Thirteen and a half, he catches his third pokemon.
He is visiting home, not staying. He wants the distinction clear because, while he's already finding this whole trainer business a bit tedious and a lot less exciting than people claimed it would be, everyone knows only absolute losers drop out with just a single badge and Anderson is not anyone like that. You've got to prove you have what it takes to get at least a couple badges if you want people to take you seriously as an adult.
He wants that so much and so much more now, other kids sneering at his slow hick drawl, how he comes from the ass end of nowhere, and he refuses to agree with them, does not see anything worth running away to in the big cities they're so proud of being from, he loves his family and his town and his endless and eternal forest, he wants there to be no confusion that he chose this no belief that he's settling no question that he didn't choose this wholeheartedly. He doesn't care what anyone else thinks. It's his home, not theirs, and nothing about it needs to change. They're the ones who should change.
He'll need to raise more pokemon, though. He's got a teddiursa and a fletchling at the moment and two pokemon is just not enough, even if they're already a handful to deal with, he'll need to get a third pokemon. And what better place to pick up another one than around where he grew up and where he'll come back home to someday?
He's barely walked out of his house before he sees a weave of zigzagoon, no doubt sniffing around looking for trash to make a mess of. Garbage eating garbage pokemon. "Go, Fletchling! Tackle them!"
"Et!" his fletchling chirps, fluttering at them. They scatter every which way, all of them zigzagging dizzily to make it hard for his pokemon to target any one in particular. She ends up tackling the rearmost one. It rolls up in a ball, squeaking loudly, and another one twists backward and headbutts his fletchling off it. The ball unrolls and the two of them vanish through a hole in a neighbor's fence. Well, that's Mr. Greenfield's problem now.
He continues through town, toward the outskirts where cooler pokemon might be found. Still far from there, he hears something rustling in a bush and gets excited by the possibility it could be something rare but all he finds is a minun near the bottom. Bleck. "Teddiursa, attack! Use fury swipes!" Having a teddiursa for a starting pokemon is bad enough, especially with the lazy thing taking his sweet time evolving into a properly impressive ursaring. He doesn't need some stupid cute minun on his team as well, like some sort of girl.
"Nun!" squeaks the minun as his teddiursa claws at it. Despite his order, the move's basically scratch still, none of the rapid speed he's seen from experienced trainers' pokemon using the move. "Nun!" Electricity sparks on its cheeks and it smushes its face against his teddiursa, who lets out a cry and jerks backward, away from the high-voltage nuzzle. Released, the minun speeds clear in what looks an awful lot like quick attack, but without the whole attacking part. "Mi!" More electricity is sparking on its cheeks.
"Hey, don't just let it go," he complains. "Come on, keep swiping, take it out already."
"Ted!" His teddiursa gamely jumps into the bush to where the minun's retreated and claws at its side again. A spark of electricity jumps across and the teddiursa flinches back, then growls and leans forward to swipe at it again, scoring deep red lines down the minun's side and sending the pokemon tumbling off the branch and down into the dirt, where it curls up, quivering.
"Good job, Teddiursa," he says, even if it wasn't really all that great, and returns his pokemon to the pokeball.
He finds a weedle on the underside of the branch of an ornamental cherry tree planted at the side of the road. Bug pokemon like weedle are for weirdos and kids whose parents wouldn't, or couldn't afford to, get a starter pokemon, but removing bugs from people's trees before they chew them all up is an important job for pokemon trainers.
"Fletchling! Peck!" His pokemon gamely flings herself toward the weedle, who spits out a web of string that she struggles under a moment, then breaks off. She's not much better with peck than his teddiursa is with fury swipes and her attack's ultimately more like tackling the weedle beak-first, but it's enough to knock the bug to the ground. She follows it down and, ew. "Don't eat that," he criticizes, about to recall her. Looks like the weedle was even weaker than he thought.
"Drill!" shrieks a beedrill above, and she barely gets out of the way. She does, though, and the beedrill's left stinger-arm is jammed into the sod for a moment. A serious fight!
"Use agility," he tells her. It's the most complex move she knows. He watches her seem to hyperventilate, and he wonders, very briefly and with little true interest, if the fire that'll burn in her when she evolves has already kindled somewhere in her center. "And quick attack," he continues. "Don't get hit, if you get poisoned I have to go all the way back to the pokecenter."
Even beedrill are kind of… it'd be sort of a useful pokemon to have, considering he's only got two at the moment and they still need a lot of training, but only sort of. Kids who are struggling might be desperate enough to catch one just because it's evolved and big-looking, even though it's never going to be all that good. Getting it would be like saying he'll never raise a real pokemon properly and just gave up.
He might've changed his mind if it beat his pokemon, but that's not how this goes. It would have been different if he'd used the teddiursa, but his fletchling has the advantage and, despite being caught second, is already stronger and more experienced as well. She's the one he favors. She'll evolve into a fire type and everyone knows, Dad himself has said so many times, you've got to have a fire pokemon if you want to be a lumberjack when you grow up, it's not safe to go deep into the forest without one of them to help protect you, and only delusional tree-huggers think there's no need for solid protection in their forest. It's why his dad keeps a simisear.
How this goes is, his fletchling flies for it, claws out, and scores a hit across its face while it's still got itself hooked in the sod. Probably it's the root of that cherry tree that really holds it, the one whose leaves the weedle was unrepentantly chewing on as if the tree was a free lunch and didn't belong to anyone at all.
