Chapter 5: Sifting Wheat From Chaff
Morning came... the sun was out, the sky was blue, and the grass and the mat outside were damp from the dew of the night. As the sun's rays poked through the treetops on the sparsely-wooded hillside where Marley and Teja's burrow was, Nida found herself emerging from her parents' burrow and stretching after a rather unrefreshing sleep. She saw the neighbor Pokémon doing similar stretches before they went off to their day's errands, following a raucous night that had seemed like it had come from some strange dream.
Except that dream was grounded in a Legendary reality, which Nida's ears could hear stumbling its way up the burrow's passage.
"Pleo… Are you making it out alright?" she yawned. Her question was quickly answered by a head popping out from the burrow, although the rest of the Lugia attached to it remained out of sight.
"I'm stuck!" Pleo cried, fidgeting and trying to find a way out the mouth of the burrow. The Nidoran gave a quick peek under the Lugia's neck and quickly delivered a prognosis.
"Uh… Pleo."
"Yeah?"
"Remember how you needed to crouch to get in last night?" Nida asked, flattening her ears.
"Eh-? Oh! Right!"
The base of Pleo's neck dropped a little, as the rest of his body squeezed out of the burrow, crouched low to the ground. Once he had finally crested the entrance and made his way onto the mat, Pleo vigorously beat his wings to shake off some dirt and cramps from his rest overnight.
"Your house is too small!" Pleo said, his voice coming out as somewhere in between a childish protest and a sleepy yawn.
"I'll try and have you stay with Crom or at the Guild Hall from now on," Nida sighed. "But was the rest of your stay fun? Er… aside from the... poisoning, of course…?"
"Uh-huh!" Pleo nodded.
Nida opened her mouth to press further, only to stop and realize… Pleo was a day old. If he hadn't enjoyed the night, would it even occur to him to try and fib to her? The Nidoran shook her pelt and then turned for the path, that Dojo wasn't going to come to them all the way up on that hillside.
"Great, now let's get going."
The two set out towards the creek that Nida normally crossed to reach the Guild Hall. They passed neighbors who offered up reverent greetings, as well as a few young Pokémon in a group who momentarily stopped a short game with a pebble they were kicking about to wave to the passing Lugia.
Before long, the trees grew thinner and the clutter of Bluewhorl Town's huts and tents began to spring up, though the reactions by the varying locals had not changed much from the ones up on the hillside where the burrow was. The two eventually found themselves nearing a hut along a path that smelled strongly of baked flour.
"Ooh! Something smells good!" exclaimed Pleo.
"That's the bakery that Crom's family runs. They're probably making bread inside," Nida answered.
"But… Where's Cro-?"
"Hey!" a voice interrupted.
Nida and Pleo turned to find themselves face-to-face with Crom, darting out from the entrance to his family's bakery. This time, two other Druddigon tailed him, sporting a pair of golden scarves with umber designs resembling sheafs of grain on them. One of the two Druddigon that followed was slightly smaller than Crom, and the other was much, much larger.
"Mom made us fresh bread today!" Crom cheered, giving his wings a playful beat before the elder Druddigon began to speak.
"Hmm hmm, I felt that it was the least I could do. After all, a Protector surely needs to eat well in order to defend other Pokémon!" the larger Druddigon answered with a proud smile.
She passed over a small satchel that contained fresh and warm loaves that had been shaped to look roughly like Lugia- or more accurately, the rough paintings of Lugia that were up at the shrine.
"Ooh… They look pretty," Pleo said as he gawked at the golden-brown loaves.
"And it smells great too, Gwenith," Nida chimed in as she snuck a whiff of little bird-shaped pieces of bread.
"All the better to help you today! I had heard from Mosca that she wants the Protector to try out scouting practice," Gwenith replied. "Why, with loaves like these to sniff out, you'll get through those mazes in no time!"
"That said, aren't you all running a little late right now?" she asked, drawing some awkward looks from Nida and Pleo.
"Uh…"
"Er…"
"Right," Crom said, shaking his head a bit. "See you later, mom!" he called off as the three Pokémon turned and briskly made their way along the path to the Dojo, Gwenith waving after them.
