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"Well she's no fun" Hiba pouted as he moved closer to Blaze, so that he, AJ and Freya were in a triangle formation. "But on second thought, i think ill just grab a snack from the Pokemon center to hold me over until morning, my and the little guy here shared some Pizza's before leaving Nacrene." Hiba explained, hoisting himself onto Blaze's back.

Blaze Turned around, ready to take off in the direction Henrietta fled. "but ill take you up on that offer tomorrow" He said, tossing AJ and folded scrap piece of paper that had his Xtranseiver number on it. He'd planned on having them handy in case he ran into a pretty girl. And with a have, Blaze Took off, carrying Both Hiba and Takamaru away from AJ and Freya.

It didn't take Hiba and Blaze much longer to find the several story high Pokemon center. 'finally..' Hiba thought, letting a sigh a relief fall from his lungs. The muscled youth Dismounted Blaze, hoisted Tk onto his back and Carried both of there sling packs under his arm.

the Trio walked up to the nurse at the counter, Hiba conversed with her for a moment, then they were given there room Key.

(That time skip would be nice.)

Damn that dastardly post.

Wayne left the pokémon center early that morning. Considering everything that happened the day before, he thought he'd probably sleep until sometime mid-next year, but no. In the end, he had short, interrupted and sweaty sleep that eventually forced the trainer to get up and start exploring the city.

He'd been here a few times in the past. Usually it was alongside his family, before he was a trainer, and once when he was passing through to Nuvema Town. Looking back, he should have used that time to find out where the pokémon center was; it took a good hour or so of searching before they finally reached it, but luckily it was so late that there weren't any lines for getting a room key.

The park looked just as he remembered; slap right in the middle of the city and larger than it looked from any one angle. It was where people walked their pokémon, took their children for a day out, got raped, and trained. Since there weren't that many people around yet, Wayne figured he'd get some early morning exercise.

"Okay everyone, come out, yeah, even you Solosis." His pokémon materialised in front of him. Deerling had gone into storage already, so that just left Hitmonlee, Petilil and Solosis, who looked half asleep. Must've been the battling last night.

"Hey, I'm Wayne, you can call me WL, I'm going to be your trainer forever," he gave each of them a little nod. Hitmonlee didn't look impressed. "Err, right, okay, so today we're gonna be working on increasing your movepools. I know, right? Look, it'll be fun. I think we already know a lot that we can build on, now it's just a matter of working some variety in there."

He grinned and the pokémon exchanged odd glances. "Okay, since I'm poor, we can't go around buying TMs, so it looks like we're going to have to figure these moves out the old fashioned way. Hitmonlee, do you know how to ignite your foot yet?"
[I hate you.]
"No? Well. That kinda sinks my training plan for you. Uh... Maybe it's like what those waiters were talking about, you know the gym leader ones? Not the ones from last night, they were just kinda weird. Err, I forget what the gym leaders were called though. Doesn't matter. They were talking about Fighting Spirit, right? That reminds me of Aura, which is like supposed to be what powers all your attacks. Isn't it?"

Hitmonlee shrugged, Petilil looked confused and Solosis nodded furiously.

"Oh! You know something, Solo? Awesome. What is it?"

Solosis span around to face his fellows, looked guilty and muttered to himself quietly. Attention whore.

"Guess not... alright. Well, here's how it's supposed to work: pokémon generate and control Aura naturally, and that's how water types can spit up loads of water for example. The Aura manifests as like a physical thing for the duration of the attack, but when you use too much of it, that's it, it's gone. I think they call them Power Points, but that sounds too dumb to be true.

"Sooo, basically, we work on your attitudes, get you to bring out all that fighting spirit, then something will happen and then you'll be able to do all sorts of cool s**t!" Wayne smiled to himself, "this is going to be awesome."

((Everyone get your hardhats and prepare to crash into a text wall))

[Earlier...]

The shiver that ran down Salieri’s spine was enough to wake her up from a deep sleep, just in time to hear the sound of the bathroom sink. It was no normal shiver. It was the shiver she got when there was spiritual energy nearby. A ghost.

The fact that the lights weren’t on in the bathroom while the sink ran didn’t help either.

Salieri groggily looked at the clock. Three in the morning. The last thing she remembered was writing in her journal before bed about the happenings of her day, from Henrietta’s mysterious attacker in the morning to meeting Friar Sand. She had left the journal on her bedside.

But it was gone.

Her eyes darted to her dresser. Her bag was gone as well.

Salieri stood up. Silent. Slowly, her feet shuffled without noise across the carpet floor. She pressed her back up against the wall next to the bathroom door and took a deep breath.

The Battle Girl popped out from the corner and turned on the lights. No one was in the bathroom.

