CHAPTER 2

The next day

Jubilife had a bunch of Pokemon Centers and Marts. It was, after all, the biggest city in Sinnoh, home to millions of people. Where the city really shone, however, was the Pokemon Mall. It was a government-owned facility with stores as far as the eye could see. If you wanted anything related to Pokemon— potions, stones, TMs, grooming, trading— you’d find it in the mall. I, however, was only here for supplies. I had already wrangled my dad into giving me enough food to last the entire trip and then some, mostly in the form of granola bars. He had also bought me camping supplies, a lighter, a small axe and spade, and a book called ‘A trainer’s first guide’. So right now, I was only there for Togepi. She was in her Pokeball right now, since she wasn’t used to being next to so many people at the same time.

The mall was bustling right now with people and Pokemon, but it’d be packed to the brim in a few weeks when the Circuit would actually be about to start. I made my way through the facility with a specific store in mind: the general items store, where a trainer could find the most common, cheaper items. I wasn’t here for the best, I was here for what was necessary, so I wasn’t about to buy a bunch of hyper potions.

Although I wish I could have.

I stepped into the quiet store and inhaled loudly. I loved the smell— it was a particularly perfumy smell, probably what they used to clean the store during the night. I made my way to the potion aisle and grabbed five potions. 300 pokedollars each. Ouch. I bought a few antidotes too, because from what I had looked up, the routes I was going to go through had some bug types as well, although way fewer than Eterna Forest.

I slowly shuffled toward the queue when something caught my eye. The Pokeball aisle.

I wasn’t planning on catching anything.

But… what if, right?

I grabbed five Pokeballs and shoved them into my basket. You never know when you’re going to run into a legendary. It’d be real silly not to have any Pokeballs. I joked to myself.

The woman working at the checkout had dyed purple hair and looked really tired, with deep bags under her eyes. I quietly placed my items on the counter and let her scan them.

“That’ll be 2,800 Pokedollars, please,” She said.

Cursing at myself for not having gotten the money out beforehand, I fumbled through my bag and gave her the cash.

“Thank you for shopping at the Pokemon mall, have a—”

“Um, wait, sorry!” I said. The woman looked at me like I had just murdered her firstborn child. “I had a question regarding repels! I, uh, was wondering if they would work if I was traveling from here to Twinleaf?”

She gestured at the person next in line. “It depends. Most of the time, it’ll just annoy the wild Pokemon, but it won’t actually deter them from attacking you. Hell, sometimes it’ll even make them attack you. They’re mostly only useful if you already have a strong Pokemon at your side when traveling. Twice the deterrence.”

I bowed my head. “Thank you very much!”

“Thank you for shopping at the Pokemon mall, have a great rest of your day,” She said to someone who had just paid. She then turned to me and smiled. “Good luck out there, and good luck on the circuit. It was the best time of my life, although I only got to two gym badges.”

I’m not even signing up for the circuit, I thought, but I just decided to be polite and say thank you. Two gym badges was impressive, though. Every year, after every League Circuit, there’d be stats that came out about the percentage of trainers that got to what number of gym badges. Usually, half couldn’t even get past the first gym. There would be all these tips online about which gym battle was the easiest one to tackle first, and most people agreed on Oreburgh because of the many weaknesses of rock type Pokemon, but most of the time, people would try their hands at the gym the closest to them instead of traveling for weeks with no progress. Probably had something to do with the time pressure and all of that.

I quickly got back home and let Togepi out of her ball. She chirped, shook her entire body, and then smiled as she saw me. I leaned down and caressed her cute little cheeks.

“Hey, princess,” I said. “Got some bad news for you.”

She tilted her head in confusion. She was only a few months old and still had difficulties understanding everything I said.

“We’re going to go on an adventure, you and I. Well, I call it an adventure, but it’s gonna suck. We’ll be living in the wild for a week and a half and sleeping on the cold, hard, ground. Well, I’m exaggerating, dad’s going to bring a sleeping bag tonight, haha…”

“Toge! Togepi!” Togepi exclaimed.

“Are you telling me not to worry?” I guessed. There was no way to truly know what a Pokemon was saying, but a good trainer would usually be able to tell with tone and body language. Not that I was a good trainer, I had just spent the last few months of my life locked inside with this adorable little thing. “That’s sweet. But, uh, yeah, it’ll be dangerous. Not too dangerous, but traveling always has some degree of danger. So I want to make sure that we’re ready.”

