"Oh, hey Dawn!" Kenny waved, as they reached the Solaceon Contest Hall. "I guess you're going to be taking part in this one?"
"...maybe," Dawn replied, frowning. "I… actually think that's a good question, because I'm not sure if I've got this issue sorted out yet."
Kenny looked confused. "What issue?"
"Long story short, I'm now older than you," Dawn answered. "Ash, can you help me talk to my Pokémon about this?"
"Sure," Ash confirmed.
"What do you mean, you're older than me?" Kenny asked. "How is that a thing that can change?"
Kenny did eventually get the story in a slightly less shortened version, then Dawn sent out her five Contest Pokémon and crouched down with them.
"So… I don't actually know if I'm ready to try Contests again," she admitted. "You guys get what I mean, right?"
"I think so," Pachirisu said. "You mean that you're not sure yet if you're properly used to battling in a Contest sort of way."
She flicked her tail, sending sparks flicking off it, and Ash translated what she'd said.
"That's it exactly," Dawn confirmed. "And… it's hard to decide, really."
She held up a finger on one hand, then a finger on the other.
"Because I can't really decide if it would be better for me to get that practice in a live Contest, or if it would be worse for me to try a second time and fail again, rather than waiting until I think I've got the problem sorted out. And… this affects you all, so I thought I'd ask."
"Hmm," Chimchar said, thinking to himself. "So… I don't think it really matters, but who would you be using?"
Ash passed that on, and Dawn considered.
"Pachirisu for one of them," she said. "And I've got a routine for her and Turtwig, so I could use her in the Appeal or Battle rounds."
Pachirisu and Turtwig exchanged looks.
"What do you think?" the Grass-type asked. "You're the one who wasn't in our last Contest."
"I don't know…" Pachirisu said, thinking. "Well, now I feel a lot like I imagine Dawn is thinking."
Ash passed that on, and Dawn stifled a giggle.
"I'd say that it's okay to try either," she said. "Which… actually doesn't help, now I think about it."
She looked at Cynthia. "Do you have any advice for picking between two options that you think are equally good?"
"I'm sorry," Garchomp said, startled. "Have you ever met my trainer?"
Latias held up a hand.
"I have input!" she said. "I asked my brother about it, because he's an impartial observer who has very little context, and he said that getting involved in the race worked out okay last time so he'd probably be okay with it."
Pikachu tilted his head.
"Okay, maybe I gave him too little context," Latias said. "But still."
"I… think I get where to go from that," Ash decided. "How about thinking of it this way… Dawn, what's the worst that could happen if you do compete?"
"I could lose," Dawn said. "But I guess… even if I was doing things right, that could happen anyway. Most Coordinators lose most of their Contests."
She took a deep breath, then nodded, and picked up Pachirisu and Turtwig.
"Let's go," she said.
"Appeals look really amazing from this side," Sneasel said, sitting on Cynthia's lap. "Right, Chimchar?"
"Yeah, it's really cool," Chimchar agreed, standing on the chair between Cynthia's seat and Ash's accessible standing space. "Doing that routine we did was really interesting, but now I'm watching them from the outside too and it's great to see – look at that!"
Kenny's Breloom had just punched up after using an Energy Ball, shattering the Grass-type attack in a cloud of sparkles that went along with the Stun Spore Breloom had used earlier, and the bouncy Pokémon posed in the middle of the glitterstorm that rained down all over the arena.
"Oooh," Sneasel gasped, standing up for a better view. "That really is amazing."
Then she looked down. "Oh! Sorry, did one of my claws jab you?"
"Are you worried about hurting me?" Cynthia checked, then had another bite of her ice cream. "Don't worry, I'm prepared."
"You are?" Sneasel said. "How does that work?"
She looked at Latias, Koraidon and Ash, in the hopes that one of them could explain. "I don't get it… I know I have to be careful with my claws, because I'm Poison-type, but why would Cynthia be prepared?"
"I think I know," Ash replied, sniffing. "Cynthia, is that Pecha ice cream?"
"Of course," Cynthia answered. "It's the obviously superior choice with a Poison-type around."
"Wow," Chimchar said. "Ice cream that's good for you…"
When Turtwig's turn on the Appeal stage came around, his Appeal involved Razor Leaves that fountained up into the air before falling back in a stream that concealed him entirely – for about a second, until a Seed Bomb detonated and revealed him in the middle of the pile.
He glowed green with the light of the Synthesis he'd just used, both adding to the natural light on the Razor Leaf fragments and healing away the impact of the close-in Seed Bomb, and the glittering reflections on the Razor Leaves drew applause from up and down the crowd.
"That was close," Cynthia said. "Until the Seed Bomb went off, I wasn't sure if she'd made the mistake of letting the move conceal the Pokémon. That's something that sometimes happens in Contests."
