A New World, a Fearful Way

by Votederpycausemufins

ch. 16 training

“Okay, I want to see you hit all three of those X’s!” Angela half yelled at Lea. “Ready… GO!”

Lea hit each of the targets with dark pulse. The third one almost missed, but was still close enough to count as a hit.

“Where were your calls? You call you attack right before firing. Let’s them know at least what to expect.”

“Why should I?” Lea asked. “These guys are trying to catch me, or even possibly kill me. They don’t need that advantage.”

“Not calling them is just as bad. Some attacks can kill, and we don’t want to become them, now do we.”

“I… I guess not.”

“Good. Now go again.”

“Dark pulse! Dark pulse! Dark pulse!”

All three attacks hit the targets dead on. However…

“Good form, nice aim, but when you call an attack, you want to be sure you actually use that attack. Still, It’s good to know that you can use shadow ball, so we can try working on that next.”

Lea had fired two rounds of dark pulse, but the third had instead been a shadow ball.

“Keep working on dark pulse, when you get three perfect groupings of three, we’ll try to get you to learn to use shadow ball.”

It took her sixteen tries before Lea could get three rounds of three perfect shots. After a short break, they moved onto shadow ball, which was a little harder, seeing as it was a ghost type move and not a dark type. After getting shadow ball as good as it was going to be for her, Lea was told to move onto alternating the two moves until she alway fired the one she called.

It took over an hour of training, but Angela finally let Lea leave. The training had been done in the sewers as there was no one down there as of then. Lea made her way up to the main floor, and then up the stairs to her room. Going into the office, she noticed two extra papers on her desk.

“No way!” She exclaimed, looking at them. “How did they get here so fast?”

On her desk were two questions from different ponies. Or could they be pokemon. Maybe even something else. Anyway, she answered the questions, and suddenly they disappeared. Before they could, it seemed like some sort of unicorn based magic had enveloped them, so her main conclusion was that was what had taken them.

She waited to see if there was anything else, but when nothing showed up, Lea decided to go back to writing more notes into her list. The day before, she had added a bullet point with the words: repeat in past; and another with: humans=Poké?

Now Lea was ready to add two more. Now, she wrote down: mega evo and notes and work. After looking at her notes, Lea proceeded to underline the second one she had just written. Before she left, Lea added a title to the paper. After scratching out a few ideas for a title, Lea finally decided to go with Questions for Arceus.

“LEA!!!” Angela yelled from downstairs “BREAK’S OVER! YOU’RE WORKING WITH MATRIX NOW! GET TO IT!”

Lea sighed and hopped off her chair, leaving it spinning behind her. She had almost left the room when she went back to put her list away.

She was looking forward to Matrix teaching her as he said they were going to work on a healing move.

“You ready to begin?”

“Yeah. What am I learning?”

“We’re going to see if we can get you to use moonlight.”

“Isn’t that a fairy type move?”

“Yes, it is, which might make it a little harder for you, but it is a move naturally learned by umbreon such as ourselves.”

“Okay what do I do?”

---

“Are you sure this is the only way?” Ire asked the grumpig.

“Yes. Besides, Mightyena is fine with it and no mon else has made any objections, now have they?”

Ire had to admit that the pokemon had a point. none of the other pokemon had tried to voice in otherwise. In fact, Ire could barely remember them saying much at all.

‘Hmph, probably don’t remember them saying anything since I can’t understand them.’

“Now,” started the deception pokemon, “I want you to do what I described to you to Mightyena. Remember, even though he is willing to do it, his brain will still show some restraint. And also remember to have a question for him once you are done to check your work.”

Ire went through what she had been taught. As her magic reached to Mightyena’s mind, she could feel it try to get rid of her. It was enough to get a small reaction out of her, but not much. When this happened, she could hear Grumpig’s voice instruct her, though it seemed farther away than normal.

“That rejection is what you have to push through. The stronger the mind, the harder it is to get through, not to mention they’ll most likely not even want to let you in at all. In other words, this is going to be harder when you do it for real. Now go onto the next step.”

Next Ire started to look through Mightyena’s mind. Eventually, she came to a memory of the day before where he was trying to let her and Quarry out, but was attacked by that other pokemon. It was a simple enough task. Instead of taking away the whole memory, though, she removed and time her was able to see the second pokemon. When she pulled herself out of the spell, Ire could see that his eyes, were a little bit glazed over, but he seemed fine after he shook his head.