"Mooom, why does Crom get to hang around the sea god?" the smaller Druddigon protested as the three left.
"Now, now, Cenn, he's not doing this for just fun and games. He's helping the Protector grow big and strong, just like you and Crom will be one day," Gwenith admonished, her voice fading into the din of life in town as the Nida, Crom, and Pleo went further down the path.
As the three followed the path, they found themselves travelling alongside the creek that flowed through town. The buildings and tents grew more closely-spaced, the gawking and greetings from bystanders more common. All the while, Pleo struggled with a question incessantly gnawing at his mind..
"Hey, Nida? What is 'training'?"
"Training is when you practice fighting, to get tougher!" Crom responded, swiping his claws at the air playfully.
"... But Nida said that 'enemies' fight in her bedtime story last night. Will we be fighting with enemies there?" Pleo asked, tilting his head a bit.
"Uhm… No. They're just some other Pokémon from around town who want to get tough too," Crom answered.
"... So 'friends' also fight?"
"What? No!" Crom explained, concerned about what idea the young Lugia seemed to be putting into his head. "Training's fun!"
"Maybe we should let Maestra Mosca explain the rest of this, Crom," Nida sighed. After all, if he could get such wild ideas from a simple bedtime story… Maybe it would be better to try and let some older Pokémon explain things to Pleo instead.
"Is 'training' also a story? It seems confusing like a story-"
"Oi!" a Swellow's voice interrupted. The group of three turned to see their team's leader perching on a crude wooden fence in front of a hut with large side wings and a tiled roof. Thankfully Kiran had arrived bright and early, otherwise they would have walked right on past the Dojo!
"Oh, good morning, Kiran!" Pleo chirped energetically.
"Are you ready for your training today, Pleo? I've even got a scarf and a badge just for you!" Kiran said, gesturing with a wing to a navy blue scarf with a white star on it- and a glinting badge that he had taken the liberty of affixing for his newest recruit.
"So we're going to be fighting for fun today?" Pleo cheerily asked.
"Uh," Kiran groaned as he looked at his other teammates, getting just a little nervous about where Pleo might have gotten that idea.
"Crom said that training is when 'friends' fight for fun, so…"
"That wasn't what I said at all!" Crom interjected.
"Why don't we go inside and put on your scarf first, Pleo," Kiran sighed, "We should probably take this one step at a time."
The young Lugia cocked his head, but not seeing the harm in the matter, decided to follow Kiran's heed and follow him and the other members of Team Traveler into the tiled hut.
The interior of the Dojo was far more impressive than its shabby exterior let on. Inside there were simple, but neatly-laid, wooden floors. The roof and walls were composed of clean-cut wooden beams separated by partitions made mostly of brownish paper. It became apparent when walking in that the "hut" was merely the entrance to the dojo, and that the "wings" were really covered corridors that lead to other huts, and to encircled grounds with boundaries neatly demarcated by lines in sand.
"So this is a 'Dojo?'" Pleo asked as Nida drew her paws back from affixing a navy blue scarf around Pleo's neck. The young Lugia looked around, mesmerized by this strange complex that seemed rather unlike anything else he had seen so far in Bluewhorl.
"Mmm hmm! This is where Maestra Mosca's gonna teach you how to get tough!" Crom cheerily answered.
"'Maestra Mosca'?" Pleo asked.
"That would be me," a voice answered from down the corridor.
The speaker drew nearer and revealed itself to be a Hawlucha. The ground-bound bird walked towards the group with a sagely calm that seemed at odds with her garish green, magenta, and white plumage as she drew near to the waiting group and greeted them with a bow.
"I must say, when Guildmaster Hatteras asked me to train the Protector, at first I had thought that he had accidentally ordered an overly stiff drink from one of the Juice Bars!" Mosca chuckled a bit.
"But, now that I see the truth of the matter, I must say that I am deeply honored to be able to mentor you as our Protector, pollito."
"But my name's Pleo," the young Lugia insisted after an awkward pause.
