Counting Sheep - A Pokemon Trainer quest

True to her word, Melati wakes you up with a shake of your tent and a terse call to get up as soon as dawn rises, and allows for no sleepy grumbling (not that you'd protest — you can handle this ! It's just… really early, alright ?) as you drag yourself out of your tent laboriously.

The low ambient light betrays that the sun has barely started peeking over the horizon, and the fact you managed to plant your tent in a patch of shade means you don't even get a little sunlight to stave off the chill of an early May morning in the woods.

It's probably because you're still half-asleep that it takes you this long to remember that you planted your tent in the middle of a clearing, and that there shouldn't be a patch of shade where you stand.

Very slowly, you look up, and are rewarded with Nekeh the Arbok's grinning face staring down at you — or at least, it feels like it's grinning, as it uncoils from around your tent and slithers off, making hissing sounds you think you are beginning to identify as being of the happy variety. You can't actually tell any of its expressions apart, but you just know that sort of look and behaviour.

Dear bird gods, even the pet snake finds you eminently funny to bully. Wasn't becoming a Trainer supposed to bring an end to that sort of stuff ?

Though looking at the tiny, yawning ball of fluff which patters uncertainly after you, maybe that's not going to be the case quite yet.
And in a way, Nekeh isn't even wrong to take the opportunity. It's not like you could tell him to stop.

Thankfully, you don't have to — Melati caught him trying to sneak away, and is giving him an earful about early-morning pranks as you rub your eyes one final open, shaking off what remains of your sleepiness after the Arbok well and truly startled you awake.

Breakfast is quickly dealt with, consisting as it does of the reheated leftovers of yesterday evening's dinner, and by the time it's over your thoughts have actually regained their usual clarity and your vision isn't even blurry anymore !

Melati seems content to pack up quietly, and you don't really know how to break the silence without being awkward, so you follow suit, folding up your tent as Marigold observes curiously.

All that over and done with, you finally take the time to give your starter a proper look-over and… She's already at least half again as fluffy as she was yesterday. For a moment, you panic a little, and try to work out how you could find a pair of shears without turning back after only a day of travel, but reason thankfully soon catches up with you and you remember a fairly important fact about the Mareep line : it stores its electricity in its wool, which increases in volume the bigger the charge it contains is.

That said, you may be reassured as to her health and your immediate grooming concerns, but that brings up a whole other question : how the hell did she have the time to gather that much electricity on a dime ?

Unbidden, your thoughts return to your mentor's observations of your little Mareep yesterday evening. Particularly energetic, a better handle than one might expect of her magnetic sense, a wool of superior quality even straight out of the egg…

The picture paints itself, when you actually stop to think about it in light of this development. Marigold is a natural savant when it comes to her feel for electricity, and with her wool being of notably excellent quality… She might as well have a Pikachu running on a wheel powering her up, constantly.

That was going to be particularly fun to deal once she grew up a little.

Nonetheless, indefatigable as she may become in the future, it's back in the ball for now as Melati and you set out on the road. The both of you still set a punishing pace for her tiny little legs, and now that she's had the time to properly meet you, you're planning on putting her through her paces later tonight when you settle down for the day.

Besides, all pokemon present seem to decide to go back to their balls for this portion of the trip, with the exception of Yasigi. Melati's Sandaconda melts into the ground as soon as you hit the dirt path, and though you see neither hide nor scale of her from that point on, you've no doubt she's keeping a track on all your surroundings.

You didn't really take the time to appreciate it yesterday, what with all the things happening at once, but she has an absolutely amazing seismic sense and underground traversal capacities, huh ?

You ask Melati about it, who just nods sagely when you tell her that you thought Sandaconda could only manage this kind of fluidity and awareness in sand.

"Hmm, not a bad lesson to learn, actually. Alright. I was on a trip to Galar when I caught Yasigi," she explains. "I was there on business, but I figured I'd have a look in the wild for Silicobra, since I was looking for a permanent sixth. Went to this place they have there called the Dusty Bowl. It's part of one of their big conservatory zones, where no human constructions are allowed and only minimal disturbance of the wildlife is permitted. Great fun and great training if you can go one day, though I'd wait until you're stronger and have more team members, it's wilder than most places.

"Anyway, I actually found nothing. Well, I found plenty of them, but while the Sandaconda were amazing, they'd all made good places for themselves and didn't particularly want a trainer, and the Silicobra…. None of them caught my eyes. They were all adorable, but they didn't have that… spark to them. You know what I mean ?"

"… Yes ?" you try. You think you get what she's on about, except you don't really and you're beginning to realise that she's very… instinctual, for lack of a better word, when it comes to training.

No doubt that's been of great help to her, but sometimes it can be a little hard to follow along.

