down someone's ability to use abilities I also knew would have been great, but I ended up with a sort of counter technique instead where I just cancelled things as they came at me instead of preventing them altogether.
Buffing my own psychic power with what for pokémon was called Calm Mind actually got kind of ridiculous, especially when I applied it with my telekinesis. With enough concentration I could double my lifting power to a little over four tons, but it took all of my concentration to keep up the buff and apply telekinesis at the same time. In the games it always seemed like a useless move, but for me it was a god-send. A Washu-send? Jump-chan-send? Whatever. It let me pick up large vehicles and clear landslides without getting my hands dirty. Unfortunately that also meant I was often on clean-up duty when some idiot brought a rock-type pokémon to a psychic fight.
Far and away the most broken ability I learned had to be Rest. It's another one of those basically useless moves in the games, but when you think about what it does in reality it's kind of ridiculous. I basically put myself into a meditative state for about thirty seconds and wake up fully healed, even if I was poisoned or otherwise inconvenienced. I never tried it with severed limbs or anything, but it did fix a broken leg and a lot of burns I got while sparring with Ember. It also worked to reduce the amount of real sleep I needed, but would probably take me a long time to get it to the point where I could stop sleeping entirely.
At the end of it all Sabrina did allow me to stay on at the gym for spending money and helped get me enrolled at the local university. Strangely enough, I also started to hearing a faintly familiar tune in the background during the registration process. It didn't go away for days on end, and was starting to drive me a little nuts. When I finally got to the part where they were asking me if I knew what I wanted to study yet, the tune suddenly stopped. And then I heard it.
"The day is approaching to give your best; you've got to reach your prime! That's when need to put yourself to the test, and show us the passage of time! You need a montage!"
OH DEAR GOD WHY!? I thought Washu was going to watch this as a montage, not make me sit through one! Can I just be a normal student!? I hated studying, but I think my brain might explode if she stuffs it with all the degrees I had planned! And why did everything suddenly look like construction paper!? I was just getting used to everything being animated! Over the sound of the music and my frantic cries about losing control of my body, I heard Washu's laughter. I guess from her point of view this would be more entertaining than watching me learn stuff she already knew, but on my end it was turning into a time-bending acid trip with periods of blurred senses interspersed with scenes of me turning in assignments, being attacked by zubats, having my assignments destroyed by zubats, angrily stomping on zubats, and scratching out entries in the course catalogue. Not only was my headache rapidly growing to Olympian proportions, I felt like I was going to throw up. It kept going that way for what felt like two or three hours, ending only when I was presented with my final doctorate in Computer Science and passed out on stage. That same mad laughter followed me into darkness.
"Wake up, Wren. Your headache should be gone now, and I need to get your new memories sorted out," Washu's voice echoed through my brain. I opened my eyes blearily and reached for the night-stand to turn off my alarm clock. It was four in the morning and I'd apparently been montaged about seven years into the future, according to the calendar. Fuzzy memories of Ash stopping by a few times and eventually somehow mellowing out Sabrina clarified themselves into him losing like an idiot twice before someone apparently told him about the weakness of psychic-type pokémon to ghost types. Ash found and brought back a Haunter he caught but never trained. Sabrina had been so amused with it she'd had a reverse-breakdown and somehow merged a pair of remarkably stable split personalities to become less of a bitch. Oh, and I'd learned the local version of sign language at some point since people still got freaked out about me talking to them in their minds.
Proudly displayed on my wall were doctoral degrees in biological sciences, computer sciences, and electrical engineering. There was also something called a Master Certification in Pokémon Studies. A gentle push against my mind directed me to a heap of new memories, and I spent the rest of the day and the following week meditating on what I'd learned. I now knew about as much as anyone in the Pokémon world knew about the biology of humans, pokémon, plants, and a large variety of mundane animals. I could understand the principles behind Potions, Ethers, Revives, Vitamins and how they affected the body, but it would take some effort and equipment to make them. I had some theories on how they could be adapted to work on humans, and had written my thesis paper on the subject. This came with a complimentary Pokémon Studies certification, since I now understood their biology enough to be a researcher, breeder, or any of a wide variety of other uninteresting things.
Next came the computer science, which it seemed like I'd breezed through in basically no time at all. This world's computers worked much the same way as those in my old world as far as algorithms, data structures, and programming but they'd apparently taken a major developmental detour into quantum computing before they even started to think about parallel processing. Their understanding of physics was far superior to what I had in my old world, and I regretted not studying that since a lot of the things I now knew how to do were actually brute-force solutions that relied on the power of parallel quantum computing. I'd done my thesis here on the possibility that we were all living in a simulation, which amused Washu to no end and just made my colleagues mad. Yes, I was ripping off a thought experiment from my home world. No, I wasn't sorry. This place was animated! After the construction-paper montage I was sure Washu hadn't put me in a real universe, and that these people were actually more like AIs than anything else. I wasn't sure about Ember, but I hoped she was real.
Another nudge brought me to the electrical engineering section of my education, and I nearly shouted in joy. I'd thought by not studying physics as its own field that I wouldn't learn anything about how quantum computers actually achieved results on a hardware level. I was wrong. Not only did I now have the base-level knowledge I'd need to eventually develop my own quantum computer, I also had the base knowledge of how to build the devices that transformed matter into energy for transport across long distances. It bothered me that it wasn't space-folding, and that it theoretically destroyed the original and recreated whatever was being transported in another location. We used that on pokémon here. Every time you put a pokémon in a ball it effectively died. Apparently this had offended my montage-counterpart too, since my thesis paper was on a way to bend space inside the pokeball such that it reached into a sub-dimension instead. That thesis was then used as the basis for the development of Master Balls TM and had made the greedy university bastards a lot of money. It did help the gym though, since I got a small percentage.
After learning from my experience with the Master Balls (TM) I'd studied on my own until I'd been able to devise a way to make the old energy-transfer teleportation work with the new Master Ball (TM) technology. I never shared the research with the school. Did I mention that they trademarked and copyrighted my work with the Master Balls (TM)? I was a little annoyed at that. The software I released that allowed a ball to be transferred without breaking down anything in the pocket dimension was marketed through the Saffron city gym and the local PokéMart, which earned me a fair amount of money. I'd learned to fold space with my mind, so using the existing technology to transfer the link to the pocket space in the ball instead of everything in it wasn't terribly difficult. I'd upgraded my backpack, just because I could.
Well, that was fun. And I still had the montage song stuck in my head. Sabrina and several of the long-time gym flunkies had been getting on my case at every meal that I needed to do something other than study and meditate after I passed out at graduation and she had to drag me back to my room. I was beginning to understand what having siblings was like, and I wasn't sure I liked it. Plans from what seemed like a lifetime ago (but were really a montage and a week ago) floated through my head. I wrote Ash a bill for the potion I'd given him eight years ago and sent it to his PokéDex for giggles, then started gathering my gear for an epic journey. I was going to troll some legendaries, provided they hadn't already died in one of Ash's adventures. Hopefully there were actually more than one of most of them.