"Something about this seems very strange," Pikachu said.

"Why?" Zygarde asked. "This seems like a logical outgrowth of the concept of a Technical Machine, if not actually something more likely than those in the first place."

Pikachu's ear flicked. "You've got a point," he conceded. "You've definitely got a point."

"What about this one?" Ash asked, holding a shiny compact disc up to Noibat, and the Flying-type's ears hummed as he scanned it.

Then he began playing the Choral Symphony.

"Ooh, this is a nice start!" he observed, still playing the music. "It's got a nice build up!"

"I do get Pikachu's point," Clemont said. "It's weird to see someone teaching their Pokémon with shiny discs, and it's not a TM."

"Excuse me, sir?" asked a harassed-looking man with a clipboard. "Can you please keep it down, and…"

He trailed off, staring at Noibat playing an entire symphony orchestra at once.

"Is something wrong?" Ash asked. "Noibat, you might need to stop."

"Oh, okay," Noibat decided, cutting the sound out abruptly.

"Thanks you," the man told him. "And, well, we're making a film not far from here, and we want to try and catch people who are going through before they get close enough that it could get on the recording. Sorry about the inconvenience."

"You're making a film?" Bonnie repeated. "That's so cool! What kind of film is it?"

She frowned. "Is it the kind where the hero wins?"

The man blinked. "I… actually don't know the plot, but probably? I can't keep track of all those Pikachu, there's… so many…"

"That sounds cute!" Bonnie announced. "If they're all Pikachu, I mean! Maybe Ash's Pikachu can be in the film too!"

"Absolutely yes," said the film director, a man called Frank. "I couldn't have got something as good for the film if I'd tried! Your Pikachu is an inspiration to Pikachu and Pikachu fans everywhere, and to be honest it's going to make some of the special effects a lot easier as well."

He considered. "Well, I'm going to make your Pikachu the hero, of course, but there might need to be a bit of a rewrite, because there are things I couldn't have done as special effects which can be easily done now without them… hmm, what does your Pikachu think about wearing a costume? It's just so that people who are watching can tell which Pikachu is which, and it allows a dramatic reveal from a crowd scene!"

"Ooh, I know!" said Mew, who transformed back from being the girder laid aside by a Gurdurr cameramon. "We could make it so that there's a special proper villain, and all the Pikachu have to team up! And we could have the thunder stone thing that Pikachu can do be a symbol of what makes him special!"

"I can see I'm going to be rewriting a lot of this, but what kind of proper villain do you mean?" Frank asked. "A Raichu, or something?"

"No, no, not a Raichu," Mew replied, then paused. "Maybe not a Raichu. Actually an Alolan Raichu would be a good high speed fight scene going up against Pikachu using Surf and Fly with that Surf board of his, but anyway, I meant a really special mysterious Pokémon that looks just spooky enough that it could be computer-generated but you're not quite sure if it's real or not!"

He folded his arms. "It's the perfect villain for a movie with a Pikachu as a hero!"

I've never acted before, Ambertwo warned, reading through her bit of the script. But I should be able to do a lot of this. It's just waving dramatically and trying not to giggle, right?

"Giggling would undermine the whole villain thing a bit," Mew said, apologetically, then scratched her head with the tip of her tail. "Or, actually, would it? Maybe it would be okay, depending on context… giggling over something that's not actually funny is a good way to be scary, I think?"

"Look, are we absolutely sure that this is my girder?" Gurdurr asked. "I don't want to make a big production out of this, but I should remind you that the last time I thought I'd put my girder down in a safe place it turned out to be a Legendary Pokémon!"

"Mythical," corrected the Heliolisk spotlight.

"What's the difference?" Gurdurr demanded. "They're both really powerful."

"Not sure," Heliolisk admitted. "I think mythical Pokémon are the ones where people don't know if they're real?"

"Get ready," Frank warned. "We're filming the next bit in a moment!"

Gurdurr and Heliolisk, along with the rest of the crew, hurried over to the hole that had been dug by one of Clemont's Gears.

Admittedly it had been a weather machine, but still, the hole was useful.

"And… action!" Frank called.

Three Pikachu, one of them Ash's Pikachu, crowded around the hole.

"You're sure this is where it hit?" asked the female Pikachu in the group.

"Yeah!" said the other male. "It went flying over in this direction – what's so crazy about that?"

"That's what you said about the last three holes," the female replied.

Ash's Pikachu was already climbing down into the hole, carefully holding himself at the lip before dropping down.

"It seems safe," he said. "The side didn't fall in or anything."

"Better you than me," the male Pikachu replied. "So? Is there anything in there?"

Pikachu brushed away some of the dirt with his tail, and his cheeks sparked.

"Is something wrong?" the female asked.

"I didn't mean to do that," Pikachu replied, then his cheeks sparked again. Then there was a sudden rush of electricity, and a Thunderstone yanked itself out of the ground to hit Pikachu with a whap that knocked him right back out of the hole again and into the air.

"Ow," he said, after landing. "What hit me?"