Messing up a beedrill's eye isn't as big a deal as it is for most other sorts of pokemon. He doesn't know the details, that it's a compound eye and the ones not torn out or crushed by his pokemon's talons remain functional or that the untouched eye on the other side of its face provides an almost hundred and eighty degree range of vision on its own, more than he manages with both eyes. He just knows beedrill can still cause a lot of trouble even when they look badly damaged, and so he says, "Don't let your guard down!" to his pokemon, and then, "Try pecking it!"
His fletchling flaps forward in another beak-first tackle, breaking a hole in the beedrill's exoskeleton, in the thicker lower body, then twisting to bring her talon's to bear again, hooking them into the opening and tearing out a large chunk of plate.
"Ew," he says again, with a lot more feeling.
The beedrill buzzes and its antenna convulses, which doesn't sound anything like he thinks a scream does. Its wings flail and it lifts into the sky, retreating.
"You won!" he tells his fletchling, and pets the fluffy red top of her head. She cheeps, rubbing against his hand. "Look at that dumb beedrill run away! That'll teach it to attack people out of the blue!"
And then he puts her back in her pokeball and keeps looking for his third pokemon.
He knows that beyond town that there's better pokemon. He was just hoping for a shorter walk if his pokemon got too beat up and he had to trek all the way back to the pokemon center to heal them and try again. Now that he's thoroughly established the pokemon around are as disappointing as he remembers them being, he heads toward the trees.
He sees a bunnelby by the road, in the tangle of patchy, too-tall grass and weeds, but its huge ears rotate toward the sound of his footsteps and then it darts to the left and vanishes out of sight into some burrow. He's got no water pokemon to flood it out and while he could tell his teddiursa to try digging too, he really doesn't think his pokemon can possibly dig up a burrow faster than a bunnelby could dig it deeper. Way too much work to battle a pokemon that he doesn't even want to catch.
A bunch of fletchling take flight from the bushes by the edge before he gets nearly close enough to set his own fletchling or teddiursa on them. Whatever, though, he doesn't want two of the same kind of pokemon.
Far from where he is, a tiding of ralts pause in digging tubers by the river. They perk up, raise their heads and turn them back and forth, feeling it out with their horns to confirm. Then without any word, they pick up the tubers they've unearthed and begin to drift in the opposite direction, unhurried.
There's patches of flowers growing in the half-sun, half-shade of the treeline, and on a large sunflower, grown from some seed that escaped from a nearby birdfeeder perhaps, a flabebe peers at him.
"Fletchling!" he cries once again, sending the little bird out. "Start off with a tackle!"
"La!" the even smaller flabebe squeaks, and a pair of vines lash out toward his fletchling. Dummy, like that's going to work. His pokemon hops into the air, her wings beating hard, and the vines don't even get close. She strikes the flabebe and the flower so hard it bends all the way to the ground.
"Aaaa!" A burst of pinkish wind shoots from the pokemon or the flower, sending his fletchling tumbling back.
"Don't let it push you around, Fletchling!" he orders. "Quick attack!"
"Tch!" Her claws catch on a patch of grass and she beats her wings to stabilize herself and correct the angle, then she launches again straight at the flabebe with shocking speed. The flabebe is knocked loose this time, along with a number of yellow petals. It tumbles through the smaller flowers, bounces into the lower broughs of a small pine and is rolled back toward them again, coming to a halt in a patch of buttercups, up against a odd tuft of broad leaves.
"Bebe!" the flabebe cries, and the leaves wiggle, then begin to rise up into the air. A deep blue oddish pops out of the soft ground and its beady little red eyes open to glower up at him. "Iiiiish," the new pokemon growls.
A bellsprout would be one thing, but even though oddish can evolve into two different things, both of those things are just more flowers and one even looks like it's a doll in a dress. Plus everyone knows they're used in making perfume.
As such he's just mad. "Cheaters," he accuses, because it is not at all fair of them to ambush him with another pokemon when he's already in the middle of a battle.
"La be la be la be la!" babbles the flabebe with a weird seriousness, floating above the oddish's leaves. "La be la be la be la!"
"Di!" the oddish cries, and then it spits a bunch of bubbly orange liquid, dousing his fletchling.
"Ing ing ing ing ing ing ing!" she shrieks, running around in circles flapping her wings and rolling around on the dirt.
"Use quick attack again!" he tells her, but she just keeps running around trying to shake the acid off. Not paying attention to where she's going, she gets close to the oddish, which hops forward a step and abruptly wraps the leaves on its head around his fletchling. She flails slightly, then goes limp as the oddish absorbs her energy.
"That doesn't even count," he says with a scowl, because it really doesn't. He didn't decide to use the fletchling to keep fighting against the oddish. He recalls his pokemon out from the tangle of leaves and sends out his teddiursa to replace her. "Fury swipes fury swipes!" he shouts. "Come on, do it fast."
His teddiursa scurries forward to reach the oddish and then rears back up onto two legs to try to follow his order, though as usual, it only gets in a single swipe and then the oddish spits another batch of corrosive acid right into his teddiursa's eyes. The teddiursa handles it better than the fletchling, or at least in a more useful way, giving a grunt and then smacking the oddish with a frustrated uppercut. The oddish is knocked into the still-floating flabebe, who yips and ends up banging into a tree stump. The oddish bounces back down, rolls to get its feet under it, and scurries away. The flabebe just falls and lies on the ground, apparently unconscious.
"Alright, Teddiursa!" he says.
Then a dark mist starts to balloon out of a hole in the top of the tree stump. It lifts upward, a bit like the oddish popping up from under the ground only the earth beneath is undisturbed. Instead, the same mist flows out from underneath, forming into a simple wisp body with two stubby arms. A pair of lights appear in the center and those red eyes fix on him.
"Cool," he says, and throws a pokeball into its face.
So you understand: there were so many other pokemon he could've caught.