"No ? Well, you'll get it eventually. Anyway, great cuddle piles, but no good fit for my team, so I ended up calling it a day, and since I had still had to be in Galar for a week, I was dragged by a local friend into visiting some ruins. And that's where I met Yasigi. She was a Silicobra that lived on her own, and because the terrain was far more rocky than sandy, she'd learned to accommodate for much harder terrain to navigate and train up her seismic sense. As soon as I met her, I could tell she had that thing more that the others lacked, and she's been with me since," she finished fondly.

Almost absent-mindedly, she sticks out her right arm, and immediately a familiar scaly missile bursts out of the ground to wrap itself around it, finding a way to coil her entire length around Melati in seconds, give her cheek an affectionate nuzzle and then slither off effortlessly to disappear back into the ground.

Alright then. You guess that's the new normal now.

You mull the story over. Beyond the cute aspect you instinctively want to gush smile in a most definitely manly fashion at, you're not actually sure what the lesson she mentioned here is supposed to be.

And since a definite answer isn't forthcoming, you do the one thing she'd spent a decent chunk of yesterday evening hammering into your skull, and ask.

"The lesson ? Oh, right," she focuses back from the absent-minded contentment she'd been showing in the aftermath of Yasigi's affection. "Ah, I guess I got a little distracted. It's more like… Three lessons ? Yes, that sounds about right."

She claps her hands suddenly, drawing a little jump out of you.

"First one : it's fine to go out looking for a pokemon with a specific idea in mind, but don't stay married to the idea. If you don't find a good fit, there'll always be better opportunities, even if it means missing out on a Larvitar or Beldum or whatever people get in a tizzy about these days. I'd say you're always better off with a pokemon that's a good match to you personally than even the strongest, most amazing specimen with which you just don't click."

"Does that mean others would say differently ?" slips out of your mouth before you can stop it, but thankfully Melati doesn't look offended, even if her brow furrows in displeasure at whatever thoughts your questions bring up.

"Some people get the idea they'll make it work, even when it clearly won't," she says darkly. "Most of the time, it just ends in a trainer and a pokemon that fail to reach the heights they could have apart from one another. Sometimes… you ever seen a full power Frustration ?"

"No…" you reply, having an idea of where this is going.

"Neither have those of us with any sense, and those who have usually didn't ever get the opportunity to see another one — or anything at all, ever again."

Ah.

"What they don't tell you at trainer school when they explain about friendship being a known, sort of quantifiable force multiplier for pokemon is that what they're talking about is the trainer bond. Positivity doesn't matter — intensity does. A strong negative bond can actually often be even more of a force multiplier than a positive one. But it makes Trainer and pokemon both mentally unstable. Usually only ever ends one way. Fortunately, otherwise you know you'd get morons all over the place trying to make their pokemon hate them because it makes them stronger."

"Why not just teach that, then ?"

"They used to, until they realised that there's always some morons out there who believe that they can handle it. Eventually, they just started teaching people only friendship worked, and that drastically reduced the numbers. Anyway, that's lesson one," she added, moving on. "Number two — and that one's a little more personal, I guess — is that the best pokemon to train are those that come with something of their own. It doesn't really matter what, or even if they're particularly good at it. The point is, if they have that something, that means they interests and enthusiasm. And what that means is that they'll always train better and with more vigour, so long as you play to these strengths and preferences. It means that they have instincts and desires that you can weave into their training, to make sure it all works in tandem rather than the pokemon having to fight off their instincts."

"I see," you reply, mind already thinking back to the way she only absent-mindedly scolds Nekhe's pranks or lets Yasigi out in the ground despite it being probably easy enough things to train out of them. "But why is that more personal ? That seems like pretty sound logic to me ?"

"Because," she growls out, "there are Trainers who believe their pokemon's talent is all on them. Take… No, you wouldn't know him, or… Oh, actually, take Bugsy."

"Bugsy ?"

You'd never heard anything about Azalea's gym leader being anything other than a very good Trainer, a respected Gym Leader and a precocious talent. Sure, you didn't exactly have your ear to the grapevine for all of the Trainer gossip, mostly because it increasingly sounds like most of it is kept strictly internal to the wider training community, but any bad rumours about a Gym Leader tend to flare up hard.

"Yeah. Don't get me wrong, he's a good Trainer, and a decent enough person, I suppose, but the way he trains his pokemon is… You know about how Bug-types tend to evolve very quickly ?"

"Is there anyone who doesn't ?"

Every school has that one kid, the one who either caught a Bug-type or more often convinced their parents to buy one — they tend to be very cheap, so they're a pretty popular choice for parents who want to give their kid a pokemon but don't have either the will or the money to find something else — and who a handful of years later brags non-stop about having a fully evolved pokemon, and sometimes even more than one, compared to everyone else, usually challenging everyone's housemons to battles and growing insufferable in their boasting.

Then a couple of years later karma usually whacks them straight back in the face with a sound walloping as, with their shitty training skills alone and the lack of challenge, their pokemon stop growing and everyone begins to catch up and overtake them.