“Ask your question.” The psychic pokemon instructed.

“What pokemon attacked you when you were trying to free Quarry and I?”

Mightyena looked at her with a little shock. “That’s all? It’s easy, it was a…” The bite pokemon paused. “I… I can’t remember. I can remember them attacking, but can’t remember even seeing them. Was that supposed to happen?” He asked Grumpig.

“If Ire’s objective was for that to happen, then yes.” She told him. “Very good. Just remember that it will take longer when you do it to that umbreon if you want to fully suceed.”

“I forget, why is this better than just getting rid of her?” Ire asked Grumpig.

“Because, this is worse. I found one account of this being done by a unicorn once before, a long time ago. Any books or papers written on how to do it were destroyed. The book I had found about it called it living death.”

This piqued Ire’s interest. “And why was that?”

“Well, the book said how one pony had done so much wrong, that death was too kind for them. Of course, your princess tried to stop them from doing anything worse, but what they did was basically clean the slate of the pony. They could still talk and walk and all that stuff, but they lost their being. Also, those cutiemarks you have? Gone! Had to rediscover their talent, which led to studies on if it was possible that changing your past could leave you with a different one”

“That does sound like something perfect for her.” Ire remarked. “Perfect for what she did. And then once it’s been long enough, we can take her back and she won’t remember a thing of the first time we had her.”

Off to the side, Quarry was watching. While he too wanted to get back at Lea and her family he didn’t think this was the best way.

“Why did you come to help us?” Quarry asked the pokemon.

“Easy, back on Earth, both Mightyena and I worked for this group who wanted to rule the world. This is as close as we’re getting to that again.”

“What about the others?”

“I’m very… convincing.”

Quarry didn’t know why, but he shuddered a little.

“Now!” The grumpig clapped her hands together. “There’s a chance this umbreon of ours has worked on protecting her mind. You know the phrase: make your mind a fortress?”

“Yes.” Ire answered simply.

“Well psychic pokemon take it literally, and there are some that while they aren’t psychic, they might still be the same. Now, I want you to do the same thing with Mightyena to me, just don’t actually change any of my memories.”

“Alright…” Ire lits her horn once again as she replied.

When she used the spell on Grumpig this time, she could already notice a difference. Trying to get in, there was more resistance from the grumpig’s mind. It wasn’t much stronger, but it was noticeable enough. When she did find herself where she wanted to be, Ire was able to visualize a large structure representing the mind. When she tried to mess with it, defences came up to try and get her out. After the seventh attack, they finally succeeded.

“That was harder than before.” Ire said, rubbing her head.

“Yes, but you also weren’t trying anything specific. Now let’s run through what you’re going to do.”
As the two girls worked on that, Quarry was examining the other pokemon. One of them just seemed to be sitting there. He waved his hand in front of it’s face. There was no reaction. Then he poked the pokemon. When he went to poke it again, it hit him with it’s arm with the spikes on that arm glowing. It glared at him before returning to it’s original position like nothing had ever happened.

“I’m going out.” Quarry told Ire, who wasn’t listening. “I’ll be going to the next town over. I’ll have better luck there. Be back soon.”

---

“I give up! It’s not working!” Lea yelled.

“It could be you don’t have enough experience for your body to allow you to use moonlight.”

Lea gave him a mean look. An actual mean look. “We worked on that for who knows how long and you never thought to TELL ME!”

“Well, uh… at least we know that you’re uh, close.”

“What do you mean?” Lea asked with a slight sneer.

“You just successfully used mean look, which is the third hardest naturally learned one, with moonlight being the hardest.”

“Maybe that’s it.” The gears in Lea’s head starting to turn. “Maybe the way each pokemon uses an attack that they naturally learn is different. The only way you can learn how to use it is by doing it the first time on accident and from then on, you just repeat what feelings you went through when you were doing it the first time.”

“Maybe. Hey, can you think of any other times this happened?”

“I think I’ve used a screech attack before, but that’s it.”

“At least we have something to work with. First, let’s get you somewhere soft to take a nap. You deserve it.”

Author's Note:

What's this?! Quarry having second thoughts?
This can't be real!

can we have more questions

anywho, it's drawcember for us artists and i decided to do something this year:

Comments

[Votederpycausemufins]

5357937 i originally got interested on why people always had diamond rings when i saw commercials always saying to buy them, but the only engagement ring i had ever seen was my mother's which had a sapphire