This is a PSA to please watch Parks and Rec if you haven't yet bc it's great; you'll have to power through season 1 which is terrible but only 5 eps and then trudge through season 2 a little because it's only ok, but then it gets exponentially better and takes over your life! Which is sort of a good thing bc quarantine and idk who has a life rn. Specifically my love life consists of just Ben Wyatt he's so sweet ugh.

Anyways I guess I wrote a chapter lmao:

(CW some depression)

I unrolled my new earbuds and plugged them into my poketch. I was annoyed with myself and mildly depressed and wanted to wallow, which meant I needed cheap earbuds from the electronics counter at the Pokemon Center. What's that, you say? Being a teenager? Then how do you explain me not having earbuds til now? That's right, you can fuck right off.

Lunch was okay. I mean, the food was way better than Pokemon Center cafeteria food, but I couldn't enjoy it. Dawn and Thomas talked mostly. Sometimes Lucas. It always seemed to be either Lucas or me in the conversation, never both of us. I mean, don't get me wrong, Dawn and Thomas occasionally tried to pull me in, but if me joining meant Lucas checking out, then I'd rather just stay out of it. I wasn't in the mood to talk, anyways.

Lucas left early to train. Thomas went to the restroom while we were on our way out.

"Hey, Evelyn?" Dawn said.

"Hm?" I said, hoping to Arceus she wasn't about to start gabbing about Lucas.

"Are you okay? You've been really quiet all through lunch," she said, looking concerned.

I immediately felt horrible for what I'd thought about her a moment before. "Yeah, I just… the tag battle didn't go well for me, so now I'm worried about the tournament."

"Ohh. Well, if you wanna train, I'll be around. Or let me know if I can do anything else," Dawn offered.

"Thanks," I said. Dawn smiled. She'd only ever been nice to me. And she was a kickass trainer who hadn't fucked up her tag battle. And Arceus, her eyes were pretty. She was pretty. I wasn't personally attracted to her (Was I? I wasn't. Was I? Ugh.) but Arceus, she had every advantage over me. And Lucas… I couldn't compete with her when it came to Lucas. I didn't even compare. Even without them being much closer friends, I couldn't compete with her on an objective level, and this and the fact that there were so many other things happening that I couldn't control pissed me off.

Anyways, so now I was listening to music. The earbud wires dangled weirdly between my wrist and my ears for a while before I realized I could thread them up my sleeve and out my collar. My poketch's music library was minimal – just a couple of songs my parents used to listen to – so I logged on to a Pokemon Center computer to find my own music.

My pokemon were out training during this time. There were enough trainers around that I felt safe even without them, and they could handle themselves. Plus, it looked like having them train on their own would be for the best, since I couldn't reliably be present during battles. Fucking useless.

Turned out I was right, too, because Thomas wanted to play Jenga that night and when I knocked the tower over, Def caught it psychically before it could fall off the table. He rearranged the blocks, deftly resetting the tower to the top of the game.

I frowned. The action had seemed more versatile and controlled than a confusion attack… "Def, was that psychic?"

"Oui," he said delightedly. "Je learned it today."

"Wow, congratulations. How did you figure it out?"

"Magic."

…damn, okay, don't tell me.

When I woke up at ten the next morning, the world felt heavy.

Arceus damn it, not again.

Thomas was long gone – it was the day before the tournament, so I got that. I managed to send my pokemon out to train and plug my ears into my poketch, at least – half the reason I bought earbuds was because I read listening to music can help with depression. It definitely depends on your song selection, though. Sad songs? Gonna make you sad. Still, sad was better than nothing at all.

I got dressed and brushed my teeth, and then sat on my bunk, staring at Thomas's side of the room.

Now what?

Maybe I'll walk down to the lake.

It was a short walk from the Pokemon Center to the lakeshore, but it took a little longer to find a spot undisturbed by trainers. There was a small ledge hanging over the water, shaded by a tree with roots half-exposed by erosion from the lake's waves. The Valor Tournament uses a variety of terrain for its battles, so there were trainers in the vicinity making use of the forest and the lake and the shoreline, but here the underbrush was too dense for pokemon training.