The other two scampered up to him.

"It looks like a Thunderstone!" the female said. "But you haven't evolved, so… who knows?"

I'll be taking that! Ambertwo announced.

All three Pikachu turned, looking up, and the camera followed them to look in the direction of a cloud of mist.

Ambertwo was glowing faintly, giving a sense of her half-seen outline through the mist, and she stretched out a paw to lift the Thunderstone into the air.

"Hey!" Ash's Pikachu demanded. "What's going on?"

When it got eight feet away from Pikachu, though, it stopped moving. Ambertwo tried pulling on it harder, making a gesture that made that obvious and sending a crackle of energy through the air, but then Pikachu's cheeks sparked again and it flew right back into his paw.

"I guess it's mine," Pikachu said, then yelped as Ambertwo threw a bolt of energy. "Uh oh, run!"

"And cut!" Frank said, as the Pikachu turned to run off. "Great! Now we'll do the running-down-the-mountainside scene!"

"So… there's something that's just occurred to me," Serena said, watching as Pikachu and the Alolan Raichu they'd brought in rehearsed one of the fight scenes. "This is a movie where all the performers are Pokémon, and that's great, but there's lots of ways to make it so humans can follow what's going on, right? Which one is going on here?"

"Oh!" Frank said. "Well, I suppose you're not an expert on film-making, it's okay that things like this don't occur immediately. To be honest given the amazing work that Ash's Ninetales is doing it's a little hard to remember myself… but in this case what we're going to do is to have a test audience watch it without any translation, and see if it's clear what's going on, and if not then we'll add subtitles."

"For a Pokémon watching the film, they'd always get the full impact," Braixen pointed out, then waved her wand and made a flash of Mystical Fire appear.

"Exactly like that!" Frank said. "And, yes, Pokémon watching films usually get more out of it than humans do because they can hear what the Pokémon are saying."

"It can be really, really funny," Ambertwo provided, wearing a big straw hat so she didn't get too sunburned. "You know that big action movie from a few years ago, um… what was it called… my brother found it and showed it to me. The one with that Lucario. The Curse of the Cofagrigus, I think?"

"You watched that?" Serena asked. "My mom said that it was way too mature and scary for me to watch it!"

"Yeah, but she doesn't get the impact of the Pokémon stuff," Ambertwo explained. "If you speak Pokémon it's a comedy film, you should try it some time. Like… there's a scene where the explorer is hearing ominous thumping sounds, and a Cofagrigus growling, but what he's actually doing is complaining that he can't get the lid open and that someone must have glued it shut as a prank. Then in the bit where Lucario is fighting off a dozen Houndoom they're all trying to sell him insurance."

Serena tried to hold in a giggle-snort. "The whole film is like that?"

"The whole film's like that, it's amazing," Ambertwo confirmed. "The stars must have all had the best poker faces to not be laughing for the whole film."

"Come on out!" demanded the masked Pikachu, his thugs sniggering behind him. "Come and give up the Thunderstone, Pikachu! You've got no choice if you want to save your girlfriend…"

"Okay, first, don't listen to them!" retorted the Pikachu Belle. "Second, I'm not his girlfriend, what kind of assumption is that? Oh no, a male and a female are in the same place, they must be in a romantic relationship! And thirdly-"

"Actually, I think you'll find that I was using it in the sense of having a friend who is a girl," the Pikachu Libre said, turning and putting his paws on his hips. "We may be masked enforcers for the Mighty One, but there's no reason to assume we're behind the times."

"That's not the way that that comes across," Pikachu Belle said. "It really isn't. And thirdly, I know Pikachu, and there's no way you're going to get the Thunderstone from him!"

The Thunderstone went thump onto the ground next to her.

"Well?" Pikachu asked, as the Pika-crowd around him pulled back to reveal him. "What are you going to do now?"

"Pikachu, you idiot!" Pikachu Belle complained.

One of the Pikachu thugs scurried forwards with a cloth, wrapped it around the Thunderstone, and tried to carry it over to the rest of the group – only to be completely unable to move it any further from Pikachu, like it was tied to him by a cord that wouldn't stretch any further.

"Well?" Pikachu asked, ears twitching. "No?"

Then he shrugged, and his cheeks sparked. The mook got yanked along as the Thunderstone sped back towards Pikachu, who Sky Uppercut him offscreen and caught the Thunderstone as it fell from its cloth wrapping.

"I guess it's a fight, then," he said, and the rest of the mooks came running at him at once.

Eventually, after a few days of hard work and some high-speed post-production by Turtwig, the friends watched back the film with the satisfaction of a job well done.

"You know, I just realized a possible downside of all this," Pikachu said quietly, leaning against Ash.

"What kind of downside?" Noibat asked, still pleased after seeing his name on the credits as Very Junior Sound Engineer.

"People are going to think that that's actually my life's history, now," Pikachu sighed. "At the very least if we were going to do that I'd want to include a Kangaskhan."

AN:

"Superhero movie" is somewhere between a genre and a plot at this point, I think.