In the Battle Round, Dawn relied on her Pachirisu, and her first opponent was a Steelix.
The giant Pokémon seemed almost too big to fit in the arena, but made use of grace, poise and moves that didn't involve moving around too much; Pachirisu, for her part, did move around a lot, using Quick Attack to avoid the attacks from Steelix and also taking a leaf out of Miraidon's book by triggering a burst of Discharge.
Pachirisu's blast of electricity didn't do any damage at all, but it fended off a Dragonbreath attack and also bounced Pachirisu into the air in a graceful flip.
Ash's attention, though, was on Dawn as much as on the battle. More than once he saw Dawn stop and correct herself before telling Pachirisu what to do, and that wasn't great but it was better than actually going ahead with a battle move.
He wasn't an expert on Contests, even after watching a lot of them and doing one from each of the two places you could do one, but it seemed like a lot of what Dawn was earning points for was reacting to what Steelix was doing. Since she mostly only had Electric attacks – completely useless against Steelix – and a Quick Attack which was only slightly useful against Steelix, it actually seemed like this was a good first match to get Dawn back into the Contest groove… precisely because it would be a bad match up in a battle situation.
Though Pikachu would do better, Ash was sure.
After the Steelix came a Rattata, a very different and much more agile proposition, and Dawn and Pachirisu switched to making more extensive use of Discharge. Both Pachirisu's new Quick Attack move and her ability to use her tail for balance gave her extra variety in how she used Discharge, letting her zip around as she used the move to make patterns in how the electrical burst flashed out.
Koraidon said that she thought Miraidon would enjoy it.
Then the finals came around, and Dawn's Pachirisu went up against Kenny's Prinplup.
More than anything else, that was a test of how well Dawn was able to stick to the Contest style of things. Prinplup was tough and had the move Metal Claw which he used to divert away much of the impact of Pachirisu's electrical attacks, along with using Bubblebeam to keep the pressure on her, and even as a spectator Ash could feel the urge to have Pachirisu fight back properly.
It didn't work out perfectly for Dawn, or for Pachirisu, and they lost points a bit at a time as Prinplup's Bubblebeam intersected with Pachirisu or as Prinplup deflected most of the force of a Discharge. But at the same time Kenny was losing points too, as most didn't mean all and as Pachirisu managed to keep using Discharge to boost herself away from a Bubblebeam or even make the attack itself veer off slightly – enough to miss.
"Pachirisu!" Dawn called, as the time clock got close to the end of the match. "Get a Spark ready – then Quick Attack!"
Pachirisu glanced at Dawn, sparks flying around her cheeks as she built up charge, and Dawn nodded.
"Mist!" Kenny ordered. "With a flourish!"
Prinplup did a twirl, using Mist to send out a thick white cloud that sparkled under the lights. It obscured exactly where he was, and the judges muttered amongst themselves as Pachirisu finished charging up.
"Go – swerve left and Discharge!" Dawn said, the commands almost on top of one another, and Pachirisu darted into the white mist. She jinked left before actually reaching her opponent, pulsing out a Discharge as she went, and the blast of electricity that came off her tail whipcracked outwards in both the direction she'd been going originally and the one she'd changed to.
The complex, interacting electrical currents flashed into the Mist, repelling it away in a kind of foggy shockwave, and that combined with the flash-and-bang of the Discharge itself to give the impression of an explosion big enough to shroud the whole arena in smoke.
"Remarkable!" one of the judges gasped.
"That looked familiar," Koraidon said. "Now I really wish Miraidon had been watching!"
"Thank you so much, Pachirisu," Dawn said, afterwards, giving her Electric-type a hug. "For trusting me."
"I thought you probably knew what you were after," Pachirisu replied, cooing back. "And now we've got a second Ribbon!"
She did a twirl, and Dawn giggled.
Ash let her celebrate, not wanting to interrupt, then stepped forwards.
"Dawn?" he said. "You know how you said you got messages from Walking Wake and Iron Leaves?"
"Yeah?" Dawn replied. "Why?"
"Something Koraidon said during the Contest," he explained. "And I realized – see, I made a promise to a friend of mine, and I didn't know how to make it work at the time. But now I do know how, or, Walking Wake and Iron Leaves can probably work it out… so if you have a way of asking them to help, that would be really great."
"Sure, I can try texting them," Dawn said, reaching for her phone. "Let's see, uh…"
As she unlocked her phone, though, it went bing!
"...I just got a text from Iron Leaves," she reported. "It says… sure thing, dad, off to do it last week."
Dawn looked up from the screen. "Do you ever feel kind of impressed how much something goes over your head?"
Ash waved a hoof. "I think those two are probably the experts…"
AN:
Time travel twin trouble, eh?