You wouldn't be surprised if over half the urban Bug-type population was made of frustrated fourteen-year olds's released pokemon and their descendants after their place in the schoolyard hierarchy suffered from a sudden and noticeable drop.

"Fair. So if you catch them young, or raise them from the egg, you can blitz them through their evolutionary stages if you're good, quick enough that they're sometimes fully evolved even when barely out of what you'd call childhood phase."

So far so good. Nothing you didn't know, and you nod along to signify your understanding, prompting her to continue with a bit more heat to her voice, which contrasts somewhat with the stilted, functional nature of her usual speech pattern.

"Bugsy does that. As soon as they're hatched, he makes sure they're as challenged as possible, so that they don't get time to learn any habits from their pre-evolutionary forms. That way, all the important motor learning, the reflexes training, move acquisition and familiarisation… It's all done only once the pokemon has reached its final form, so that there are absolutely no leftover habits or instincts from their previous forms. They're just systematically more comfortable in their bodies than most evolved pokemon I've ever seen.

"It works. Can't take that from him," she growls through gritted teeth. "And it's not like he's cruel or too harsh in his training. But this only works if the pokemon is still truly young by the time it's done evolving. And to go this fast, that means the only thing they do is training. They get enough time to rest that you wouldn't call it cruel, but they barely even socialise until they're almost adults, and most importantly they don't have time for themselves. They don't get time to discover what they like, what they enjoy, what they want to do. And… You ever seen Bugsy fight ?"

"On TV, once or twice, though the last time was a few years ago," you admit. There's no Gym Leader that's not exciting to watch battle, but some are more entertaining than others. Bugsy isn't one of them.

"Describe his style in one word."

You have to give that one a good think, as you try to call the memories back up. And after a while, you realise why it is you struggle to remember anything that stood out from his otherwise excellent battling and pokemon.

"Efficient, I guess ? Whatever the opposite of flashy is."

"Huh. Not bad," she says, sounding a little pleased — you're not sure whether you're happy at the praise, annoyed she didn't expect you to get it or relieved that it seems to have broken her out of her irritation. "That's the rub of it. His pokemon are all strong, and excellently trained… but they have zero instinct, no flair. Put his team in a mute battle where neither trainer can give orders, and I wouldn't call them helpless… But he'd lose against any other Gym Leader, from most regions at that. No one actually does that except as a gimmick, which is why it isn't that obvious, but every time he's put in a situation where the battle is too tight to micromanage his pokemon, and unpredictable enough his training can't have prepared his pokemon for it, he loses.

"He's not weak. He'd probably beat me about 70 or 80% of the time if we had a match. But all the other Johto Leaders would win about 95% of their matches against me, so…"

So that's the rub of it. You can see why she hates it. He's essentially trained very strong pokemon, but his method comes with a hard cap — the Trainer himself's skill as a battler. Not to mention He's gotten away with it by dint of being very good, but not enough that no one notices.

Huh. You'd always wondered where those 'Bugsy is the weakest Johto Leader' rumours kept coming from, and why they'd been around for so long.

To someone like Melati, who might generously be called a free spirit, dotes on her pokemon like a proud mother and prizes their independence and character… It's kind of antithetical to everything she finds training to be, even if it isn't necessarily wrong per se.
Then again, what with having been a proper Trainer for all fo a day, you guess it's a little soon for you to tell where you stand on that issue.

But for now, it mostly inspires…

[] Revulsion
You share Melati's concerns here. It doesn't matter if isn't cruel or disrespectful, training and the bond between pokemon and Trainer shouldn't be so… utilitarian. You're not just raising battlers, but life partners, and if they're not given the chance to flourish as individuals you might as well be a Battler rather than a Trainer.

[] Wariness
You might not quite have Melati's… vehement dislike of the practice, but something about it still sits uneasy with you. The lack of agency she describes, probably. You don't necessarily disavow the whole idea of moulding a pokemon into a perfect fit for you, but to do so from the day they hatch by removing anything other than training from their lives is excessive.

[] Neutral
You've had Marigold for all of a day, and Melati herself said this was a personal opinion, not so much an established truth. You'd rather wait until you have more of an idea of what's at play here before you commit to an opinion one way or the other.

[] Interest
Considering the problems Melati highlighted, there's clearly some flaws to fix there, but Bugsy might be onto something, providing they can be found and fixed. At the end of the day, the Trainer gives the orders in battle, and removing any element of conflict between these orders and their implementation on the field is a net plus. Not to mention the advantages to having a pokemon wholly familiar with its evolved form, when the latter markedly differs from its pre-evolutionary stages.

[] Approval
Sure it isn't perfect, but by the sound of it the main flaw in what Bugsy is doing is that it's a training method limited only by the Trainer's skill, and he isn't quite good enough to live up to it. But his pokemon neither suffer nor dislike him, and even if they don't have quite as much of a spark as Melati's, it's not like they're housemons either. You don't really see the problem with the method, so much as the lacking execution.