“Prrrri?” She asked.

“So I want to try out some of your moves and stuff. You know, just to get you into shape. I need to make sure we’re on the same page with verbal commands and stuff like that, you feel me?”

The Pokemon nodded hesitantly.

“Great! So, uh, there are battle arenas in the city for this stuff, but…” I started twiddling my thumbs. “I was too embarrassed to go. I mean you have all these kids tryharding for the Circuit, I’d just get destroyed!”

“Toge…”

“No, it’s not your fault! It’s completely on me! Well, anyway, let’s see what you can do,” I said as I got up. I tapped my feet and thought for a moment. It’d be great if I had a Pokedex for this, but you only get one if you sign up for the Circuit. Pokedexes allowed you to see the moves a Pokemon knew, so I’d be able to know if Togepi had any hidden moves I had never discovered. Right now, all I knew was that she had Pound, Rollout, Sweet kiss, and Growl.

Pound, I had discovered pretty quickly when she saw dad and I argue for the first time. Togepi believed that the first person or Pokemon they set their eyes on when they hatched was their mother, so essentially, she thought dad was about to hurt her mom. In reality, I had just lied to my dad about stealing a little bit of his money and he had found out.

Togepi ended up hitting him with her stubby little arm, which knocked him on his ass. Scary in the moment to see this tiny baby hurt a human, but funny to look back on. Plus, he basically loved her more than me now. Growl was… well, growl. It was a move almost every Pokemon was capable of learning, and it could trip up an opponent enough to make its attack slightly off or weaker. It usually only worked on weaker Pokemon though. For Sweet Kiss, Togepi had used it on another male Togepi we saw at a Pokemon Center when we brought her in for a check-in when she was a little bit sick. That trainer was practically about to tear my arm off before dad intervened after he came back from the bathroom. And for rollout, that move was more of a theory. Sometimes, Togepi would just roll into things, but the damage it did was substantial, meaning I believed it to be a move and not some random action. I looked at a crack in the bottom of my wall and snorted. Still just a theory, though.

Reminiscing about these events made me nostalgic for some reason. I grabbed Togepi and raised her into the air, and she chirped happily at me.

“Let’s believe in ourselves! We’re gonna do it!”

——

“Togepi, use Pound, and then Rollout!

Togepi’s little arm shone slightly as she ran toward the empty plastic bottle. She slashed it and cut it in half before retreating into her shell and rolling toward one half of the bottle. It was crushed under her weight.

“Good job— wait Togepi, stop, stop!”

She continued rolling right into the counter and dented the old wood.

“Prrrri?” She said, tilting her head.

“Damn it… dad’s going to kill me,” I said, putting my face in my hands. “Togepi, when I say stop, you need to stop, understand?”

“Togepi!”

“You’re saying that, but you keep not stopping!” I said. “Man, the counter is so fucked. Damn it. Is it the momentum maybe?”

“Toge?” She said with a confused look on her face.

“Like, when you’re using rollout, maybe you can’t stop until you run into something?”

“Prrrri!” The Pokemon nodded happily.

I punched my palm as my eyes widened. That was progress!

“Alright Togepi, let’s try this again. You’ve got pound down pretty well, but we need to work on your rollout. Try to stop as soon as you hit your target alright?” I said, grabbing another plastic bottle from the recycling bin.

——

“Togepi, stop!” I screamed as I winced, expecting her to hit another wall.

Togepi slowed down and clumsily ended up on her back. She struggled to stand back up, taking a few seconds, but she had stopped!

“Yes! Yes, yes, let’s go! You did it, princess! I’m so proud of you!” I said, grabbing her and spinning her around.

“Prrri! Togeprrri!” She said, happily moving her arms.

“Arceus, what time is it? Is the sun already setting?” I asked myself. I grabbed my Poketch from my pocket and my eyes bulged at the time. It was already 5:23 pm. Dad was going to be back any second!

“Oh, fuck.”

I cleaned up where I could, but it was no use. Dad always came back by at 5:30 pm at the latest. He walked into the house as I cleaned up some glass from the ground that Togepi had knocked down by rolling into a cabinet.

