"Sorry I'm late, Professor," Kiawe said, one morning. "What are we doing today?"
"I'm in the middle of talking about riding different kinds of Pokémon, because it's something you've already got experience in," Ash said, which made Kiawe groan.
"Sorry, Mr. Ketchum…"
"Well, maybe you don't need to apologize," Ash shrugged. "Why are you late, exactly?"
"Oh, there was an argument with some developers this morning," Kiawe explained. "These guys want to buy out the ranch land, to turn into some kind of resort hotel to attract tourists… and my dad said no, but they were being persistent and I felt really nervous about leaving to come to school."
"That's okay!" Ash assured him. "So, as a quick thing, it's important not to abuse it but there's definitely times when adults would have to decide that what's going on at the moment is more serious than making it to a specific event, so it's the same thing with you. It's the same thing if you're sick, for example. And you know school is important, and you made sure to come over as soon as you can, so it's not really a problem."
He shrugged. "Of course some things are more important than other things. That means that you have to make difficult decisions! But that's nothing unusual, that happens… and, since you're here, I know a great way to sort out that problem! First…"
Ash sent out Silver. "So, just to get you caught up to speed, what do you think you'd need to think about for Silver being used as a ride Pokémon?"
"Hmm," Kiawe frowned. "I guess… he's quite small? So is there a problem about how much he can carry?"
"I'm stronger than you'd think!" Silver replied.
"Yeah, Silver's psychic and he can use that to help his physical carry weight, but he's also not very heavy," Ash said. "That means that adding a rider is a big change to how much he weighs, and it can mean he's clumsy because he weighs more than he expects. Since it's easier for a person riding him to remember that than for him to remember that, it's good for a rider to remind him about it when it looks like they might need to change course in a hurry."
Lillie put up her hand. "Is that a lot of what training a Ride Pokémon actually is, then?" she asked.
"It's some of it!" Ash agreed. "I don't know the exact amount because I've mostly worked on my own Pokémon, and that means we can talk a lot more easily than most ride Pokémon can communicate with their riders. So a lot of it would probably be to do with making sure ride Pokémon know how to react to what humans do… my friend Serena and her mom could probably explain that better, at least for Rhyhorn because that's the kind of racing they do."
Next, Ash sent out Zapdos. "And then Zapdos is an example of a Pokémon who's more specialist for riding, I've talked about why before. Who remembers why?"
"It's because you're ridiculously resistant to electricity, right?" Sophocles said.
"Exactly," Ash agreed. "There'd be a lot of extra work to make sure Zapdos could take passengers who weren't me without occasionally giving them static shocks, and honestly it doesn't really seem worth it at the moment… anyway, a lot of this lesson doesn't actually have to be done in class, so let's head over to Kiawe's ranch!"
After the last time they'd been out of class, and because it was relevant, they took all the Ultra Guardians gear and Ride Pokémon with them on the way to Paniola Ranch.
With Ash bringing Silver along as well as Zapdos, and with Pikachu able to join him, that left Garchomp and Silver both free at first, and Ash had Silver help the students swap between different Ride Pokémon on the journey to feel the difference first-hand.
Kiawe said he was seriously impressed with how Ash was able to just work out how Metang was going to be different to Flygon to fly just from first principles, which led Ash to shrug and say that it was just obvious from thinking about it – about how Flygon's four wings meant that the Dragon-type had a lot of control over the direction of their thrust, while Metang was just using raw psionic levitation and so could mostly only push in one direction at a time but that direction was arbitrary – and how both of those were different to Zapdos, who flew like a conventional bird and so needed to either fly with airflow or flare her wings to land.
Then they reached the Paniola Ranch itself.
"What the…?" Kiawe began, shading his eyes. "What happened to the river?"
"I can see a dam upriver!" Silver gasped. "Someone's built a dam to block off the water to the river?"
"It must be that Viren guy," Kiawe simmered. "He's trying to force us to sell. That's the only thing that makes sense!"
"It could be a coincidence, but it doesn't sound great," Ash agreed. "Silver, swap Lillie back to Altaria, okay? Then get ready to use Hydro Pump and we can help out with that water shortage!"
"Got it!" Silver agreed.
"Then, Arc, let's go with a soup plate!" Ash added. "Unless… hey, maybe Nebby can help too and we can set up an Ultra Water Supply!"
"It feels so wrong to watch my family ranch being hit by so many Water attacks," Kiawe said.
"And, Silver!" Ash called. "Put an ice dam at the bottom of the Paniola Ranch bit of the river with Ice Punch! That's going to be temporary but it'll mean we don't need to put too much water in while we get this sorted out!"
Quick work from Ash's Pokémon, excluding Nebby (because, as Lana pointed out in time, you couldn't use seawater in a fresh water river) until they included both Nebby and Suicune (because, as Ash countered, salt was one of those things that could be defined as impurity if Suicune wanted) resulted in the Paniola Ranch river being filled up to make it a sort of impromptu pond.