There's a little silence as you mull over what she's told you, which eventually morphs into a sort of companionable silence as the two of you carry on your way. Although you'd started out getting deeper into the forest, Melati had you bank a hard right at one point to take you towards what you think is the Southwest, and as the tree line begins to clear out you see why.

If you'd gone straight through, you'd have eventually arrived in the almost-mountainous forested hills which culminate in the cliffs that dominate this side of Cherrygrove Bay. By no means impracticable — in fact it was a hiking spot of no small renown, so long as one sticked to the paths cleared out by the Rangers, but considering Melati had mentioned wanting to get to the coast, it was a needlessly tiring detour.

Your steps back towards the main Route took you up a small hill, and from there you finally begin to notice the more familiar landmarks you grew up with : further South, by the end of the stretch of coast you can make out, the small fishing harbour of Silverwing, mostly notable to Trainers for having a full Pokemon Centre despite its small size — and for having a dreadfully long name in the First Tongue whose meaning grossly translates to "the village founded in the shadow of Lugia's silver wing".


What they mean by that is that a fisherman once found a Lugia feather on a beach, and brought it to the priests of Sprout Tower in Violet City. They took it as a portent of good luck and a sign it had claimed the area as his, and so a grand shrine to Lugia was erected there, with the feather carefully enshrine in an altar. Tribute was regularly payed to the Bird God of the Depths, becoming a major point of worship, and from the activity around the temple the village sprung.

You don't remember all that much about the shrine itself, save that it was still in activity, but what you do know is that the Lugia it payed tribute to was in all likelihood not the Prime, the Lord of the Whirling Sea, but a lesser one which might have decided to cut its teeth on a nearby area. This is corroborated both by reports from the Temple about the Legendary's power seemingly growing over the decades, and the fact that the end of its appearances seem to coincide with the timing of the lesser Lugia of the Sevii Islands' first sighting.

Scholars are still arguing over whether it was chased out by the Prime once its influence started to encroach on his own domain, or whether it was a spawn of the Prime given temporary lease over part of its sire's territory to grown and learn before striking out on their own.

To the west, instead, you can make out the rocky outcroppings which hide the Ruins of Alph — and the giant fence enclosing the dig site.


The Ruins of Alph were off limits for a very long time, thanks to the priests at Sprout Tower claiming ownership over it and forbidding any intrusion on the grounds. When the authorities started severely cracking down on the local cults' influence, the abbot of the time had a sudden idea. Rather than be forced to surrender all the secrets within to the League, they sealed and hid all the secret tunnels, put up some fake murals to make it appear as though there was more aboveground than there truly was… And then promptly handed over the keys to the League of their own accord.

A veritable horde of archeologists, historians and scientists with governmental accreditation descended upon the Ruins (under previously negotiated supervision from the Tower, of course), ready to sate decades of curiosity… And found nothing all that ground-breaking. Oh, it was certainly a site of sizeable historical importance, but where centuries of rumours and secrets had fed countless rumours, it was 'only' a significant historical site.

Interest waned, until only a small contingent of archeologists remained, and the Tower's secrets could have been kept hidden for who knows how much longer, if a single meddling child hadn't ruined it all.

The most famous small-town heroes in the training world are of course the Pallet Four, but Johto had its own version in the New Bark Three — mostly coined thus for promotional purposes, as Silver only went to the town once in his life. It was… a bit more of a marketing thing, with the Silver League wanting to show off it had talents as promising as Kanto's, combined with the silly chip on the shoulder of a handful of teenagers who wanted to emulate the success of Red and Blue a handful of years prior.

Either way, a boy named Ethan — though at the time he was still trying to get himself called Gold — who was also a Lab Trainer to the regional Pokemon Professor went on a journey of his own, and along the way happened to earn the respect of Sprout Tower's abbot — somehow. In recognition of that, he was allowed into the Ruins of Alph, to train and seek out the local pokemon. After getting in an argument with the archeologists at the cabin where they all stayed, however, he decided to spend the night sheltered in one of the temples — where he accidentally stumbled upon a passage to the underground ruins the monks hadn't sealed, because they hadn't actually discovered it yet.

There he found the Unown that the priests had sealed away. Fun fact : their name actually comes from a misspelling in the panicked report he sent Professor Elm, where he declared them to be an "unown species". Elm thought it was hilarious, and immortalised his trainer's mistake for the world to see.

Ever since the cat has been out of the bag, the Ruins have been put under strict lock and key by the League and the military, once they admitted to hiding the Unown away out of fear of the ridiculous amount of power they could achieve when working together, for all their general weakness and uselessness when alone. They do not take to trespassers well.


You're not going to test them on that.

Before Silverwing, there's the road bridge over the bay, built at great expense for no reason anyone can seem to figure out considering that the land part of Route 32, while a bit more rough than most Routes and prone to small landslides from being stuck between mountains and coastline, was perfectly serviceable.

