“No, Jo, a pokémon with a brave nature will dislike sweet berries and like spicy ones, not the other way around,” Rick explained calmly to Jo as they walked together towards the Viridian Forest.

  “Damn it! I got that wrong in last week’s test. Why wouldn’t someone like sweets?” Jo stomped the ground in frustration, suddenly having a vision of herself failing yet another test and needing to have remedial classes.

  “It doesn’t need to make sense, really. Brave, quiet, serious, sassy, and relaxed natured pokémon dislike sweet flavors, so I use the mnemonic ‘ The serious Braviary quietly smashed a sweet berry while relaxing on a sassy tree.’” Rick adopted a professorial tone and guided his ‘student’.

  “Wow, that’s a good one. Where did you learn it?” She looked at him curiously and got closer.

  “I-I made it,” he whispered, suddenly feeling the crushing weight of Jo’s gaze on him as she violated his personal space. His ears began to burn in embarrassment as he desperately fought to prevent himself from blushing.

  He lost, like always, and with the loss came this demeaning feeling of inferiority that made him feel even smaller than he already was. A shame that only made him blush even harder, creating a vicious cycle, but Jo continued, completely unaware of his plight.

  “That’s amazing, dude. Do you have more of these?” she said, sounding very impressed, “Wait, I need to write this down before I forget it.” She opened her bag and began searching for something.

  Rick saw her go from casually putting her hand inside the bag, to stopping to open the bag completely and look inside, to finally pouring out all the contents in the bag to make sure, all in vain.

  She then looked at him with eyes full of hope, so he opened his bag and gave her a notebook and a pencil.

  After that, they resumed their journey, with him timidly chanting mnemonics, and Jo gleefully writing them down.

  ***

  It was a quarter to 9 when they reached the secret base.

  The base was at the edge of the Viridian Forest, close enough to the road that they wouldn’t get lost, but not so close as to be immediately obvious for anyone who walked by, it needed to be “secret” after all.

  The proximity to the road made it so it could be considered a safe spot, at least if you had a pokémon with you.

  This was not an urban area, so wild pokémon appeared sometimes, but they were usually weaker ones, which made it a good spot for beginner trainers to wet their feet in the world of Pokémon Battles.

  The location also made it convenient for them to find “easy prey”, Kai’s words, not his.

  How Kai managed to survive in these conditions without a Pokémon was something that always confused Rick. He knew in his heart that he wouldn’t last even a few days here, and Kai had been living here for more than a month.

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  He and Jo climbed the carved steps on the tree that served as a ladder and entered the base.

  The base was a crude wooden room, simple in design, and only large enough for them all to sit comfortably. It had gone through an expansion after the new members arrived, so now there was a “window”, a big hole really, where Kai put a few clothes to dry. At the corner, he could see an old mattress, rolled up so as to not take too much space, and beside it a couple of canteens full of water, gifts from Grandpa Samuel that Sammy had brought one day after seeing Kai storing water in Bananna leaves.

  “Urgh. Good timing. Rick, help me look if I’m doing this right.” Kai grunted as he greeted them.

  He was sitting by the window, his eyes, darkened by deep circles, held an edge and an intensity that reminded him of their first encounter. Kai was squeezing a Pecha Berry over a purple wound in his arm.

  After covering the whole wound with the juices, he began to massage it while looking at him, waiting for his opinion.

  Urgh. Again with this intense gaze, why do these two like to do this so much?

  Rick complained in his heart, but looked carefully at the process.

  “There’s nothing particularly wrong, but you’ll want to put some bandages on this arm, wait a minute.” Rick went over his bag and took some bandages from his first aid kit, quickly rolling them over Kai’s arm.

  “Good, now you’re patched up.” He smiled, looking at his work.

  “How did you get this wound?” Jo asked, curious but also concerned.

  Kai looked at his arm, moving it up and down, flexing his elbow, trying to see if anything was wrong, but save for pain, it didn’t seem like there was anything hindering him.

  “A weedle crawled through the window in the middle of the night and tried to eat my dinner, so we fought,” he recounted, his tone casual, seemingly disinterested in the whole event.

  “In the end, I won, but it fought well.” He showed his arm to them.

  “Anyway, it was dark, so I waited until morning to look for a Pecha Berry, because it was burning so much that it had to be poisoned.” Kai finished calmly, but looked behind them and asked, “Where’s Sammy?”

  “Probably at home, or on the way, but I would bet he didn’t even get up yet,” Jo dismissed the question. Sammy was notorious for forgetting appointments and getting really late to the ones he eventually remembered, so no one would be surprised if he did so again.

  “Anyway, tell me more about what happened.” Jo quickly got back to the topic that interested her.

  Kai may lack enthusiasm, but Jo had enough for both of them. She began to bombard him with questions about the events of the night; she wanted details of the fight and the Weedle, but also wanted to know how he was feeling, and whether he was in condition to go into the forest today.

  Kai answered her at his own pace, dismissing the whole thing as just an annoying situation. In his words, “It was only a level 3 Weedle.”

  They didn’t know what he meant by that, but Jo seemed to find Kai’s casual response to the events to be cool; Rick, on the other hand, grew concerned.

  He wondered, not for the first time, about Kai’s upbringing. What type of life did he have for him to turn this way? Did he get abandoned by his family? Why was he naked and starving in the forest when they found him?

  These were not normal circumstances, and his lack of concern for his own well-being and situation was troubling.

  He, Sammy, and Jo would graduate from the trainer school soon and be adults according to the law. Kai, on the other hand, didn’t go to school and didn’t even have any family that they knew of.

  His thoughts circled his mind, and before he got to analyse them further, he was already verbalizing them.

  “Kai, what do you want to do in the future?”