Pokemon Cards Book One

Battle Begin!

I looked around the side yard of my house, trying to focus on what was right in front of me. My pokemon were all out of their cards, excluding mythicals and legendaries. There were 22 of them, which happened to take up quite a lot of the yard. My Cinderace was training Raboot on the side of the yard with the raspberry bushes beside the cedar hedges. The were trying to see who was better at kicking fireballs over the fence that was several meters away from them by the looks of it. Clefairy and Clefable were taking care of the garden sort of in the middle of the yard. We'd had a garden longer than anyone in my family had been using this yard for training, so it wasn't foolish placement. We'd just never gotten around to moving it. Clefairy and Clefable liked taking care of it though, along with some of my other pokemon. Bunnelby went over to help them along with Diggersby, whose ears came in handy for digging out certain places in the small patch of dirt where there were only weeds to be removed. Popplio was trying to make one big bubble to cover the entire garden at once as Pikachu cheered her on.

The rest of my Pokemon either seemed to be fighting or hiding. Sudowoodo was practicing new camouflage techniques while Koffing searched for him. Charmander and Dragalage were sparring, Eevee and Mudbray were sparring,  Grookey had wound up fighting with Krabby since he'd decided to see how many smacks with a stick it took to tick Krabby off, Rookidee and Rhyhorn were sparring, and Vulpix and Froakie were just about to take a break from their match. It looked like a draw to me.

Then there was the last pair. Two of my hardest working pokemon. Frogadier and Greninja were on the rectangular brick space between the side door and the garden that some of my other pokemon were taking care of. They seemed to be just finishing up. I stopped watching Vulpix and Froakie try to get the better of each other to see who would win; My partner whose card had almost been ripped in two over a year ago, or his pre-evolved form.

You could see that Greninja was struggling a bit, but he kept calm all the way through it. Frogadier continuously tried to use cut on him, but he dodged every time. Sometimes it was very narrow. Sometimes he just barely managed to not get hit. He wasn't trying to counter anything at all. Ever since he'd been told he wouldn't be able to battle anymore due to the condition of his card making it too dangerous for him to take a hit, his main focus had been learning how to dodge everything. He knew he couldn't take a really hard hit, so he was trying to slowly build up more of a tolerance to pain, and teach himself how to avoid that pain in the first place. By now he was so good at this that he was dodging with both hands folded behind his back. This went on for a little while, until Frogadier had Greninja backed up to the edge of the bricks where it and the grass met.

Froakie hopped up on my shoulder and Vulpix sat down beside me to watch as Greninja formed a water shuriken and used it to attack Frogadier before he could use cut again. It was so quick and unexpected that Frogadier was caught off guard by Greninja suddenly going completely offensive. He was too quick for Frogadier and managed to pin him between the brick wall of my house and a water shuriken.

"Okay, you got me again." Frogadier laughed, reaching for his translator mic and turning it on. He was speaking in his own language, but it sounded like English now thanks to the microphone translating everything. He could choose his own voice too. He and Greninja used the same voice. They sounded kind of like normal human boys actually.

"You did better this time. Just remember I still like to attack people in a battle, even though I'm forced to dodge a lot more now." Greninja smiled. He always had his translator mic on. His was hidden by his tongue scarf though. You could see most others wearing theirs. They were like the microphone headsets that people sometimes wear on stage, just a lot less obvious. You actually had to look right at the user's mouth to see the tiny black dot that was the microphone.

"I almost thought Greninja was just going to let him win this time." Froakie spoke up. He sounded like a young human boy. A child. He kind of was. He was one of the youngest pokemon in the family. His mic was hidden by his frubbles.