Jutting above it you can see the raised bridge the Magnet Train to Saffron uses, in another colossal waste of money that is actually mildly justified by the fact that running the tracks through the actual Kanto/Johto border would have meant demolishing the nesting grounds, lairs, domains and general neighbourhood of some of the strongest Named Pokemon in both regions combined.

Presumably, the patch of rock you see barring the way in the distance is Union Cave, though it's not like you could tell.

Nothing you haven't seen a hundred times before — hell, you went hiking in the hills you just veered away from last year alone with some university friends — but seeing it as a road to travel down on, rather than just the neighbouring countryside for the first time… It hits different.

To your side, Melati gives your shoulder a small shove to bring you back to the land of the living, though her smile tells you she understands what you're feeling.

You set off again after her, heading towards the cliffs' base where they slowly transition into the beach — or at least you think so, it's still a little far away. The walk carries on in tranquil enough silence, until a thought suddenly strikes you.

"Wait, what was the third lesson ?"

Melati turns to you, confused.

"What ?"

"That story about Yasigi. You said there were three lessons to take from it, but you only explained two," you tell her, before her blank expression begins to make you doubt yourself. "… Right ?"

"… Ah. Yes. That," she says, face betraying absolutely nothing. She lets you stew in your worry for a few seconds, before giving you what you're going to assume would be a sheepish grin for anyone else.
She really doesn't emote all that much, huh.

"I forgot. Right. Third lesson… Oh. It pairs with the other one. Never only take into account what a species is good or bad at when training your pokemon, but also what that individual is good at. Yasigi's talent was with her tunnelling and seismic sense, so I built her entire style around her being in the ground as much as possible. Manasa shares her mother's affinity for growth and nature control, so her entire style is based around creating a battlefield suited to her and making use of it. Nekeh likes to get in his opponent's heads, so I made sure he's all about making them lose their means. None of these are particularly considered strengths of their respective species, but it was what they were good at and they enjoyed, so I found a way to make it work."

"Doesn't that just seem like common sense, though ?" you ask. "I mean, sure, it might not be the single most obvious thing these species are known for, but it's still things that are known to be within their wheelhouse, no ?"

"Hmm. True. I lucked out. Better example. You know the Surfing Rhydon that does the advertising for the Kimono Girls dancing house in Ecruteak ?"

Did you know one of Johto's most famous internet memes ? Yes. Yes, you did.

"It's actually over sixty years old. He was a donation to the dancing house, but he originally belonged to an old man who was a frequent patron. Aristides Papadopoulos. A three time Silver Conference winner, with also an Indigo Conference winner title and a Lily of the Valley Conference runner-up position in Sinnoh to his name. Served a three-month interim for the Johto Elite Four some thirty or so years ago, back when they were holding the talks about joining Kanto's and Johto's together. Basically, someone who knew what they were doing."

Yeah, you'll bet. It's not the most impressive resume ever heard of, but that's like saying that a Gym Leader isn't all that amazing when compared to a Champion.

"That Rhydon was his ace and starter, the pokemon that he brought to every single competition he ever entered… And I don't think it knows a single physical attack."

"What ? But… I know Rhydon has a crazy movepool, but aren't they kind of terrible at external energy manipulation ?"

"They aren't. It's a common mistake to make," she explained, "but they're actually ridiculously skilled at it, and are possibly the evolutionary line that can be taught to manipulate the most kinds of Type energy this side of Mew. What they're terrible at is imbuing power into those energy constructs. So when Aristides realised that what his starter's joy and pleasure was learning and using all these crazy special attacks, what he did was that he took a step back from thinking of Rhydon as you normally would, a powerhouse, battering ram and tank, and instead imagined a role that would fit his chosen toolkit. Care to guess ?"

You give it a long thought, but struggle to imagine what could be made of that kind of pokemon. Thankfully, the question seemed to have been more methodical than anything, because she doesn't really wait for an answer.

"He turned it into the ultimate utility tool. It has easy terrain control, what with Rock and Ground typing. It could change the weather at a whim, it could freeze a water terrain or melt an ice one, it could happily swim and electrocute anything in the water it was in while being completely immune to it… If you ever get the opportunity to dig the League archives for some of his matches, you should. It was the ultimate anti-control pokemon, because there wasn't a single opponent that could set its pace undisturbed while it was on the field. And sure, it didn't hit anywhere near as hard as most other Rhydon do, but it didn't need to. It's still one of the best-performing member of its species in competitive history that we know of."

That's… actually insane. And you mean that as literally as possible. It takes a special kind of crazy to look at Rhydon, a pokemon with ridiculous physical hitting strength, and enough bulk to tank mountains, and think 'I'm going to rely entirely on its diverse move pool to make it an offensive support disruptor who relies entirely on the external energy manipulation it's notoriously terrible at'.