Her attention went to the sink. It was filled with water that didn’t go through the drain. Salieri switched the drain lever. The water stayed there.

She sighed. Just a plumbing problem. Sal took a glance at herself in the mirror at her reflection and rubbed her hands through her hair. “If I want to be at my best tomorrow, I need to go to sleep.”

Sal spotted a plunger next to the toilet. Grumbling she grabbed it and brought it over to the sink.

The water in the sink was gone.

She lowered the plunger to her side, relaxing her grip. Her eyes shifted side to side. Goosebumps were all over her limbs. It was cold in the bathroom now. Where are you?

Drip.

Salieri turned around.

Drip drip.

The sound had come from the ink. Salieri looked back at it, but the faucet wasn’t on.

Drip drip drip.

The drops were coming from the ceiling. Salieri looked up.

A morphous, shifting puddle of viscous blue liquid rippled silently, attached to the ceiling in an act defying gravity. In the center of the puddle was a blue tendril shaped like a tentacle, wrapped around an open red book. Also in the center of the puddle was a blue, bulb shaped head with a white frilly collar, hanging upside down with one eye closed and the other eye glowing red behind a feather themed monocle focused on the book. There was an object floating around inside of it’s slightly translucent head. It’s mouth curled into a smile.

“Lish lish lish.”

Salieri was speechless. Her legs were frozen in place. The creature took little notice of her, forming another tendril out of it’s amorphous body to turn the page of the book-

“ARE YOU READING MY JOURNAL?”

Now that she looked closer, the thing floating around in the ghost’s head was Salieri’s bag. s**t! My pokemon are in there! The ghost looked down at her in time to see Salieri stab upwards at him with the plunger.

The plunger met no resistance, passing right through the liquid body. The creature was fine, reforming it’s shape in the matter of a second. The bag, however, was knocked aside and poked through the side of the bulb shaped head. But quickly, it was reabsorbed back into the head of the creature, and the hole it created was sealed up good as new.

So it is a ghost! Watery composition too. A ghost and water type? If I had my pokedex I could check, but it’s in his stupid head! Salieri clenched her fists as she ghost pokemon began to descend, it’s puddle shape slowly transforming into a slender figure. She spotted that her previous attempt to attack had knocked an item out of her bag: a pokeball.

The creature now floated in the air, attached to nothing as it began to right itself upwards. It was definitely jellyfish shaped, only it floated through the air instead of the water. The pokemon narrowed it’s eyes at Salieri, and the eye behind the monocle glowed brighter.

It lashed out at Salieri with its’s two main, hand like tentacles. Salieri dived under it and grabbed the pokeballs, narrowly avoiding contact as she rolled back to her feet.

The pokeball was empty. Not for holding her pokemon yet, only for catching. Is that how she would have to get her pokemon back?

How can I hurt it? Salieri thought as she jumped back into the bedroom, avoiding tentacles once more as the pokemon floated after her slowly. She sprung onto her bed, kicking up her blanket at the ghost. It phased through and continued forward.

It reached for her again, but before it could grab her Salieri kicked another of her bedsheets at the ghost defiantly.

Instead of phasing through, the sheet hung onto it’s body, draped in the air with only the glowing red eyes showing through. Like at traditional ghost. The eyes squinted bitterly before the ghost phased through, letting the sheet drop to the floor while floating above the bed.

So it needs to be solid to grab me!

The ghost reached for Salieri again. The Battle Girl ducked around the outstretched tentacle and grabbed the monocle off of the ghost’s eye, exposing it’s other one to the air.

Salieri scrambled off of the bed and stood next to it, a few feet away holding up the monocle. She tried to maintain eye contact with the ghost, but found herself glancing away constantly in subordination. “Give me my stuff back.”

The ghost puffed up his chest angrily, and then opened his mouth, spewing a clear stream of water at Salieri. She fell to the floor, doing a split to avoid the damage. The water attack splashed onto the wall behind her, fizzling all over the place. Steam rose from where it struck.

“Scald?”
“Frill-LISH!”

He prepared to do it again. Salieri wedged a foot under the mattress and flipped it up. The mattress blocked the Scald, flying towards the door. With Salieri in between, she was flung into the door as well.

She hit it with a thud and crumbled to the ground behind the mattress. The Scald had more concussive force than then she had accounted for. As she pulled herself up, she grit her teeth.

I can’t attack it but it can attack me? How do I give it damage? Everything has a weakness. I won't let my pokemon get taken by supernatural BULLSHIT!

The shiver ran down her spine again. The ghost was getting closer.

She spotted an electrical outlet in the wall next to her.

A weakness.