"Of course it is. Anyhow, the training chamber Guildmaster Hatteras arranged for you is this way," the Hawlucha replied, before ushering Team Traveler down a corridor which passed some streamside huts on one side and a series of fields in between buildings and covered corridors on the other.
"So… What is training?" Pleo asked the Hawlucha, "Crom tried to tell me on the way over, but I didn't really understand what he was saying."
"'Training' in the strictest sense is merely readying yourself for the challenges of life by making challenges of your own to conquer," Mosca answered as she lead the group into a turn around an intersecting corridor. "To make battles that you can safely retreat from in order to prepare for those that you can't run from."
"What does that mea-?" Pleo blinked, before a shrill shout cut him off.
"Kyaaah!"
The group turned from the sound of the cry to see a Mawile and Luxio locked in combat in a rectangular courtyard. Along the courtyard's edges, various Pokémon worked in teams of two to maintain translucent barriers of what seemed to be light. On sidelines behind them, a much larger body of Pokémon cheered on the two opponents, most of them wearing lavender scarves that had been scrunched and folded up into headbands and made it impossible to tell whether or not the cloth had any designs on them. The Mawile too wore one of these headbands, and had just narrowly weaved around an arcing whitish-yellow bolt of electricity that the Luxio further behind shot out at him.
"Haw, haw! Is that the best you've got, ya little guild runt?" the Mawile called over his shoulder. "I've fought off ferals that hit harder than-! Oof!"
The Luxio cut off her opponent by lunging and pinning him down. She reared her head back before sinking her sharp teeth, cloaked in flame, into the maw-like horns on the Mawile's head.
The creature was forced to let go almost quickly as she had clamped down, as the Mawile instinctively flung his head about to fling off his assailant. After tumbling a distance, the Luxio bounded away as her opponent was preoccupied with nursing the sting of the flaming bite, before taking a moment of its own to retort in kind from a good distance.
"Maybe you should do something more with those jaws of yours than just talk! I thought you were supposed to be a guard!"
"Wow!" Pleo exclaimed. "So that's what we're going to do today?"
The Mawile took a moment to brush himself off, shake some sensation back into his second maw on his head, and get back onto his feet, scowling determinedly back at the opponent Luxio.
"Hmm, not bad, but it'll take more than that to finish me- Eh?!"
And then, the Mawile's eyes caught sight of Pleo. As did those of the Luxio, followed one by one by the rest of the shielding and gawking Pokémon on the sidelines, the frenzy of battle broken by their awed stare at the white and blue guardian in the corridor.
"Hi!" the little guardian waved. "So, I'm gonna get to fight one of y-?"
"Ahehe… Not quite, Pleo," Kiran laughed nervously as he tucked Pleo's wing down. "Para ser fuerte, you can't go throwing yourself into the thick of things!"
"Otro día, pollito. Please follow me this way," Mosca quickly replied, "As for the rest of you, don't you have a battle to be getting back to?"
"Oi! Less staring, more sparring!" a Girafarig from the sidelines, apparently the referee, cried out with both its mouths, as the Pokémon in the courtyard began to uneasily pull themselves away back to the Mawile and Luxio, who slowly eased themselves back into battle positions.
"Wait, everyone was looking at something? What was it?" a Zubat asked, before the noise of the returning din of battle drowned its voice out and grew indistinct as Team Traveler continued to move further away.
"... But why can't I fight?" Pleo asked in a pouting tone.
"Most of those Pokémon are guards, Pleo," Nida explained, "Their training focuses on fighting because if anything bad in town happens, they'll need to help protect the town from it."
"But if they also protect things, and I'm a 'Protector'... Shouldn't I also be doing their training?" Pleo asked.
"You will eventually. Why, who knows? Perhaps I'll wind up sparring with you myself to see how you fare against my world-famous Plancha Voladora!" Mosca proudly declared as she slid a partition open to peek into a wooden hut by the stream. "But before that, there are some fundamentals that you must learn. This way."
Inside the hut were a series of high partitions that, unlike the others seen in the complex, were fashioned from solid wood. The panels reached up to a net strung along some rafters, having the net effect of making a rough cube of netting and wooden partitions.