And that Aristides must have been something else, because if this was easily done you'd have seen a lot more of it. Him and that Rhydon both, you can't imagine any specimen of that line could manage these feats.

Which ties this whole thing back to Melati's lesson. Aristides saw what his pokemon was going to work best with, and when it didn't fit with his plans, he scrapped them up and instead found a way to turn what anyone would have considered a weakness or a fault into strength.

"How… How did he manage that, though ?" you definitely don't sputter out. "I mean… What kind of training would you have to do to get those kind of instincts into a Rhydon of all things ?"

"Beats me," she shrugs before laughing at the face you make at her. "It's not like I knew him personally. Besides, I told you. I lucked out. All of my snakes wanted to do things that were easy enough to devise a basic framework for, even if I had to get a little creative with the specifics."

You want to point out that this sounds absolutely unfair, but that would be entirely too childish — so you just think it really loudly at her and hope she'll pick it out somehow.

Thus goes the rest of your walk, and before long you finally reach the first small cove and the first of the tiny beaches that the area is famous for. You're surprised, however, when Melati makes straight for it, despite the few people who'd obviously decided to settle there for the rest of the sunny afternoon.

Bit dangerous, that. Between the Chinchou, the Qwilfish and the Tentacool, if there's one thing the area doesn't lack for it's interesting ways to drown.

Your sojourn amongst the beachgoers is pretty short-lived, however, as you've barely set foot in the sand when Melati takes a couple of pokeballs out of her strange belt hoop thing (should you get one of those eventually ? It looks kind of stupid, but also really practical…) and releases Pep and Jura, both sea serpents raising a small tidal wave as they materialise in front of the awed vacationers.
Such is the two's power of attraction that even the two men who weren't even being discreet about ogling your mentor instantly forget about her to stare at the Gyarados looking down at them.

You don't get the time to appreciate the scene, however.

"Hop on to Jura," Melati tells you as she herself heads towards Pep.

"Wait, where are we going ?" you ask a little desperately, struggling to keep up — and unable to keep out the excitement in your voice at realising everybody's childhood dream of riding a Milotic.

"Small out of the way cove in the cliffs. Won't be disturbed there except by the Wingulls, we can access the hills from there and it'll be a good training spot for Marigold."

"… Why didn't we just go through the hills in the first place, then ?" you question, as you freeze a little when Jura turns her head to you and trills encouragingly when you try to work out where exactly you should be grabbing on to not drown.

"Easier hike, less chances of being disturbed by wild pokemon, and that way we didn't trespass."

"Trespass where ?"

"I'll tell you later. Hold on tight."

And suddenly all questions flee your mind, as Jura sets off through the surf and everything else stops mattering.
You never thought you'd ever say this, but you rode a Milotic through the waves and it lived up to every childhood fancy you ever had, as the rushing wind and the crash of the waves against the cliffs drown out any other competing noise besides the occasional happy cry from Jura.

All too soon, however, the moment of magic stops as you near what must have been the place Melati told you about, a small secluded beach carved within the cliffs from which you can see a small trail disappearing within the rocky crags.

You're loath to step off your temporary steed, but a warning look from the neighbouring Gyarados with fangs the size of your head holy Ho-Oh is enough to convince you.

So it is you find yourself on an isolated little beach, with clothes you only now realise are completely damp.

… You know, Melati may have been onto something about the minimalist sportswear.

Not that it explains how she handles wearing it in the middle of a damn forest, but it's something.

Surprisingly, the first thing Melati tells you is to start preparing a base camp, as she takes off to follow the trail in order to pick up some firewood. It's not even lunch yet, but when you ask if this isn't a bit soon, she tells you to your surprise that you'll be settling here for a few days at least, to get started on your training.

While you set up your tent, dig out the firepit and clear out the area — Marigold scaring away the few curious Wingull come to bother you through her presence alone as she sticks by your side throughout — you have time enough to realise why.

This is a fairly secluded location where no one is likely to bother you, there's enough space to get started on your training, Melati can stay here for a while without worrying about Pep and Jura having nowhere to stretch their… fins (?) out and between the Wingull and the pokemon in the water, there's a plethora of potential opponents for Marigold that she could cut her teeth on without too many worries.

And indeed, when Melati returns alongside Yasigi — who you are fairly sure has just brought you back roughly a metric ton of eggs, it seems this isn't only a nesting ground for Wingull — that's precisely the reasoning she gives you as the two of you get started on lunch (unsurprisingly, an omelet).

With one added caveat, however.

"The crags above are Cassiopeia's domain," she tells you almost as an afterthought.

"Cassiopeia ? Who's that ?"

"Named Nidoqueen."

You choke unceremoniously on the bit of omelet you were chewing on.

"I'm sorry ?"

"Never heard of her ?" she instead asks, looking sincerely curious and as though she hadn't just told you a very important detail.

"Since when is there a Named Nidoqueen outside Violet ?"