Togepi, as usual, chirped as she ran toward my dad, oblivious to the dressing down that we were about to receive. Dad dropped his keys when he entered the kitchen. He had calmly asked me to go back to my room to wait for him to finish cleaning up. That was bad. Calm dad was really mad.

Twenty minutes later, give or take, dad entered my room and crossed his arms. He stood at the entrance, blocking the door.

“Grace—”

“I’m really sorry, dad! I just got carried away and, uh, I wanted to train Togepi for our journey. It turns out that it was really fun and I— I’m sorry,” I finished weakly.

“Grace, I’m not angry at you because you wanted to train. In fact, I’m proud of you for taking this seriously. I just don’t understand why you had to do it here. There are public arenas for this very purpose!” He said, finally raising his voice. “Pokemon gyms, new trainers looking to battle, everything! Now I have to deal with this and work,” He sighed.

“I’m sorry,” I just said. Togepi seemingly imitated me and gave a sad chirp.

“Look, you’re leaving tomorrow and I don’t want this argument to be on your mind when you’re out there, so I’ll just let it go. But promise me, when you come back and if you happen to want to train again, you’ll actually use the correct facilities.”

“I will, I was just scared… sorry.”

“Scared? What do you mean?”

“I was scared that I’d just make a fool of myself. You have all these trainers— really good trainers, even, training for the Circuit, and I’m just… there. I’m a really bad trainer with no experience and I have no idea what I’m doing,” I vented.

He took a deep breath and sat down next to me, wrapping his arm around my shoulder. Togepi jumped on my thighs.

“Grace, I thought you didn’t care about training or battling?” He asked softly.

“I mean, I don’t. Or I think I don’t. I still don’t want Togepi to get hurt, but training her today… it was fun. More fun than watching some shi— crappy tournament on T.V. or browsing the internet. I was actually doing the real thing. But I feel that if I actually took that final step— that step into the real world, then I’d realize how behind I am regarding everything Pokemon-related. It’d be like getting woken up with cold water. So if I stay home, I’m safe in my little bubble. I can act like I’m getting better and not just pretending.”

“Wow… that’s some heavy stuff, kid,” Dad sighed. I just nodded and hugged Togepi. “Listen, I won’t go into wanting to be a trainer, or signing up for the Circuit, or whatever. But, Grace, to be successful in life, you’ve got to be unafraid of failure.”

“What if the failure is really big?”

“Really big? Come on, losing your first battle is an event almost everyone goes through. Want to know how my first battle went?” Dad asked.

“Uhuh,” I simply said.

“I signed up for the Circuit as soon as I turned fifteen along with Herdier— well, he was a Lillipup back then. I set off toward Oreburgh on route 203, and I was challenged by some other kid way younger than me. He looked eight, or nine, so he wasn’t on the Circuit. I got cocky and underestimated him. His Budew just completely obliterated me. I couldn’t even get one hit in.”

“No way,” I said with a small gasp.

“I swear! He’d just keep his distance after setting up Leech Seed, and Lillipup was too panicked to do anything. He started rolling around the ground, trying to get the plants off of him while Budew kept attacking. It was… embarrassing, to say the least. But you know what I did after that?”

“You went on to win the Conference and then the League to beat the Champion?” I joked.

He chuckled. “Young me would have wanted that. But no, I went back to square one, and trained for a few weeks in Jubilife before setting off again. Of course, when I reached Oreburgh I got my ass kicked by the Gym Leader, so the story doesn’t really have a great ending,” Dad coughed and clapped his hands. “But it’s about your mindset, kid! You can’t be just doom and gloom all the time, right? Whenever you want to get good at something, you’re going to fail at some point no matter what— even the most gifted, talented people fail. Get it?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I nodded. “Thanks for the pep talk dad.”

“I’ll be rooting for you during your Circuit.” He grinned.

I pushed him off me playfully. “Shut up, I’m not signing up for it. As soon as I get back from Twinleaf, I’m never battling or training again.”

“We’ll see about that. You got the bug, it’s going to be impossible to get rid of now.”

“The bug?” I frowned.

“The training bug. It’ll grow and grow until you only want one thing,” Dad paused.

“To be Champion,” I finished, as something clicked in my mind, and dad’s smile grew into a wild, toothy grin.