Mosca shut the partition behind her, and led the group up to an entrance of the cube in the middle of the room. There, Crom handed off his bag of bread to her, which she set beside the cube's entrance.
"For today's exercise, we will doing a mock-up of a dungeon crawling experience that you will all surely find familiar one day," Mosca lectured, pointing at the wood-and-net cube behind her.
"Now, the dungeon is not too different from this maze behind me here. The layout's unpredictable, it's often hard to see things, and most importantly: there's treasure lying about," the Hawlucha continued, which immediately drew a curious inquiry from Pleo.
"Wait, there is-?"
"However!", she interrupted, "Any dungeon, our own included, has its hazards. The ferals there will pick fights more often if they are threatened or moody, the Distortion creates traps, and most importantly, if you take too long, the Distortion will clear out the floor you are on."
"What does this have to do with the wall maze, though?" Crom asked.
"Everything! As a mock-up, you will need to put all of the skills and senses that you would need in the dungeon to use to find these loaves that your mother, Gwenith, so generously provided for us.
"If you can clear this gauntlet in time and make it out the end still standing, then, and only then will you be able to-"
It was then that Mosca found herself interrupted by the sound of munching, and of hard pecks against wood. The team's attention was then drawn to the bag by the entrance, where they noticed that it had already been half-emptied by Pleo, who was presently working on a half-devoured loaf on the floor.
"Wow… And I thought I was a fast eater," Crom murmured.
"Psst! Pleo! You're supposed to eat those after you find them in the maze!" Nida hissed.
"Hmm? But they were right there! And the pink birdie said to find them!"
"We… Have a lot of work ahead of us, don't we?" Mosca sighed, putting a balled-up claw up to her face.
During the first few days after Pleo began his training at the Dojo, his progress was marked by fits and starts, mostly false ones. Still, he improved little by little. The monotony of the routine was broken by a midday recess, during which Team Traveler showed its newest member around Bluewhorl.
As it so chanced this particular day, Nida and Crom agreed to bring Pleo along into the town's square by the docks.
"Wow! I think these 'boat' thingies changed overnight, Nida!" Pleo exclaimed as he passed a wooden craft tied up along one of the docks, oblivious to the gapes that some of the nearby Pokémon interrupted their routines to give him.
"Well, they kinda did. Two went out last night, and two came in this morning," Crom explained. He took a short moment to perch on a post on the dock to stretch his wings in the sun.
"Eh? Where did the others go?"
"Probably to a nearby island to trade for some supplies," Nida answered, "There's some things that we wouldn't be able to normally get easily here on Tromba without them, and it helps some Pokémon like Crom's papi to support their families."
"'Trade'? What's that?" Pleo asked, tilting his head out of puzzlement.
"Eh? Nida, did we not buy anything with Pleo before?" Crom asked, turning slightly from his sunning on the post.
"Now that I think about it," Nida pondered, drawing a paw to her muzzle in thought, "I guess we haven't."
It was then that she happened to catch a glance of a certain rude wooden shack from the corner of her eye, and with a devious smirk, she turned back to Pleo.
"Actually, let's fix that right now. The team could use a few more supplies anyways," Nida said, as she hopped off towards the hut.
Pleo gave a quizzical look to Crom, who shrugged his shoulders and dismounted his post. The two nimbly followed Nida to make up for her head start, and caught up with her just in time to see her hopping up a stump next to a wooden counter on the shack.
"Hey! Calino! Are you back there?" the Nidoran called to the back of the shack.
"Speaking!" answered a Kecleon who popped up from behind some boxes. The creature made its way over, changing his scales to the customary viridian that he tried to greet all his customers with.
"What can I do you for to- Oh!"
And saw that the Protector he had heard so much about in recent days had graced his shop with a visit!
"Ahehe, it is truly an honor to have you here, Protector," Calino said, giving a small bow from behind the counter.
"Oh really now?" Nida said in an accusing tone, lowering her ears to play up a sense of grievance, "I seem to remember that you said that you wouldn't give even the Protector a discount if he was a rookie!"
