Summer Heat

Chapter 11: Relighting

Risa chewed her bottom lip. After a rather sleepless night, here she was, standing in the challenger's box on the rooftop arena. The young man with traditional birdkeeper togs and messy black hair stood on the other side, sizing her up.

"You were here earlier, right?" Faulkner asked as the referee and announcer were getting ready.

Risa nodded. Faulkner saw that she didn't seem to be a chatty challenger, shrugged, and took out his first pokeball. (She hoped it was the same pidgey, as she figured Heat could handle it. Or, at least, have a chance of beating it without doing it by accident.)

With a quick glance over towards the off-arena areas to her left, she saw that the announcer and referee were ready to start. Sitting in the bleachers were a few people, and Risa immediately regretted looking over. She recognized one person as the attendant from before, the one who always signed her up and reprimanded her for only going up against Faulkner with one pokemon.

Next to her were four people she did not recognize. Two of them looked like a mother and her young son, just come to watch a gym match for fun. She sat next to him, and Risa overheard him saying that he should make sure not to distract the battlers. The little boy, who didn't look like he could have been more than six or seven, only looked like he was half listening.

The remaining two people weren't there together, but were both around ten or eleven and stared down at the arena impatiently. Risa realized they were both trainers - why hadn't she thought of that? If she'd watched a gym match, maybe she would have been less nervous!

On the other hand, Risa thought as she tried to ignore the spectators, having people watching her gym match felt pretty nerve-wracking. She took out Heat's pokeball and tried to focus on her battle plan.

She didn't have too long, though, before the referee was yelling at her to release her first pokemon. Risa yelped, mentally reprimanding herself for spacing out, and threw her pokeball onto the arena. "Go, Heat!"

Both pokemon materialized, and Risa could see the same pidgey from before flitting about in the air in front of her little black snout-nosed fire-type. Faulkner and the pidgey stared at her. "You can attack first," Faulkner called from across the arena.

Risa took a deep breath, then shouted, "flash!"

Heat crouched down, focusing and clearing his mind as the monks in Sprout Tower taught him to do. Then he erupted his back in three quick flares, focusing more on light flashes than temperature.

It worked - the pidgey began to blink uncontrollably, faltering a bit. Risa and Heat grinned (though Risa's was more like a shy smile, since her stage fright kept her from reaching full grin potential). Faulkner's pidgey could barely see Heat due to the blinding afterimages, but Heat could see it just fine, unlike with smokescreen.

"Tackle," Faulkner ordered, though he looked concerned at his pidgey's reaction to Heat's flash attack. The bird dove down at Heat, but missed by half a meter. The bird groaned, hopping around and looking a bit dazed after hitting the dirty asphalt.

Without waiting for an order from Risa, since he knew what she'd probably tell him to do, Heat jumped at the pidgey. Before the pidgey had time to react, he blasted the pidgey's underbelly with a barrage of embers, turning his head when the pidgey jumped back to get the area underneath the pidgey's left wing.

The pidgey squealed in pain, trying to get up into the air to get away from Heat's embers. Unfortunately, the burn underneath its wing caused it even more pain when it flapped its wings. Begrudgingly, the pidgey landed.

"Mud-slap."

Heat screamed when the pidgey turned around and began digging at the dirt layer on top of the asphalt arena. It was pretty dry and not as muddy as Risa would have expected, but it got in Heat's eyes and clogged some of his fire glands. Plus, Risa realized, horrified, it was a ground-type attack.

Risa frowned. Judging from Heat's wriggling and flailing, she figured he couldn't see. That meant that he and the pidgey were on equal grounds in terms of accuracy. Which was bad, because her whole battle plan for Heat-versus-Faulkner's-pidgey was based on Heat outlasting the pidgey due to a difference in accuracy.

She watched as both Heat's ember attack and the pidgey's second mud-slap missed their respective targets by a long shot. Relying on the gamble that Heat's attacks would hit more than the pidey's wasn't something Risa felt like doing, but...

Then she saw the pidgey looked a bit more droopy on its left side as each turn went by. Frowning, she reached into her shorts pocket, pulling out her Pokedex. She hadn't used it much, but she did know she could use it to find out status conditions during a battle.

Flipping it open, she held it up to scan the pidgey. When the word "burn" came up on screen, Risa grinned. Heat had burned the pidgey! That meant he could just stall and still win.

"Heat!" Risa yelled, putting away her Pokedex. "Use smokescreen!"

"But then I can't see the stupid bird, either!" Heat yelled back.

"You can't see it anyway! You have dirt in your eyes!"

"Whatever," her pokemon snapped, though he took in a deep breath, anyway. Just as the pidgey closed in for a tackle, Heat's back exploded in smoke. The pidgey cried out as it hit the ground instead of Heat, making an audible thud.

