Frontier Town Nina's Place

[Jackie Cat]

Laura nodded. Jade got it – and she felt like she got whatever Jade was trying to express. 'It' being the emotion you got after a few months post-spacio-temporal displacement in reality. Howls.

At least she could get some weird comfort out of someone else mentioning the internet. That was definitely a real thing, somewhere else in the multiverse. Laura still missed calculator apps and online thesauruses – not so much social media.

"For what it's worth, you seem... simultaneously 'about sixteen', and a bit older than that at the same time," said Laura. "I kinda like 'sixteen twice' – you're not not sixteen, but... I dunno, you've seen some shit?"

She really had, was the thing. Not that Laura knew all of it, or anything.

"I feel kinda like I just turned nineteen a couple months ago, and also like it's been a year or two since then. The closer to the present day I think back to, the fuzzier it gets. I keep feeling like I'll be going back to the first few weeks after I set out – helps that I did that in winter, and it's cold as fuck in Luctemar lately."

 

[Chibi Pika]

Another sip of warm drink, another slow wave of relaxation. The instinctual flicker of hesitation that always came with talking about her age thankfully remained just a moment. Laura had never made her feel like... like she was too young to be doing what she was doing. Like she was just a kid, even though she hadn't felt like a kid for a long, long time. And, well... she was grateful for that.

"I can't imagine having to wait that long to set out," Jade admitted. Not that she wanted to make Laura feel bad about that fact or anything. She quickly added, "What was it like, finally starting your journey?" Starting in winter was pretty strange, for a lot of reasons.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura winced a little, and made a mock-grimace at waiting that long.

"Uh, well, it wasn't exactly fun or cool or triumphant, you know? Mostly... cold and lonely. I mean, at first there was this brilliant 'fuck-you' feeling of defiance, this sorta 'righteous anger' type of emotion. But it turns out you can't keep that up for too long when you're freezing your tits off."

She frowned, blinking at herself. The expression felt odd to say after months of living as a howling Meowth.

"Um, anyway. It was pretty unglamorous for a while? Lotta bumming curry off of wild area stewards to make ends meet and fobbing off and blocking relatives trying to get a hold of me for my parents. And, uh, the shittiest tent-pitching ever, probably – woke up in a fucking freezing puddle this one time.

"I had... so little idea of what I was doing, outside of strategy and theory and pokémon husbandry that was all totally irrelevant for half my team. I had a gogoat I didn't even catch myself, and a rune-yamask who basically stalked me until I caught him? I felt like a complete muppet for like, the first month or so."

She snorted at herself – it was kindof absurd.

Of course, things had turned way the hell around after that. After Malachai.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade couldn’t help stifling a small laugh. “Oh man, you’re making me real glad I started in the summer, even if it wasn’t a normal start at all.”

She’d shared plenty of stuff about the Rebellion, about the anti-Rocket training, but she spent considerably less time thinking back on the awkward liminal space that was waiting around for the S.S. Anne.

“I, uh, I definitely know how you feel about the whole ‘no clue what I’m doing’ thing, though. I sorta got lucky that Vermilion had a decent trainer camp I could crash at for a few weeks, but there was a lot of living off instant ramen and wondering if I was making a huge mistake.”

Jade glanced out the window, imagining camping out in the cold and the rain, or even the snow, and had to suppress a shiver.

“But like… I think it’s cool that you went ahead with it,” she went on, looking back at Laura. “Even though it was a mess and your family, uh… wasn’t cool with it. But you did it anyway.”

 

[Jackie Cat]

A trainer camp, huh? Sounded like a bigger version of the little community spots Laura had hung out at so often early on. Instant noodles were a familiar necessity. Maybe their starting-out experiences weren't so dissimilar after all.

"Oh, uh, thanks," she fumbled, at Jade's validation. Cool? She was cool. "It's not like I didn't feel like I was making a huge mistake for a while there, but... I'm still glad I did. I think I'd have just turned into a complete zombie at uni, otherwise – and hey, I've even got a few badges, now. Maybe I'm not good-good, but I'm good enough to compete. I think I have a TSR of, like, eighteen-hundred or so?"

A flash of memory— Her teeth clenched so tight she felt it in her neck. The announcer's warning over the tannoy. A growing shadow and the downblast of great wings.

"Two-thousand," she corrected. "I hit two-thousand after my last gym battle."

Her TSR – Trainer Skill Rating – was a relative grading system, like ELO for chess. Below a thousand for novices and amateurs, just above for anyone competent. Sixteen-hundred or so was locally competitive, the kind of score a talented rookie might have after half a season. Two-thousand was when you started to think seriously about calling yourself pro trainer.

(Before he lost, before the scandals, the Galar champ – Leon – had been the best in the world, the only trainer ever to reach a score of three-thousand. Now nobody had a score that high, not even Gloria.)

