The first thing I felt was the ache. Every muscle in my body, from my toes to the tips of my pointy ears, screamed in protest as I pushed myself into a sitting position.
Beside me, a tiny green form stirred. Caterpie, my partner, my one and only Pokémon, let out a soft chirp. His big, black eyes blinked up at me, full of a trust I hadn't earned yet. I reached out, my hand still sore, and gently stroked one of his twitching red antennae.
He was so small. So fragile. And I'd let him down.
A new feeling pushed through the soreness, something hot and sharp, coiling in my gut. Determination. I crouched down, getting eye-level with my little buddy. The scent of damp earth and crushed leaves filled my nose.
"Alright, little buddy," I whispered, my voice raspy. "Forget yesterday. Today is different. Today, we become a team no one can beat. Even Derek."
Caterpie wiggled, a gesture I was starting to interpret as enthusiastic agreement.
From across our small campsite, a twig snapped. Lila looked up from the stick she was methodically sharpening into a spear point. Her expression was, as usual, a carefully crafted mask of skepticism. One perfect eyebrow arched over a piercing grey eye.
"Big words for a guy who got beaten out by a rat," she said, her voice dry as dead leaves.
"A highly-trained rat!" I shot back, maybe a little too defensively.
She didn't reply, just went back to her whittling. But as she turned her head, I saw it—the ghost of a smile playing on her lips. She could act unimpressed all she wanted, but I knew Lila. She saw the spark. She knew raw talent, the wild, untamed energy I had, wasn't enough on its own. It needed focus. It needed discipline. And apparently, it needed a very painful lesson from a smug kid named Derek.
"Okay, Caterpie, lesson one: The Basics!" I announced, striking a dramatic pose in a sun-drenched clearing. "We gotta learn the standard moves. A good, solid Tackle! Watch me!"
I took a running start, focused, and then, at the last second, my instincts took over. Why just be a person tackling? I could be… a rhino! My body swelled, skin thickening to grey armor, a horn sprouting from my nose. I charged, a magnificent, thundering beast—right past the training dummy and headfirst into a thick oak tree. THWUMP! Stars exploded behind my eyes.
"Maybe… maybe not a rhino," I mumbled, shifting back to my normal self as I slid down the trunk. Caterpie just stared, his head tilted in what I could only describe as pure, unadulterated confusion.
Lila sighed audibly from her perch on a nearby log. "You're trying to teach him to be a 'normal Pokémon' by turning into an animal that isn't a Pokémon and crashing into a tree."
"It's about the spirit of the attack!" I insisted, brushing bark off my uniform. "Okay, new plan! Forget normal. We do it our way. The chaos way!"
Thus began the most ridiculous, unhinged, and possibly most creative training montage in the history of Pokémon. We didn't practice moves; we invented them.
"Operation: Frog Leap and Bug Spray!" I'd yell. I'd morph into a giant, green bullfrog, Caterpie clinging to my back. I'd launch us into the air in a glorious arc, and on my command, he'd unleash a volley of String Shot. The first time we tried it, he sprayed directly into the back of my head, and we landed in a prickly bush.
Next came "Monkey Smash and Caterpie String!" I became a hulking gorilla, pounding my chest. Caterpie would shoot a string up to a high branch, I'd grab it, and we'd swing through the canopy like a bizarre green pendulum, aiming to drop onto unsuspecting logs. More often than not, the branch snapped.
My personal favorite, and Lila's least, was the "Flying Hawk and Caterpie String." I'd transform into a majestic hawk, soaring towards the sky with my little green partner dangling below like a piece of airborne artillery. The idea was a high-speed dive-bomb. The reality? I misjudged the wind, the string got tangled in a branch, and I ended up spinning like a top before slamming into another, thankfully softer, tree.
The low point came when I tried to demonstrate a fire-based counter move. "See, buddy? If we face a Grass-type, we need fire! Like… like a dragon!"
My body twisted and grew, green skin hardening into shimmering scales, leathery wings sprouting from my back. I reared up, horns scraping the leaves above, and took a deep, dramatic breath, ready to unleash a torrent of flame. All that came out was a sad little poof of dust and a pathetic cough. I'd forgotten the most important rule of being me: I can look like anything, but I don't get its powers. No fire. No venom. Just the shape. I promptly overbalanced and face-planted with a groan that echoed through the forest.
Through it all, Lila sat there, a one-woman audience of disapproval. Her facepalms were frequent and heavy with feeling. But sometimes, when a move almost worked, when the Monkey Smash sent a log flying a full twenty feet, I'd catch a tiny, almost invisible smile on her face. She saw it too. Buried under all the chaos, there was something there. A spark of brilliance.
We just had to learn how to keep from blowing ourselves up with it.
Slowly, painfully, things started to click. After I tried to use a grass-snake form to intimidate a Litleo and got blasted with an ember, Lila finally took pity on me.