"Can you get out of the smoke?" Risa called.

"Yeah!"

"Then do it!"

"Okay."

A few seconds later, she saw Heat crawl out from the smoke blanket, his eyes squeezed shut. He wiped his eyes, trying to squint and get a picture of what was happening around him.

Risa waved. "Heat!" Heat looked over, squinting at her. "Keep blowing smoke at that pidgey. It's burnt, so if we just stall, it'll faint eventually."

Heat's face fell. "Eventually? How long do we have to wait?"

"Hey, winning a round is winning a round. Just do it."

More smoke billowed out of Heat's back. "Can't the bird just blow it away?" Heat asked after they realized they hadn't heard from the pidgey in awhile.

"It got burnt underneath the wing. Maybe it can't flap its wings hard enough," Risa said, shrugging.

They kept waiting like that for awhile, awkwardly staring at the smoke. Neither of them could see the pidgey or Faulkner, so they kept sneaking glances at the referee. He seemed to be checking the status of the battle on a hand-held computer. He stared at the computer screen for a few moments, his lips pursed and his mouth in a hard line, before raising up a flag towards Risa. "Pidgey is unable to battle. The round goes to the challenger."

"Right," they heard Faulkner say from the other side of the smoke. Risa then heard the sound of a pokemon disappearing back into a pokeball, then another pokemom being released. "Blow the smoke away and clear the battlefield," the gym leader ordered his second pokemon.

Risa quickly zapped Heat back into his pokeball and switched him out for Pseudo. The sudowoodo stood tall, branch-like arms out to his side.

They waited for the smoke clear, and when it did, Risa saw the same pidgeotto that had taken out Heat in one hit the previous time. She took a deep breath. "Rock throw."

Pseudo slammed his arms down onto the arena, cracking part of the arena into large rocks. He picked up one and hurled it at the bird. The pidgeotto squawked and dove to the side, but Pseudo didn't let up. He kept grabbing more and more rocks and hurling them at the bird.

Faulkner couldn't order the pidgeotto to get closer and attack Pseudo because that would increase chances of getting hit, Risa noted. And the pidgeotto would have to get hit eventually -

And it did. A rock slammed into the pidgeotto square in the chest, knocking it back and causing a lot of damage. The bird fell to the arena floor, winded, and only had time to look up as another rock came hurtling down.

It slammed into the pidgeotto's wing, crushing it.

The bird swooned, then fell to the ground, unconscious.

"Pidgeotto is unable to battle. Round and match goes to the challenger," the referee said in a tone that was much more bored than Risa wanted it to be.

Pseudo stood up tall again, a proud yet solemn look on his face. Risa, on the other hand, jumped into the air and shrieked. She'd won! She'd actually won! Not just defeated one of Faulkner's pokemon, but both of them. She'd won a gym badge!

On the other side of the arena, Faulkner had already returned his pidgeotto and given both pokeballs to an attendant. "Heal them, please," he said as she nodded, took the capsules, and disappeared down a staircase. After she left, he strode across the arena, lightly picking his way around the rocky rubble, to Risa and Pseudo. "Good match," he said with a smile. "I'm glad you had another pokemon this time."

Risa felt her cheeks color a bit. He remembered her and her inability to prepare for a gym battle. How embarrassing! "Um, y-yeah..."

Faulkner chuckled. "Well, good job with your rechallenge. Here - here's the Zephyr Badge," he said as he handed Risa a silvery, double-wing-shaped medallion. "Good day, miss." He bowed, then walked back over to the staircase on the gym leader's side.

"Would you like a picture?"

"What?" Risa looked up to see the attendant standing next to her with a camera.

The attendant smiled. "I can take a picture of you and your winning team and email it to you. You want a picture?"

"Y-yeah! That'd be great! Hold on." She dropped Heat's pokeball, revealing a somewhat sooty cyndaquil. "Heat! We won!"

He looked up at her solemnly. "Of course we did. I was awesome."

Risa rolled her eyes, not wanting to add that Pseudo was more awesome than him. She then had to busy herself with posing her two pokemon for the picture, since neither Heat nor Pseudo seemed to understand anything about tilting their head to be more photogenic.

A genuine smile appeared on her face for the picture as she held out the badge for all to see.

Eighteen more days. A Hive Badge was definitely doable before then, she thought.

Totally doable.

...Totally...

---

Disclaimer: I do not own Pokemon.

Author's Note: I've written better battles...but hey, at least Risa can finally leave Violet City, right? Oh, and I know a couple of you have expressed interest about the book. Don't worry, it's coming back. Just be patient.