Chapter 17 Jack sighed, and lowered his head onto his hands. He and the others had been at the Pokemon League base for a whole three days, and so far no one had even mentioned going out and fighting Team Rocket anytime soon. Right now he was in a small room, with about fifteen other trainers looking to join the battle against Team Rocket. The floor, ceiling, and walls made out of planks of golden wood. Dust motes sparkled like diamonds in the beam of late afternoon sunlight coming in the room's single window. Neat rows of desks, mostly occupied, filled the room, and a blackboard was at the front. In front of the blackboard, lecturing, was an officer in the Pokemon League, not that it had much in the way of officers. This one was named Mr. Chadram. "You will be organized into groups," He was droning in the manner of the most boring of school teachers. It was not a normal drone, but the kind of drone that drives you beyond boredom, almost into a coma. For most people, this kind of drone is unattainable except through intense practice, and, usually, a full frontal lobotomy, just to make sure nothing interesting would creep into the voice. Unfortunately, the man at the blackboard was a natural at it. "These groups will very in size from five to twenty trainers. These groups will be known by a squadron letter, a group letter. Each individual trainer in these groups will be given an identifying number. For instance, the leader of group B, in squadron A, would have the designation ABL, for squadron A, group B, leader. The next person in the group would have the designation AB1, then AB2, and so forth." The instructor continued droning on, oblivious to the fact that most of the class wasn't paying attention. Jack was one of the one who were practically asleep. Jack nudged the boy sitting next to him. Jack had met the boy, who had fiery red hair, in the few days he had been at the base. "Hey, is this guy boring or what?" The only name Jack had been given for him was Fire Traveler. "Yeah, I know." Fire Traveler responded. "If I wanted to listen to lectures, I would have gone to school, not gone on a pokemon journey. And look, he needs notecards to tell us how many people are in a group!" They both snickered. At the sound of the snickering, Mr Chadram finally realized that not everyone was paying attention. He walked over to Jack. "Talking in class, I see. Well, " He paused, and appeared to be trying to remember something. "Well," He repeated. "Well, you'll just have to sit here and wait while I go get my discipline speech out of my files." Jack snickered some more, as he left through a door in the back of the room. If someone had looked in, they would have seen him digging through a file cabinet, muttering to himself. "Let's see, now what did I file that under? D for discipline? T for troublemakers?" After a few minutes, which the entire class spent talking, mostly to laugh at him, Mr Chadram returned, carrying a folder full of note cards and sheets of paper. Putting on an old pair of glasses, he began to flip through the folder, mumbling. "Let's see, tips on giving a disciplinary speech. Give speech to class before sending troublemakers out in hall, make sure to send the troublemakers, and not the rest of the class, out into the hall. Read the speech aloud." He nodded. "Ok." He began lecturing, in the same drone as before. "Now, you know children, I've told you not to play with my grenade launcher. A grenade launcher is not a toy. In fact, if you run with it, you could poke someone's eye out!" He paused. "Or is that scissors? Oh well, as I was saying, do not play with your teachers munitions. You may think it is a humorous prank to launch a rocket at the principals office, but rocket launchers are not for use by children. In fact-" Mr Chadram paused at the sounds of laughter from the rest of the class, and realized what he was reading. "Well, now that I've had a practice, on to the real lecture." He turned to glare at the others. "You all do realize I was just warming up, right?" Turning back to Jack and Fire Traveler, and acting nonchalant, like nothing had happened, he flipped through the folder some more, before finally settling on a different sheet of paper. "Ah yes, talking in class. Now kids, talking in class is bad. Talking in class deprives others of the chance to learn. If you talk in class, you may miss important information, and that lack may hunt the rest of your life." Mr Chadram's voice had been getting dreamy and more distant, and by now he was staring off into space. "It has mine. If I had been paying attention in class, on that spring day, back in ninth grade, instead of talking, I wouldn't have missed the math formulas the teacher was talking about. Then, I would have gotten an A on the test, and not flunked the course. If I hadn't flunked the course, then I would have been able to get a better job. If I had been able to get a better job, then I wouldn't have to be here, teaching you little monsters." Mr Chadram's face and voice had been getting angrier and angrier as he went on. Suddenly, he snapped back to reality, and noticed the entire class staring at him oddly. He cleared his throat, and tried to look like he had meant to say that. "Yes, well," He said, straightening his shirt collar nervously, "I'm sure you all see how important it is to not talk in class." He glanced around. He was still getting odd looks. It was obvious that no one believed he actually meant to say that. "Errr... Class dismissed." Everyone jumped up. Mr Chadram grabbed the shoulders of Jack and Fire Traveler. "Not you two. You two are being punished." Jack sighed, and watched enviously as the others streamed past him, out the door. "Now," Mr Chadram vanished into the back room for a moment, and came out carrying two buckets, with some rags in them. "Polish these desks." Jack and Fire Traveler sighed, grabbed the buckets, and went to work. Jack flopped down on his bunk. It was evening now, and he, Bob, and David were in their "cabin". A one-story log building, situated in the woods to the west of Pallet, it was mainly just a big room, with bunks lining the walls and a few tables set up in the middle. A small breeze blew in through the open door to the outside, at the far end of the cabin. Another door, along the right, opened onto a small bathroom, which everyone in the cabin had to share. A third door, opposite the bathroom, revealed a sparsely furnished kitchen. Currently, there was almost no food in either the small cupboards or the tiny refrigerator, considering that food for the cabin cost money, and had to be bought in Pallet, while food from the cafeteria was free. All that was there were a few morsels of food, trail mix and the like, from the trips everyone had taken to get to the camp. Next to each bunk was a cabinet with a combination lock, for storing any personal possessions in. Upon arrival, everyone had been