I sat on the dirt and dangled my feet over the edge. If I stretched my legs down far enough, the toes of my shoes skimmed the water. My music was slowly moving in a more optimistic direction. I felt okay.

After sitting there for a while, maybe five or thirty minutes (if I couldn't estimate time before, then I sure as hell couldn't now), my thoughts drifted in the direction I'd hoped they'd steer clear of. I still had no idea how I was going to handle the tournament. So far the best I could do was send my pokemon out and hope they made the right decisions. I'd done that in some Galactic situations, when all my pokemon were all out at once, but fighting a mob of Galactic pokemon is different from fighting trainers one-on-one in a high-stakes, focused tournament battle. I knew Prom could handle it, but that's because battling was such a strong suit of his anyways. Even Coeur had been struggling at points during yesterday's tag battle.

Worse yet – if I just sent them out and barely gave them commands, just kind of unreliably chimed in when I came back from another timeline, letting them handle battles on their own, could I even take credit for any wins they earned while I was off skipping through time? At that point, could I even be called a trainer?

I exhaled and looked across the lake at the sky. One good thing: Dialga had eased up on his bullshit after the tag battle. So while I was still feeling down and useless, at least I wasn't also experiencing time like a broken record. I took my earbuds out to hear the wind and the distant sounds of pokemon training.

There was a rustling from behind me – I heard it first at a distance. The sound approached slowly, but audibly. It was the steps of someone who had no desire to hide their presence from me.

"Your pokemon are worried about you."

I looked down at the lake. He sat down by my side, legs dangling over the edge like mine.

"What's going on? Your pokemon need you."

I shook my head. "No they don't."

"Oh?"

"I can't be relied on during battles, thanks to Dialga, but they're fine without me anyways. They train without me. They fight without me. I can't take credit for anything they do. I may as well not be here."

"That's not true."

"Didn't you see our tag battle?"

"You mean the battle you missed most of, but which you told me about before it happened?"

"What?"

"You told me to send Marcassin underground because you knew about their dig-discharge combo, and then you told me how to recognize that the sudowoodo was going to use earthquake. You basically saw the future and told me about it. Sure, you disappeared for most of the battle, but you gathered information and made the most of it during the five seconds you were present."

"I just did what I could. It wasn't much."

"Well, we'd have been obliterated if you hadn't told me about Pikachu using protect before an earthquake."

"Thomas, giving general instructions at the beginning of the battle is not the same thing as being there for my pokemon throughout."

"But you were there, weren't you? You were jumping forwards and backwards and hitting the ground running each time, right?"

"Sure, I was active and present for all the parts I experienced, but Coeur barely got any of that, at least in this timeline."

"That doesn't matter. The effort you put in matters. What you did was pretty fantastic, given your situation."

I sighed. "That's sweet of you, but you can't tell me it doesn't matter if I miss entire pokemon battles. I may as well not be a trainer at all."

"You know that's not what being a trainer is about."

"What isn't?"

"Battle directions," Thomas said. "It's just as much about the training that goes into the battle beforehand, maybe more so. But even more importantly, it's about knowing your pokemon and their needs, and taking care of them, and being there as a mentor and friend. You know this, Evelyn."

I did. I knew that half a battle is in the preparation, and that battling is a tiny fraction of trainer responsibilities. When did I forget that?

"Oh, Arceus," I said, tilting my head back in frustration, "I've been so fixated on battling, I've been neglecting the rest of my job."

"It's okay," said Thomas. "It happens. I spent a month too focused on my breakup to train."

"Not the same thing exactly, but I appreciate it," I said, standing up.

"I just mean it's easy to fixate on the bad and forget everything else," he said, standing too. "You might have problems sticking in time, but you're a hell of a trainer in the ways that matter. Don't forget that."

He smiled. His dark brown irises shone with chestnut highlights, like they were inlaid with reddish-brown gems. I blinked and was sitting by the lake again, legs dangling over the edge. My earbuds were in. Thomas was gone.