If she was right about guessing the pokemon’s typing before, then that meant it was weak to electricity. Sal clenched her teeth, and then punched a hole into the wall. She could feel the lives wires inside the wall. She ripped them out.

The broken ends sparked as she rolled out from the side of the mattress. She spun to face the Frillish, who had been reaching to phase his tentacles through the mattress and choke Salieri from behind.

With a grunt, she stabbed into the ghost with the wires before it could even react. Sparks conducted all over it’s liquid body, and it convulsed in the air. After a few seconds, Salieri took out the wires and dropped them to the ground. They had died, anyway.

The ghost hovered closer and closer to the ground. Dazed. Now was her chance.

She threw the pokeball she had at the ghost. Hard. It opened up, and enveloped the pokemon in a red light that got absorbed back into the ball as it closed.

Salieri didn’t move an inch as the ball shook on the ground. It beeped. Capture successful.

She picked up the ball and released the pokemon. It hung in the air limply, still dazed and confused. Without sparing a moment, Salieri stabbed at the ghost’s head with a spearhand, reaching into what felt like jello and pulling out her bag. The ghost’s constitution went back to default as she grabbed her journal out of his lower tentacles as well. And then she recalled the pokemon.

The Battle Girl breathed heavily as she stood in the center of the room, clutching her things that were somehow entirely dry. She locked the ghost’s pokeball and dropped it into the center of the room.

Slowly, she went over to the dresser to put down her bag and journal, then walked back to the mattress and collapsed against it. She was too tired to put the bed back together as she closed her eyes to drift back to sleep.

“…I hate ghosts….”

Chari stirred in the gathering morning light. Her reaching hand dislodged a delicate saucer- still containing, evaporation notwithstanding, a small portion of...something. Something suitable for cleaning spoons, by the smell.
She sat up fully, pulling the blankets around her. It was cold; it was always cold, summer or winter. At least it was consistent.

The bed was coming back into shape; the hollow of her body, small and curled, like a child's, was fading.
Once there might have been another body there. Once, there might have been warmth enough to make staying in bed an attractive proposition. Old women were always cold.

From the bathroom, a low rumble, accompanied by teakettle sounds, announced that Friar Sand was still asleep. A quick swat to the back of his gnarled head produced, after she had washed up, a smacking and yawning that indicated his slow growth to wakefulness.

Phobos and Deimos, unusually, were floating separately; each circling the room, as if...patrolling?

"Something about, then?"
Phobos turned toward her, bobbed, once, and returned to her circuit of the room. Chari snorted derisively.
"Hmph....no grasp of security, that's for sure. Wouldn't have this sort of thing back home..."

You might, really, said a treacherous inner voice.
But it's still so nice to be here, isn't it? Because here's new. There's no memories.

She took her seat on the edge of the bed again, for a moment. A quick glance made quite, quite sure that the carafe of rice wine was empty.
"...s**t."

Clapping to gather her troops, she headed for the stairs.

After signing out of the pokemon center at around 8 in the morning, Salieri got her team breakfast and brought them out to the pier to eat it. They sat on the edge of the docks, dangling their legs over the water while they ate. Sal had finished her food and was looking at the pokedex data she had on the ghost.

It was a Frillish, and she had been right about the typing. Acid Armor was the technique he had used to become water in the sink and on the ceiling. The pokedex said nothing about it’s strange behavior with the journal, although it mentioned that the item Salieri had taken from it was a Scope Lens.

The Scope Lens acted as a telescopic filter that helped increase the critical hit ratio, but it didn’t also act as a prescription lens. Maybe the Frillish just wore it for show? Surely he couldn’t actually read. How did he get his hands on the item, anyway? Salieri shuddered to think that the ghost had stolen it from an unsuspecting victim before.

She hadn’t intended on catching the pokemon, but it was the only option at the time. Now she was stuck with the Frillish. Salieri wanted to put it in the box, but the rational part of her brain told her not to. The pokemon had several quirks and attacks that could make it an excellent battler. And she hadn’t actually gotten to know the ghost’s personality. Maybe it was friendly.

A friendly ghost? Absurd. Salieri decided she would let out the Frillish eventually so she could sort out the situation. But right now? It wasn’t the time.

“So we have this whole city to train with today, guys.” She swept her arm out at the expanse of skyscrapers before them. “I want to find that old lady with the Torkoal and challenge her to a battle, but other than that I want to try and focus on solo training for the each of you.”

Salieri pulled out a map from her bag and unfolded it on the dock. Her pokemon gathered around it as she circled different areas with marker. “I’m going to drop you guys off at different locations, and each of you will be given a different challenge. When I find you guys again, hopefully your training has made some progress. Sounds good?”