"Oh! Er..." Calino stammered, his scales starting to flush an embarrassed burnt yellow, "Well, you know, Nida, that was all hypotheticals! I wasn't honestly expecting that the Protector would be awakened in my lifetime, so-"
"So… You'll give that discount on whatever we buy today, then?" Nida asked in a saccharine tone, perking her ears up.
"Haha! You mean for yourself, yes?" Calino chortled. "When you sprout white feathers and wings like this Lugia here, we'll talk-"
"I want to get whatever Nida buys!" Pleo cheerily proclaimed to the Kecleon, waving his wings.
"E-Eh?!" the Kecleon cried out in surprise, his body rapidly turning white.
"So you'll give a discount now?" Nida insisted, giving a cheery head tilt.
"Uhm… I mean-! Th-This isn't fair, Nida! Hiding behind the Pro-!"
"You did just imply that you'd cut a deal for Pleo, Calino," Crom said, as a few Pokémon passing by began to stop to watch the exchange between Calino and his young, if surprisingly tough customers.
"W-Would buy one get one half off-?"
"Seriously, Calino? Just how much Poké do you expect Pleo to have after a week around here?" Nida sighed, flicking her ears back as some of the nearby residents chimed in.
"Yeah, Calino, don't be such a tightwad!" Scout called from the water beside the dock.
"Can't you even cut the Protector a break?" a Corsola from the harbor cried.
"B-Buy one get one free! That's my final offer!" Calino cried, his scales now tinged a desperate grayish-blue as he eagerly tried to save some face, "Why, my poor purse couldn't possibly take more than that!"
"'Free'?" Pleo asked.
"It means that he'll give us an extra thing for whatever we buy!"
"Oh! Okay!" the young Lugia chirped, happy that he had helped to get his friends some extra goodies.
"Thanks for explaining, Crom," Nida replied before turning to Calino. "I'll take the usual again, this time with an extra Cross-Eye Seed!"
Calino couldn't help but grumble, his extremities flushing red at the tips as he put together a double portion of Nida's mostly-customary selection of items as she slid some glinting baubles onto the counter.
"What is it that you're giving him, Nida?" Pleo asked.
"It's Poké, the money that's used in this town," she explained.
"'Money'?"
"It's kinda like trading food, except the food never goes bad… And you can't eat it... I guess it's not like food at all, now that I think about it," Crom mused with a claw up against his chin before a certain Swellow's voice abruptly cut short his train of thought.
"Nida! Crom! What are you two doing? Pleo's training session was supposed to start again 10 minutes ago!" Kiran admonished mid-flight from above the shops behind the group.
"Uh oh. Looks like we'll have to get going, Pleo," Crom said, before tromping off after his team's Swellow leader. After a moment's hesitation, Pleo waddled along, occasionally hopping from the ground with the beat of his wings.
"Thanks for the discount, Calino!" Nida called out to the Kecleon, bounding away after her teammates.
"Uh huh, sure," the merchant groaned, putting a claw to his face. "Gods these days."
"Oh, so you do have things that you care about more than money, Calino," a certain Sentret piped up while passing by the counter. "That's honestly surprising."
"Scout, could you not right now?" a now fully-red Calino fumed.
Soon enough, Pleo found himself back within the wooden corridors of the Dojo's maze. Although he had been in there more times than he could count on one of his wings by then, the experience was still disorienting. Outside of intersections and rooms, the list of directions where one could see in any meaningful direction was short: Forward down the corridor, behind oneself, and, if it wasn't covered by a chunk of the next level of the maze like his present corridor, the netting that hung along the rafters.
"See anything, Pleo?" an unseen Nidoran called out.
"Yeah, we should have three more loaves left!" the voice of an also-absent Druddigon added.
Even though Nida and Crom had taught him some handy tips for training over the last few days, such as that the two didn't disappear when Pleo couldn't see them, or to always mark his place and pick the next closest direction if he got stuck at an intersection… The isolation of the maze always felt unnerving.