I got up and started walking back toward the Pokemon Center. On the way, as expected, I ran into Thomas.

"Hey," he said cautiously. "Doing okay?"

"I am now," I said. I stepped forward and hugged him, then released him before he could reciprocate. "Thanks for coming to talk to me."

He blinked but caught on quickly. "It already happened, didn't it?"

"Yeah."

"So… how'd it go?"

I smiled. "It went pretty well."

My pokemon were excited to see me – even Faith, whom I usually thought of as my most oblivious pokemon, so her reaction said something about my absence.

"Okay," I said, my team huddled around me. "Tomorrow's the beginning of the tournament, so we should take it easy, for the most part. There's just a couple things I wanna look at."

Trust, I'd learned, was more of a heavy hitter than a fighter. He had an instinct for the exact movements that would serve most efficiently. "If you ever need to move faster, harness mach punch wherever it helps," I said. "It might be your hand, or maybe your leg, or your head. It'll speed you up and open up your movement options. Feel free to use it even if I don't specify to."

With Prom, I brought up a bite-based move that just combined a bunch of energy – mostly dark, water, and ice, but whatever else he could harness as well. Coeur had done something similar once, combining multiple moves for added power against Dawn's altaria.

"On top of that, I have an important job for you," I said seriously.

"Bui."

"In case I freeze completely during battle, you'll be my first pick for the following round. I'll need you to recall whoever was before you before you head out."

"Bui."

"Faith, you're my second pick for this. If Prom is down and I'm not doing anything, get him back into his pokeball and then go out there and prank the other pokemon a bunch. Hypnosis, confuse ray, all that."

Faith giggled. Mischief was her native language.

As a togekiss, Hope was naturally predisposed to learning aura. Right now that meant we easily managed to teach her aura sphere, but in the future it would also mean teaching her to communicate like Coeur. "Also, if I disappear, can you be cheerleader?" I asked her very seriously. "You can talk to whoever's battling through Coeur or Def. Keep their spirits up."

"Tos," Hope said with mock seriousness, barely concealing the "hell yes" energy radiating off of her.

Def had learned to encase his swords in psychic energy in order to deflect things, effectively using psycho cut as a defensive move. When I suggested he extend that concept to other parts of him, we found that pretty much any part of him could be protected with psychic energy. "It won't work against dark moves, though," I pointed out. But otherwise he basically had psychic armor, which is pretty cool.

In order to teach Hope aura sphere, Coeur and I followed through on the realization I'd had during yesterday's tag battle, and pretty soon she was conjuring and throwing aura spheres as easily as shadow balls. "If I ask you to use dark blast, I mean to just use dark pulse in small pieces, just like shadow ball or aura sphere," I said. "I'm also relying on you and Def to help with communication throughout the team.

"Sounds good. I'm glad you're back."

"I'm sorry I was ever gone," I said, addressing all of them. "I got so focused on what I couldn't do, I forgot what it really is to be a trainer. I'm sorry."

"You know you can talk to us when you're down, right?" Coeur mentioned. "Whether it's about the battling thing, or Lucas, or being depressed – We're here for you too."

"I've been trying to stay strong for you, for the most part," I said sheepishly. "I'm supposed to lead you, as your trainer."

"You can lead and still need help," Coeur said cheerfully. "Besides, we're around you too much for you to hide from us."

"Fair." I nodded. "Okay. I'll start being more open about what's going on."

Coeur smiled.

"Ready for tomorrow?" I asked, putting my hand in the middle of them all. They joined in their various ways – three hands, two paws, a wing. "What do we want to say on three?"

"Bui."

"Tos."

"Spruce!"

"Teamwork?"

"Infer."

"L'équipe."

"Uh… okay, great, say that on three. One, two, three–"

We all shouted something and then went down to the lake for a brief lake day, and then we returned to the Pokemon Center to rest. I was back. And we were ready.

Here we go! Last tournament of Chance!