Chen Zhen pumped his fist into the air, and Salem mewed excitedly. Liuye Dao silently nodded, crossing his bladed arms across his chest. The Monferno jabbed a thumb proudly at his chest. “Mon!” Wukong exclaimed, confident in his ability.

Even though Frillish had the type advantage over Friar Sand, she didn’t want to have to turn to the ghost for help just yet. “Wukong, you want to be the one to do the battling this time?”

“Fern!” He exhaled steam, standing triumphantly while flexing his biceps. Chen Zhen rolled his eyes and turned away. If he wasn’t a Grass type, he knew he would have been the one chosen. This just meant he’d have more time to work on perfecting his moves.

“Great! Then let’s get going, we’ve got a lot of walking to do.”

[Earlier]
Fleya watched as the girl suddenly left she didn't even get a chance to say anything to her let alone see how much money she had but instead of following her she let out a sigh then turned to the other two and figured they were probably not much better then Henrietta she walked past the two,"Later guys." She waved her hand in the air as she headed into the pinwheel forest and managed to get to the other side to the terminal but by the time she got there it was already dark and she didn't want to go across the bridge this late so the found a nice bench in the terminal and slept there for the night.

{Time Skip}

The next day Fleya awakened to the sound of people passing through the terminal moving from the walk path to the bus terminal or just going across the bridge on foot. She slowly starts to rise up from the bench only to find that someone had put a blanket on her as she slept. She wasn't sure where it came from or who put it there but the blanket was hers now she quickly stuffs the cloth into her backpack and starts to rise up from her seat. She stretch her back a bit and looks around,"Hmm better get across that bridge though should I take the bus under or walk over?" She looked at the options she had seeming to tap her foot as she ponders her options a little.

Now in time with the rest of the Legends crew ((I.E. Not stuck in a pre-emptive time skip)), Luka was out and about Castelia traversing paths that he remembered well considering he'd been living here for the past few years and had only left a few days ago. He did not really feel like tackling Burgh today but he did feel that he needed to get stronger. So, after some deliberation about where he would train he made his way to Route 4.

He'd always been confused at the existence of a desert so close to a city with beautiful docks but he guessed it wasn't that unusual considering how hot Castelia usually was. Thinking about everything, going to Route 4 was relatively dangerous to Luka as apart from Squirt he didn't really have a surefire way of beating the wild Pokémon because Tayla had the issue of being part bug type and Kai was at a huge disadvantage due to the sandstorm. Hopefully though, this would make them stronger and Luka might also chance across the Pokémon he wanted to capture that lived on this route.

Luka and his three Pokémon made their way to the edge of the unfinished road and settled down near the slope that led down to some of the deeper sand. Looking at his Pokémon, Luka tried to figure out how best to help them train.

"Kai, I think the best thing you can do here is to try and build up a resistance to sandstorms. Although we may never have to face one again, there is always a chance and in many ways it will improve your overall endurance. How about you roll down the hill and then make your way back up using whatever means you can. The more you try then the more likely you are to get better at using all of your moves under different circumstances. Try that for about half an hour and see how you get on, but don't push yourself too hard, understand? I can't have you getting yourself hurt because of me."

Kai nodded and trumpeted to signal his enthusiasm and then he got to work. He wanted to be stronger. He had always had Luka protecting him and he had never truly had to face any battles until recently. Although the thought of fights like the one in Pinwheel Forest frightened him, he wanted to be strong enough to handle them. He didn't want anything like that to happen again.

Luka turned to Squirt. "I think the best thing we can do for you Squirt is to get you to learn some new moves." He looked at his Pokédex and thought for a moment. "You've got two new moves soon that you can learn, Crunch and Wide Guard. Crunch is probably going to be the most useful at present but Wide Guard will be so useful in battles like the one in Pinwheel Forest. Let's try Crunch for now. Y'know how when you use Bite? Well, Crunch is essentially like that but stronger and more powerful. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it by trying to crunch some of the rocks about the place. I know it might not be pleasant but it could work and it will definitely sharpen your fangs. You ok with that?"

Squirt nodded and went off to find some nearby rocks to crunch on.

Finally, Luka turned to Tayla. "I don't really know what to suggest for you Tayla. I mean... We can't really do much until you are friendly enough with me to want to evolve. Give me some time to think and then we'll figure out what to do." He took off his fleece and put it over the Swadloon. "That should keep most of the sand off of your coat but please tell me if you get too hot. Ok?"

Tayla chirped in the response. She'd been meaning to try and convey the thought that she wanted her coat protecting but she had felt a bit selfish for the request when Kai and Squirt were going to be out braving the elements. But, now that Luka had offered she was quite pleased. She was beginning to like Luka more and more. He was kind and caring and he really was trying his best. Maybe soon she could evolve. She hoped so. Then she could truly shine.