"I smell it, but nothing yet-" Pleo called, as he rounded a sharp turn in the maze. As his the corridor on his left progressively became less obscured by one of the maze's walls, Pleo noticed one of Gwenith's golden-brown loaves sitting at a dead end.
"Oh! I found it! I found it!" Pleo cheered, as he veered to the left of the corridor to waddle towards his prize.
"I've got i-!"
Click.
The faint sound of a trap triggering resounded, followed by a stiff smack from underneath by something cold, slimy, and smelling of earth, causing Pleo to pitch forward.
"A-Ah!"
"Pleo! Are you alright?!" Nida cried out from deeper in the maze, "What happened?"
As Pleo picked himself up from the floor, he looked down and found that the entire lower half of his body had been covered in thick, damp mud. When he turned back to the place where he had stumbled, he found that the mud that struck him had been splattered radially all over the corridor.
"Yes, but I just got a bunch of brown goop stuck on my legs and wings!"
"Oh, you probably stepped on a mud trap!" Crom's voice called out over the walls.
"Simulated mud trap!" Mosca's muffled voice from outside the maze's partitions corrected.
"Whatever!"
"Pleo, can you move alright?" Nida's voice asked.
Pleo attempted to shake off some of the mud, finding that it weighed down his legs and wings. While he was able to get some of it off, the majority of it remained stuck in his feathers and continued to uncomfortably encumber his movements.
"Not really!" he answered back.
"Just clean off what you can and play through it for now!" Nida's voice cried back. "Mud Traps affect your ability to fight depending on what part of your body they gum up. It'll go away eventually as you get the mud out!"
"Okay!"
"And pay closer attention to the floor from now on!" Crom's voice added. "If you see one that has a pattern kinda like an arrow, step on that one! It'll pump you up and clear up that trap's effects right away!"
Pleo snatched up the loaf by pressing it in between his wings and backtracked down the corridor. He made sure to keenly avoid the center of the mud splatter as he made his way back to an intersection with three other corridors stemming from it. There he attempted to scrape some of the mud off onto a corner before he paused for a moment.
"Let's see… The one that I didn't go down should be on the… Right!" he chirped, as he turned down his chosen direction. The young Lugia continued on under the shadow of the next floor, leaving a small trail of muddy footprints and splatters as he carried on down the corridor's bends and turns. As Pleo entered a small chamber with two narrow passages leading out, one forward and a smaller one to the left, he could overhear Nida's voice call out.
"I found another one!"
"Okay, so then there's just one left!" his other partner replied.
Pleo paused for a moment. After realizing that he had already marked his position (in a manner of speaking) from the flecked mud trail still following him, he decided to follow the "next closest" direction rule and head to the left corridor. He carried on a ways, until he noticed a break in the pattern of the floorboards below his feet where some jagged rocks were poking out.
"There's pointy rocks in the bottom of the floor like last time!"
"It's probably another trap!" Nida called out "Can you get around it?"
Pleo went up to the trap, keen to keep his feet a healthy distance from where its edge might possibly be, and saw that the corridor was narrow enough for the patch of embedded stones to span its entire width.
"I don't think so!" he called back.
"Turn around and try another path, then!" Crom's voice piped up, which prompted the Lugia to sigh at just how hard this 'training' thing was as he retraced his muddy steps back to the chamber.
He then noticed that as he got closer to the other corridor, the smell of toasted grain lingered in the air. Pleo made his way down the passage a bit more briskly, keenly watching the floor.
"Oof!"
Perhaps a bit too keenly, as he bumped his head into a wall. After he drawing back and giving his head a good shake to regain his bearings, Pleo noticed the last loaf lying in the middle of the corridor.
"I found the last loaf!" he cheered, seizing the piece of bread with his mouth.
"Alright, great! Now we just need to find each other... Did any of you see the stairs by any chance?" Nida's voice echoed down the corridors.
"Nop- Oh wait, I just found them, Nida!" Crom hastily announced.
"Alright! We'll come to you, Crom! What should we be looking for?"
"Claw marks!"
… Hopefully Mosca would be understanding about that. After all, there were already a bunch of nicks in the maze panels already, right? As Pleo backtracked his way towards where he and Nida had split up, he discovered that sure enough, Crom had scratched little reminders to himself into the panels.