"This can't be right," Lillie frowned, looking upriver at the dam. "Maybe they got the water rights, but you're still not allowed to just dam a river and stop it flowing completely. Otherwise water rights would be water wrongs."
She stopped, and groaned.
"What's wrong, Lillie?" Snowy asked.
"I should avoid telling my mom about that one," she said. "It just slipped out."
Snowy giggled. "I thought it was funny."
The water crisis over, Kiawe started helping with the next part of operating the ranch – part that had been on hold due to the water problems – while Ash had the others follow along so he could talk about how Tauros worked as ride Pokémon.
"It depends on their attitude," he said. "Tauros can be touchy, but they don't have to be. So there's a difference between a good ride Pokémon for general use, which is a Tauros who doesn't have many problems with any random rider, and a good ride Pokémon for a specialist, because they have more time to devote to getting a good relationship with their Pokémon."
"What about Miltank?" Mallow asked. "We're moving Miltank to the water, are they good as ride Pokémon?"
"Not sure!" Ash admitted. "Maybe some are, but most of the ones I see tend not to have a great posture for it. They're also more useful for other things, like providing milk."
Then something roared off to the side.
"Aah!" one of the Miltank yelped.
"Scatter, it can't get all of us!" another one said.
Half-a-dozen of the Miltank fled through a nearby hole in the fencing, and Ash pointed. "Dartrix, stop them!"
Dartrix flew off into the distance, flinging out a Leafage barrage from both his wings at once to head off the panicking Miltank, and Lillie cleared her throat.
"Ultra Guardians ride Pokémon, help out!" she said.
That was apparently good enough to get all the Ride Pokémon involved, and Silver and Zapdos did too, which helped to prevent a wholesale disaster.
It was likely that at least some of the day's milk would be milkshake, though, with how much the Miltank had used Rollout.
"That's not right," Kiawe frowned, looking at the broken section of fencing. "This was cut, deliberately."
He looked back. "What was the roar sound?"
"The roar sound is an exact match for: a Pyroar," Rotom informed them.
"Pyroar?" Kiawe repeated. "If there's one of those causing trouble I could catch it, but… they're not native to Akala, are they?"
"Wild Pyroar can be found on the Paniola Plains." Rotom waved their arms. "However! The roar sound was an exact match for a Poketube video called Pyroar Roaring. This is not a coincidence! The sound file of the roar has a hard cut off."
"So that was someone playing the sound of a roaring Pyroar," Sophocles said. "That means it's got to be sabotage."
"Watch out with those words, brats," someone snorted. "Anyone would think you were trying to accuse me, Viren, proprietor of the Rainbow Happy Resorts, of underhanded dealings!"
"Hmm," Lillie frowned.
"Well?" Kiawe said, over the top of his friend's voice. "I don't hear you saying you're innocent!"
"Of course I'm innocent!" Viren said. "I'd like you to sell, of course! But it's nothing to do with me that you've got a difficult time making this ranch of yours work. It'd be much less work, and much more profitable for all of us, for you to just go ahead and sell the land!"
"Are you the one who built the dam?" Lillie asked.
"So what if I did?" Viren demanded. "Who do you think you are anyway, kid?"
"She's a schoolkid!" Ash pointed out. "And so's Kiawe. But if that is your dam, how did you build it so quick! When we built a dam to stop our replacement water all flowing away too fast we made it out of ice, how did you build such a big dam so quickly?"
"Huh?" Viren said, confused. "Why would it take a long time to build a dam? You just shove stuff in the river until it's blocked."
"It's not easy to make one that works!" Dartrix said cheerfully. "In fact, it's dam hard!"
"Yeah, you need to work out where the water's going, and say how much it's going to reduce the flow downriver," Ash pointed out. "That's just polite! And safe, otherwise the whole thing could collapse."
"What's it to you, kid?" Viren demanded. "I oughtta battle you lot and stop you from making a fuss!"
He reached for a Pokéball at his belt. "My Electivire will show you the error of your ways!"
Three things stopped Viren's Electivire from showing them the error of their ways.
The first was that there wasn't really much of an error for them to be shown.
The second was that Viren sent out Electivire to battle the first Pokémon available, which was Ash's Pikachu.
The third, which was related to the second in a way, was that Electivire was very shortly too hurtling-into-the-sky to do anything like that.
Viren stared after his disappearing Pokémon, then clenched his fist.
"Right!" he said. "That's it!"
He pulled a walkie-talkie. "Change of plan, guys! Go now!"
There was a vroom sound as a set of engines started nearby, and Nebby quietly vanished as they teleported away.
"What was that?" Kiawe demanded.
Silver took off with a whoosh of wings, flew high enough to see, then dropped back down.
"Bulldozers!" he said. "I think they're heading for your house!"
Nebby appeared again, this time with Officer Jenny.
"-sure what you-" she said, then stopped. "Ash Ketchum? What just happened? Aren't you Kiawe?"
"This guy Viren just ordered his goons to attack my family ranch with bulldozers!" Kiawe said quickly.
Viren, and his goons, were extremely arrested.
AN:
Land developers in Pokémon Hawaii? Who would have expected that?