Professor Carolina invited me for dinner, a simple affair cooked by an elderly housekeeper, and during dinner, our conversation soon turned to Pokémon and their training. Just like Cynthia, Professor Carolina had been an expert trainer in her youth, before switching her focus to historical research.

We discussed my previous attempts to help my partners learn new attacks and even debated the question of how a Pokémon lets itself get captured and trained. Curiously, she had a slightly different opinion from Cynthia and it didn’t take long for the debate to get spirited. Ultimately, we both had our opinions and examples, before agreeing to disagree, that neither of our observations was more valid than the other and the truth was likely something neither of us had yet considered. Or that there was no unified answer and it was dependent on the individual Pokémon, thus rendering the whole debate moot.

Regardless it was an interesting dinner and I was able to formulate a couple of new ideas to train my Pokémon, even if some of her suggestions were contradictive to the plans I had made before. Quite obviously, there wasn’t just one universal truth that worked for every trainer and Pokémon, but individual capacity, interest and ability were pivotal.

The sun was already setting when I was back on the streets, with an invite to come back the next Saturday. From the way she had talked, there would be something interesting then, but hadn’t outright said what. Hopefully, the others wouldn’t have a problem with staying for those few days.

With little else to do, I wandered to the edge of town, towards the walls and beyond. The guard at the wall took a brief glimpse at my trainer card and reminded me that it would soon be dark as if I hadn’t been able to see the sun making its way towards the distant horizon. When I thanked him for the reminder, he didn’t impede me further as I wasn’t deterred by his warning. Not his job to keep trainers out of trouble, just to keep the stupid kids of town out of trouble, if that was even possible.

No, the guards were a warning mechanism, first responder, and a general measure of comfort, not real security. Anyone with the desire to get across the walls could do so, especially if they had a Pokémon or two to help them with it.

Once outside, I called out Charm, happy to have my buddy with me in a place where he didn’t have to be cautious about his tail and fire.

We walked along the outer wall, towards the area where the steep cliff to the south of the city and the lesser slope on the end of the plateau east of the city met, giving me the best of both worlds.

It didn’t take long to walk there and on the way, I told Charm about the conversation with Professor Carolina. As always, he was a wonderful listener, never interrupting me or talking back, giving just a few growls and chirps of acknowledgement. I had a feeling he was quite interested when I told him about the different ways a Pokémon could go about getting stronger, especially about the different paradigms when it came to move training.

So far, I had focused both him and Vio on their special attacks, but that wasn’t the only way, not even close. Some of his moves focused much more on his physical ability, such as the flaming bite we had worked on prior. Sure, there was fire involved, but the real punch came from his teeth that carried the flames and enhanced them.

Following along that line of thinking, I was considering whether or not it would be worthwhile to let him work on what I considered the physical side of an attack like Iron Tail first and let him get used to the motion of slapping something with his tail, to build up power that way. It would be a radical departure from his previous training, making me wonder if it would be worth it or if keeping our previous focus and see how much further we would be able to go there. He only had so much strength and potential, potential that might be partially wasted if we changed course midway through his training.

I had a feeling that there was no right answer, only different answers depending on the individual. When I got to the edge of the cliff, I had to grin, as there was a reasonably large empty space near the walls, right at the edge, with a couple of tree trunks stripped of their bark and deliberately placed there as benches.

Claiming one of them, I sat down, Charm stepping up behind me and placing his arms around me, his head resting on my shoulder as we looked down on eastern Sinnoh. It was a beautiful sight, the miles and miles of untouched land stretching ahead of us, the way the slopes below us started to turn into shrubbery and a little further down, into the forest, it was a fascinating sight.

I entertained myself by trying to correlate what I could see below with the maps I had seen before, curious how the various Pokémon habitats looked, if only from a distance. Some of the valleys and forests I could see, most of them quite some distance away, held Pokémon strong enough that one would be enough to send my companions and me running, even if we tried to have our partners battle it in a tag-team fashion. Sure, we were getting stronger and better but there were Pokémon out there that had been doing that very thing for decades.

Their lack of a trainer mostly meant they couldn’t rest as easy as they could with a Pokéball, nor would their wounds be treated and they lacked someone who cared for their injuries and provided friendship and emotional closeness. There were some groups, but those dynamics were often fraught with trouble, as the individual Pokémon all had to compete if they wanted to grow, which, in turn, often led to one or two Pokémon becoming dominant.

“Should I tell you about the Pokémon down there or do you want to train a bit?” I asked Charm, when he became a bit antsy from the inactivity.

He gave a quiet growl at the first suggestion that instantly morphed into a happy grumble when I suggested some training. From the way he was swinging his tail, my earlier story of different training methods was still in his mind and he wanted to try it.

For a moment, I considered rejecting his enthusiasm and trying to keep him on the track I had set him on initially but decided to indulge him and see where it would lead.

Picking a few small rocks, I gestured for him to take some distance.

“Now, I’ll lob these at you. Your job isn’t to smack them as hard as you can, but to use your tail to hit them and slap them into the trunk over there,” I gestured to one of the other benches. There were only so many rocks of the right size around and I had no doubt that he’d be able to lob them into the valley with ease if he put his mind to it. But hitting them towards a target would be a challenge and train his control and focus, not his brute force.

When I lobbed the first, small rock, he watched it soar towards him and, with a spin and a slap, tried to hit it with his tail. I barely managed to stop myself from laughing out loud, when the rock just passed by the slapping tail and landed on the ground next to him, while Charm pivoted, a look I could only see as consternation on his scaly face.

Tossing the next rock, he tried again, only this time with a lot more force. He managed to hit the rock this time, but instead of directing it towards the log, it was directed somewhere further away. A lot further away, so far that I hadn’t even the slightest idea where it might have landed.

“Control, Charm, not just force,” I admonished him, lobbing the next rock.

For the next twenty minutes, I lobbed rocks and he slapped them, slowly getting better at it. Finally, when there was only half an hour of light left, I stood, dropping the remaining rocks back to the ground.

“So, you think you want to train your physical abilities more? Or should we go back to training your flame and what you can do with your fire?” I asked Charm, as we walked back towards the road.

His response was a simple scoff, though the brief jet of flame coming from his mouth was answer enough. His flame would continue to be the focus of our work, just as it had been. There would be a bit of physical training, especially in regards to his coordination, but mostly it would be for his flame.