A scratch on a corridor here, a gash on a corridor there, an occasional tracing of a dead end that Crom had gone down. So went the process of plodding along and trying to piece together these clues to follow the young Druddigon's steps.
"Hey!"
Pleo soon found himself looking up at Crom waving at him from beside some stairs.
"Don't eat those until after we get out!"
"I wathnth!" Pleo protested through a beak filled with bread loaf. Crom quickly darted over and took the remaining pieces of bread, depositing them into the bag Kiran had let him borrow for training.
"Here, while we wait, lemme try and get that mud out of your feathers," Crom offered, as he prompted Pleo to raise his wings and began to carefully rake the mud out with his claws.
"Are the other floors of the cave also like this?" Pleo asked.
"Kinda. They're not as boxy or wooden, and in the places where Kiran takes us, the Distortion usually makes them a lot more open," Crom replied, as he flicked off globs of mud before moving on to one of Pleo's legs.
"The… Distortion?"
"You know, rearranges the Mystery Dungeon... creates orbs and traps… changes plant seeds into the sort that Calino sells from his shop... occasionally makes a forgotten gummi or apple left in there into a super-special gummi or apple if the ferals don't eat it first," Crom explained.
"But then why aren't we training there?"
"Eh?! The Mystery Dungeon is a lot more dangerous than here! That's why Maestra Mosca has this maze! So that way Pokémon can practice and go home easily if they mess something up!"
"Dangerous?" Pleo asked, cocking his head as Crom quickly wiped off Pleo's badge and then moved his attention to cleaning a few stray spots on the Lugia's plumage that he had not already gone over.
"It's a place where you can get hurt a lot more easily," Crom responded.
"But if it hurts you easier, why do you go there?"
"Because it's training for us. A Pokémon on a Rescue Team needs to be able to not run away from danger or scary things all the time, because in the future, someone might be counting on you to help them," the Druddigon explained.
"Someone… Might be counting on you," Pleo repeated, as Nida's voice interrupted from behind him.
"Oi!"
And Pleo turned to see Nida setting some bread loaves that had visible bite and drag marks down on the ground.
"Well, I suppose that that's one way to spend half a week," Nida sighed.
"Well… Think of it this way, it's only been half a week, and we've managed to make it with Pleo to the sparring partner!" Crom cheerily replied as he stuffed Nida's loaves into his bag.
"Uhm… Crom, you realize Pleo has to win against said sparring partner before he can move on, right?" Nida whispered, as she watched Pleo beat his wings, enjoying his regained mobility now that the mud caking his body was gone, minus a few stains on his feathers.
"Ah, we're fighting as a team of three, I'm sure we'll do fine!" Crom replied back in a hushed tone.
"Nida? Crom? What are you talking about? Aren't we going up the stairs?" Pleo interrupted.
"Heh. We were just talking about that, actually," Nida said as she began to make her way up the stairs, and lead her teammates on.
"So, a 'sparring partner' is a Pokémon that you fight, right?" Pleo asked.
"Sorta. They give you a battle in which they hold back a little so that you can use the chance to improve how you fight," the Nidoran explained as the group reached the top of the stairs and the last level of the maze.
"Hmm? But who is Maestra Mosca going to have us spar with-?" Pleo asked as he gawked at the now unobstructed view of the netting above, before a low, familiar voice interrupted.
"Hello, Crom. I was beginning to wonder when you were going to make it up here."
The three Pokémon paused, blinked, and stopped a moment to make sure their eyes were not being deceived by the sight of the large Druddigon waiting in the room, standing between wall partitions that went up to her chest.
"Wait… Mom? You're our sparring partner?" Crom asked incredulously.
Author's Notes:
- Maestra - Spanish: "Teacher", "Master". Maestro for male counterparts.
- Para ser fuerte - Spanish: "To be strong"
- Otro día - Spanish: "Another day"
- Plancha Voladora - Spanish: lit. "Iron Flying", referring to the move we would better know as "Flying Press"