 

[Chibi Pika]

Those numbers didn't immediately mean anything to Jade—even if it was a metric that existed in her world, it wasn't one she knew about (maybe Rudy or Darren would've known). But it sounded cool, and she had a few badges too, which anyone could understand.

"I got a couple of badges too, but, uh... didn't really go anywhere with that since I wasn't trying to enter the regional championships or anything." Not like Rudy who'd gone and made it to the finals.

Jade leaned an elbow on the table, thinking back to their previous conversations. "Remind me—you said that was related to finding your Purrloin, right? Like you needed a certain number of badges, or...?"

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura nodded. "Yeah, the corporation that has her is also one of the companies filling the trainer sponsorship gap after Macro Cosmos imploded. Figured I needed the money, and getting a sponsorship means getting a foot in the door to investigate them from inside. Somehow."

She sniffed, and shrugged, and reached for her own drink again.

"Anyway, they gave me a little preliminary support, but threshold for the actual sponsorship and getting a deferred first-partner and all that was five badges. In other words, breaking into the latter half of the circuit. The Galar gyms can get brutal once you're in the second-half of your tour. Most of the leaders are these, like, hyper-competitive tryhards – my fifth was this nutjob who interrupted the finals a few years ago even though he'd been disqualified, or something? And he's a Fairy-specialist. So, you know, I was kinda shitting myself given my ace was a dragon."

Her mouth twitched into a slightly smug little smile, tempered with lingering embarrassment about just how panicked she'd been at first, how humiliating it had been for those awful seconds at the end where it had looked like she'd have to forfeit...

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade imagined being in that spot, maybe not in a gym battle necessarily—the gym battles had never been so high-stakes for her, and definitely not a necessary stepping stone for her goals the way that it'd been for Laura. But a critical battle against a team of ground-types when Nine's lightning had always been the team's trump card...

Jade gestured with her mug. "But hey, you beat him, right? Even with the disadvantage. I bet it would've been a cool match to watch."

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura blew a nasal chuckle, and nodded. "Yeah, it was pretty dramatic. Galar's so pumped up on sensationalist sports fan juice that nobody bats an eye at, like, stupid crazy entrances, so—"

Wait, was she going to explain? Yeah, she didn't know how to back out of this without ruining the vibe. Fuck it, why not.

"Well, uh, it's like this. Malachai, my noivern, was – is – my strongest team member. And he's pretty pushy, always expecting me to deserve to be his trainer by working my arse off and all that. And so when I was freaking out about fighting Bede – the Fairy guy – he got all pissed off at me for, y'know, being a bloody wimp? I guess also for not being confident in him, or myself, or whatever. So, he, uh. He took off."

Jade would be able to tell that admitting this meant Laura's guts going cold and falling out, probably, but laughing it off would just feel wrong. So she didn't. Having your pokémon bail on you fucking sucked, and maybe Jade would judge her for that, but whatever.

"But like, I guess he got through to me, 'cause I didn't no-show the match. Went in there determined that even if I lost, I'd at least make that wanker work for it. Did better than I expected, but not enough to win. Then, while I was blue-screening and waiting for the announcer to call the match..."

She laughed at the drama of it. Mal would never admit it, but he was absolutely a fucking diva.

"He swoops out of the air and bails me out. Crowd goes nuts, thinking I'd, like, planned it?? But no, he was just watching to see if I'd piss myself, and when I didn't, he decided to give me another chance. Just barely scraped a win after that. Massive type disadvantage, only decent move I could use was Shadow Ball, I don't think I breathed for a solid couple minutes, but we won. Howls, I don't even know what I'd've done if we hadn't."

 

[Chibi Pika]

Jade couldn't help laughing. "Oh man? That is way more dramatic than anything I've got." Not to mention the fact that this was Galar, where major gym battles could have the kind of audience that something like a League conference would draw anywhere else.

(Laura'd had a Pokemon leave her team, but he'd returned. That kept lingering in Jade's head for some reason.)

"I can't really follow that up, but, uh..."—she leaned back in her seat, eyes trained upward—"I guess our fourth gym match was pretty cool. There was this one part where Firestorm—Charizard, if you don't remember—was up against Magneton, and he was in a spot where even a single Thunderbolt would've been too much, and we really couldn't afford for him to go down there, so we had to—" She carried on with recounting the story, feeling maybe a little bit like it wasn't cool enough to tell, not after Laura's, but she kept going anyway, and it felt nice.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Laura held her warm cider close and listened with delight, the anxiety sloughing off at the realisation that, no, Jade didn't judge her harshly for Malachai leaving. If anything, she'd relaxed a little herself. Now the chat almost felt... peaceful. Nostalgic.

"Ouch, that had to be tense," she said, venturing a little encouraging crosstalk. "What was the play?"

Talking shop about pokémon battle. Howls but she'd missed this. She put up her paw for Nina to swing by with refills – right now, all she wanted was to keep trading stories like this with Jade, feeling normal, feeling like friends.

This way, she didn't miss home so badly as before.

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