"Gar, you're an idiot," she said, not unkindly. "It's like rock-paper-scissors. Water beats Fire. Fire beats Grass. Grass beats Water. You turning into a leafy sea dragon to fight a Charmander is just asking for trouble."
It sounded so simple when she said it. Obvious, even. I'd been so focused on the how of the fight, I'd never stopped to think about the what.
Stamina was another brutal teacher. Holding a large, complex form like the dragon or the rhino was exhausting. After thirty seconds as a T-Rex (a failed attempt at an intimidation tactic that just made a wild Zigzagoon laugh), I felt like a wet noodle. My shapeshifting wasn't a limitless well of energy. Every form had a cost, and if I spent it all on flashy, useless transformations, I'd have nothing left for the actual battle.
The biggest lesson, though, was that Derek hadn't won just because his Rattata was strong. He'd won because he had a plan. He'd watched us, seen my wild energy, and used it against me. He'd predicted, he'd countered, he'd strategized. My chaos was fun, but it was predictable in its randomness.
I started watching Caterpie more closely, not just as a passenger in my wild schemes, but as a partner. I noticed how he anticipated my movements, how his String Shot was getting more accurate, faster. When I'd shift into a smaller, quicker form like a weasel, he learned to brace himself. His little prolegs seemed firmer on the ground, his posture more alert. He looked at me with something new in his eyes—not just trust, but a kind of battle-ready focus. He was evolving, right alongside my understanding.
"Okay, let's try this for real," I said one afternoon, jogging into a clearing teeming with Pidgey and Rattata. "A low-stakes spar. We'll practice a defensive combo. I'll go badger, you get ready to use String Shot on my signal."
Caterpie nodded, his antennae quivering in anticipation. But as we stepped into the clearing, a strange stillness fell. The normal chirping and chittering died down. The half-dozen Pokémon in the clearing—three Pidgey and four Rattata—all stopped what they were doing and turned to face us.
Something was… weird.
Their movements weren't natural. They were jerky, twitchy, like puppets on invisible strings. Their eyes seemed glassy, fixated on us with an unnerving intensity. Before I could even issue a challenge, they moved. The Rattata fanned out, a perfect flanking maneuver, while the Pidgey took to the air, circling above us like vultures. This wasn't a territorial squabble. This was a coordinated assault.
"Whoa, okay, not friendly!" I yelled, dropping into a defensive crouch. A Rattata lunged, its teeth bared in a snarl that seemed too vicious for its small body.
"Caterpie, now!"
I shifted into a hard-shelled armadillo, curling into a ball just as the Rattata's teeth scraped harmlessly off my back. At the same moment, Caterpie unleashed a perfect, wide-angle spray of String Shot, gumming up the legs of the other charging Rattata and forcing the Pidgey to swerve. We didn't win, not really. We just disengaged, backing away slowly as the wild Pokémon watched us, their bodies still tense, their movements unnervingly synchronized.
Once we were a safe distance away, I leaned against a tree, my heart hammering in my chest. That wasn't right. Wild Pokémon could be aggressive, sure, but not like that. Not with tactics.
"What was that about?" I muttered, mostly to myself. Lila, who had watched the whole thing from the edge of the woods, had a frown creasing her brow.
I shook my head, trying to rationalize it. We were new here. Maybe they were just extra territorial. "Hmm… maybe Pokémon in this forest just hate me."
I laughed it off, but the feeling lingered. A cold little knot in my stomach that told me something was wrong with the world, something deeper than a simple rivalry with Derek. For now, though, it was a mystery I had to put aside. We had training to finish.
As dusk painted the sky in shades of orange and purple, Caterpie and I sat under the sprawling branches of our favorite oak tree—the one I hadn't crashed into today. The ache in my bones was a good one now, the satisfying burn of a day well spent. Caterpie was curled up in my lap, fast asleep, his tiny body rising and falling with each breath.
We lost our first battle. A real stinker of a loss, too. Then we spent a day crashing and burning, learning rules the hard way. The really hard way. But sitting here now, exhausted and covered in scrapes and residual silk, I felt a quiet confidence settling over me. We were starting to understand the rules of this game. And now… now we were ready to break them in our own way.
I heard footsteps and looked up to see Lila standing over me, her arms crossed. She looked down at the sleeping Caterpie, then at me. Her expression was unreadable in the fading light.
"For what it's worth," she said, her voice softer than usual, "that Armadillo-and-String-Shot thing… it wasn't the stupidest thing I've ever seen."
Coming from her, that was a medal of honor. A genuine, unironic smile spread across my face.
"Thanks, Lila."
She just grunted in response and walked back toward her tent.
I looked back down at my partner, a wave of affection washing over me. He wasn't just a Pokémon. He was my teammate. We were a team of chaos and calm, of wild transformation and sticky string. And we were just getting started.
"Tomorrow, little buddy," I whispered, stroking his back gently. "Tomorrow, we start turning chaos into victory."