"Hmm, about… a bit less than a decade ? I guess if you don't hear Trainer gossip the locals might not know yet," she adds, mollifying you somewhat. By Named standards, a decade is a pretty short to get established to any but the immediate neighbours. "There used to be a mated pair that ran this area. Nidoking and Nidoqueen. Very strong, but not strong enough to be Named-level. The Nidoking got the idea he alone should be in charge. Cassiopeia challenged him on that, and won. Frankly, she's a bit weak for a Named, which is why she isn't all that famous on top of being young, but she stepped in to rule the domain that had taken two very strong pokemon to keep in line, and has done a smooth job of it, so the locals Named her. A bit too precociously, but she's growing into her strength well, and is heads and shoulders above anything else in the area short of the Depth Lords."

The Depth Lords is a colloquial name the locals surrounding Cherrygrove Bay give to the handful of Named-level pokemon that made their domain in the local watery depths and never really surfaced. Little was known about them, expect for there being a Kingler, a Lanturn and possibly a Tentacruel among them at the last count, though the latter may have been a drifter.

"I… guess it made sense she wouldn't be as famous yet, then. And she's fine with us trespassing ?"

"We're not. This beach isn't part of her domain."

"Oh," you say, relief flooding you. "That's alright then."

"We'll be paying her a visit tomorrow, though."

Your head swivels straight back to her.

"What ?"

"It's only polite," she shrugs. "Besides, you'll have to learn at some point. And it'll be good for you and Marigold to understand why we make such a fuss about the gap between them and strong wildborn."

You try to pry out what she means by that, considering you thought it was simply a matter of fame and strength, kind of like the difference she highlighted between Named Trainers and proper Trainers who simply haven't gotten strong enough to earn a moniker yet, but she clams up and simply tells you to be patient.

Instead, she finds the perfect way to distract you : she gathers you and Marigold (who'd been off playing in the Sand with Yasigi) up and tells you it's time to talk about training.

"Give me the fundamentals of a training scheme," she orders.

"Objective, Means and Incorporation," you rattle off reflexively, years of rote repetition at trainer school catching up with you. "Decide your desired result, then work out how you will attempt to attain it, and finally figure out how you work the developed skill into your wider training and tactics."

As you'd almost begun to expect, your answer draws a grimace out of her.

"This is why the trainer school curriculum should be made by Trainers, not Battlers," she groans. "Forget incorporation. It's the conceit of people who only ever use pokemon for fights and never raised their own properly."

"Really ? How so ?"

"A properly trained pokemon is smart enough it doesn't need to be told how to use its own damn skill," she grumbles. "Can you imagine me teaching Yasigi Coil ? And then trying to explain to her how it works ?"

… You know, when put like that, you're kind of surprised you'd never thought about it. But then again, it's a very… Melati way to look at things.

"I guess not."

"Good. Now the other flaw that comes from this being a Battler's doctrine is that it doesn't account for exploration."

"Exploration ?"

"Most Battlers don't get that they can't work out all the answers by themselves. Sometimes you just train a specific aspect of your pokemon, or a new move, not because you have an idea of how to use it but because they want to, or because you feel it might end up as something interesting. It doesn't account for your pokemon's agency or your own instincts, but instead supposes that optimal training relies on rational planning alone."

Having heard her express a few strong opinions, you feel like you're starting to get a pretty good idea of what Melati's relationship with training and pokemon is. And the truth is that you don't think it's changed all that much since she was a ten-year old who decided to raise her Feebas and Magikarp all on her own. There's a wonder, a very strong human element to the way she approaches these things that you can definitely find an echo in.

To Melati Meriwether, pokemon are beings beyond her comprehension, and training is as much about rising to meet their level than it is about raising them.

It's… admirable, honestly, and you sort of wonder if you'll be able to keep that sense of wonder once you've grown more familiar with your own pokemon.

Would you even want to ? She sounds like she's at odds with most of the training and the battling community, when you think about it.
Something to mull on later, you imagine, focusing back on the lecture.

"So, with that in mind, let's talk about Marigold."

The little Mareep, who had settled in your lap, raised her head curiously, recognising her name and drawing a smile from your mentor.

"Yes, girl, I'm talking about you. It's already fairly apparent where her strengths lie. She's a regular little bundle of energy, even for her young age, with a talent for storing electricity. You might want to do something with that — for example, try to work on her being more efficient in using that external storage as fuel for her stamina, figure out how it might affect defensive uses of Charge or work in conjunction with Electric Terrain.

"You also know that she's got an excellent magnetic sense for one so young, so you could try and make her even better at it, or work on her reaction time, agility or movement… Basically, teach her what she'll need to learn dodging. Alternatively, you could teach her more offensive uses of it, as a targeting system of sorts — Jasmine's Ampharos has so fine a control over his that he tracks his opponent's muscle twitches to predict where they will dodge, though Marigold'll have to be at least a Flaaffy before it'd even be biologically possible for her to get that good.

"And then there's her third quality, which for all it may sound like I hope you didn't just dismiss as a nice extra. She's a beautiful little specimen," she added as she reached out to scratch a preening Marigold under the chin, "and that's not just about looks. You've noticed ?"

"Well, her wool is of particularly good quality," you chance, bringing up your observations from this morning, "and I was wondering if that had to do with how good she seems to be at storing energy ?"

"Among other things," she smiles proudly. "She's naturally talented at that anyway, but it helps. The sheen to her skin isn't just nice to look at either — that odd rubbery texture on their skin the whole line share is an electrical insulator, and hers is of particularly high quality, and the light of her tail is more potent as well. Beauty isn't something you can train in and of itself, most of the time, but what makes a pokemon beautiful is very often parts of them with uses and purposes of their own, and the fact that they are better is absolutely something you should keep in mind. For example, Mareep's fur also serves as an insulator from cold and heat both, so you could decide to train her to better be able to handle those — although I'd wait until she's older before starting resistance trainings. Better to stick to something more fun to her for now.

"Not to mention, you've seen it in Jura, right ?"

You remember your first introduction to the sea serpent, the way she had utterly enraptured you, and the stray thought which had come to you regarding what made her beautiful.

"Power and beauty share… the same source ?" you try, unhappy with the word choice but lacking anything better.

"Very good," she smiles. "To be more precise, the Typeless energy that suffuses a pokemon's body is what makes them more in the first place. And if you follow that train of thought…"

"… A pokemon whose beautiful features are made moreso is one whose power is made moreso alongside it," you breathe out, flabbergasted at the thought.

Something tells you you've just learned something very, very important almost as an afterthought.

"Exactly. She's too young to start working on stretching those… energy muscles out, for lack of a better word. But when she's older, I'll tell you two more.

"If she'd rather, you could also try and get her started on a new move, with Thundershock being the obvious choice, even if you're lucky in that she has no shortage of those already — so you could also work on mastering one she knows. Tackle and Growl are usually not worth the time investment you'd spend bettering them, unless she has something she wants to do with those, but all of Take Down, Electric Terrain or Charge have aspects to them you could work on to make them better."

Suddenly, you're both jolted — literally in your case, as Marigold releases a few sparks — out of the lecture by Nekeh joining the three of you. Unbidden, it coils the tip of its tail around Melati's hand, has a strange sort of seizure, then looks smugly at you and wanders of.

You're not too sure what to make of that.

"Nekeh's right," Melati agrees, utterly confusing you. "Arbok already know that the fact you get electrocuted when you coil around Mareep makes them annoying to hunt, so that's one defensive use of Charge you could train, supplementing the natural static charge of their fur to deter attackers."

Next to her Yasigi, who'd been happily dozing half-buried in sand, gave a small hiss to attract attention, before coiling up around herself in that strange way Sandaconda did, and jumping at a rock, pivoting in the air to make sure to hit it with her flank.

"That's right, combo moves." Melati chides herself. "Almost forgot. Like Yasigi said, that doesn't even have to be a defensive use of Charge — if she charges herself up like that, then she can use it to give a shock to anybody she hits with a contact move.

"Or you could just try to have her fight some of the wild pokemon around, if you're feeling confident and figure you want Marigold to have more of a handle on what battle is like before you orient her one way or another."

This whole conversation is surreal enough it almost manages to distract you from the decision coming upon you.

"So, these are just some examples, if you want to follow them, but what do you and Marigold want to work on ?"


[] Training Plan
— Write-in
— Marigold's choice
— Joan's choice

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A/N: Alright, there it, a week and roughly 9k words later everything added up. Two votes with this one, with one of them being considerably less important.

That vote regarding how you feel about Bugsy's training methods is basically to help me define what your character's relationship towards the pokemon he trains is. There's no good or bad answer there, it's more there to help me write him and his interactions with his team. Keep in mind that Melati's opinion regarding what he does is just that — his opinion, and not in fact a gospel truth.

Meanwhile, the training vote obviously matters more, but it's also one where you can afford to fail, hence why I wouldn't be too worried about it. Part of why I really wanted a tutorial-like introductory part where you're supervised by a mentor is that this means you can get used to the write-in mechanics without really paying for any mistakes, until you have a better idea of what to take into account. Besides, part of that vagueness is the price you pay for picking the more esoteric mentor — who in exchange, has given better insights into how to bond and work in tandem with your mon than the other two would have.

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Votes for this update :

[] [Bugsy] (Approval — it's fine to put all the options that are fine with you)
[] [Marigold Training] (Plan — if you haven't picked the 'Marigold's choice' or 'Joan's choice' options, submit your idea for training in plan format. This is only a half-day's worth of training, so only one focus please)

Let it not be said I don't learn from my mistakes — there'll be a FOUR HOUR MORATORIUM on this vote, as of the moment I post this update.