assigned a building, and were told that it was there permanent place of residence while at Pallet Town, not only while they were being trained, but also whenever they visited. That is, they would be staying there whenever they returned from a mission, if they ever went on a mission, and didn't just stay in the base and have lessons until they all died of old age. Six bunks lined the walls. Three of them, at the end away from the outside door, were taken up by Jack and the two other boys he had started his pokemon journey with. Jack himself was in the bunk farthest in the back, on the right. Right across from him was Bob, who had David at the foot of his bed. There were three other people who slept in the cabin, none of which any of the original three had met before coming to the camp. Fire Traveler was one of them, and had taken the bunk at the foot of Jack's. Another bunk, at far other end of the room, at the end of David's bed, was occupied by a boy they hadn't been introduced to. However, this wasn't due to any fault in not being friendly, seeing how the unknown boy hadn't made any effort to introduce himself, and seemed to caught up in whatever he was doing at the moment to notice anyone trying to introduce themselves. The times that he was in the cabin, he seemed to spend all his time either reading big thick books, which looked a lot like the manuals you get for your VCR or computer (you know, the ones that would tell you how to program your computer to do your taxes, or program your VCR to do anything from tape shows to sit up and beg, if they weren't written in the obscure dialect of technicalese). If he wasn't reading those, he would be doing something on a small laptop computer, or tinkering with some sort of small machine that he wouldn't let anyone else get a glimpse of. Finally, the sixth boy, who had the bunk next to Fire Traveler, appeared to do nothing but study whenever he got the chance. He studied his pokedex, he took notes in class and studied those, he even studied the nutrition facts on whatever food he ate, memorizing everything on it. In short, he studied everything he could. Once, when Jack had asked him why he always studied so much, Jack had received the answer "You never know when you might need the information.", right before the other boy went back to studying the pattern on his sleeping bag, which had a blue and green diamond pattern printed on it. The boy seemed to be memorizing the number of diamonds of each color. This boy seemed to live the belief that There Will Be a Test On It Later. He had introduced himself to the others as Ben. Ben Kyoo. (Note: Does anyone else get that?) "Stupid teacher." Jack muttered. "Making me stay after and clean the desks." "I know. You would expect that someone who can't even remember what he's punishing you for, unless he writes it down, wouldn't be able to remember to punish you." Bob commented. "Oh well, it doesn't really matter if he can remember why you're being punished, he still punished you." Of course, Bob could be philosophical about the whole thing, considering he wasn't one of the ones that had been punished. David blinked. "Do you think you used 'punished' enough there?" he asked Bob. Bob wiped a small smear of something red off his chin. "No. Punished punished punished punished-" Fire Traveler cut him off. "That's enough punished's. You can stop talking now." "Aww... ok." Bob put his head in his hands and started to sulk. David whispered to Jack. "I knew we shouldn't have let him keep those ketchup packets." Then, he said in a louder voice, "Do you want to know the real frightening thing here? Not that Mr Chadram can't remember anything without notes. The thing that we should all be worried about is that, why would he ever use a speech about not playing with explosives so much, he writes it down?" An hour passed. Bob had wandered outside, and David and Bob had followed, looking for something to do. Ben had gone to see if he could find a library, for more books to study. Fire Traveler walked up to Jack, who had been sitting on his bed, cleaning dome mud off one of his pokeballs. "What was up with Bob? Why did he act so weird? And what's this about ketchup?" Jack paused a moment. On the outside, he appeared calm, but inside his thoughts were churning frantically. Crap! he thought. How do I answer him without giving anything away? After a moment's pause, he answered. "Well, Bob just sometimes acts weird like that. No one's sure why." He gave Fire Traveler a weak grin. "And the ketchup thing is an inside joke. It would take a really long time to explain." Fire Traveler nodded, seeming to take the explanation as the truth. "Ok." He said, turning away. Jack barely concealed his relief at Fire Traveler's acceptance of his explanation. However, he didn't see the suspicious look that passed across Fire traveler's face when his back was turned... David sighed, and idly pushed a few peas around his plate with his plastic knife. It was two days later, and he was currently sitting in the brightly lit cafeteria. Dinner had just ended, and he was bored out of his mind. The people sitting near him weren';t doing much to alleviate his boredom. Jack and Bob were having a conversation with Fire Traveler, and Ben was sitting over at the corner of the table, studying some obscure book that he had pulled out of his backpack. David was just barely able to make out the title from where he was sitting. It appeared to be [I[Pokemon Training for Dummies[/I]. The last two days had been filled with more pointless lessons, and still they had heard no word about anything other then more lessons. It was not something that encouraged him for the prospects of the League. He sighed again. His boredom was showing no signs of being alleviated before dinner ended, and, considering how things had been going, it didn't look like anything interesting would happen in the next week, at least. He had tried to join in on the conversation Bob was having, but it didn't interest him in the least, and he didn't even know anything about the topic. That left Ben as the only other possible source of conversation, which was equal to having no source at all. After a few minutes playing with his silverware and staring aimlessly around the room, he stood up. "I think I'll go get a book. Or maybe some cards." He announced to no one in particular. Considering that, it wasn't too surprising when no one answered. David pushed open the door to the cabin. A muted roar could still be heard coming from the cafeteria, but other then that, the warm spring night was quiet, except for the occasional noises of insects in the grass. As he walked in, David noticed a soft glow emanating from the bed on his left. He glanced over, and saw the other boy who shared the cabin, working on something by the light of a small lamp that he must of have brought with him. Walking up to him, David saw that he had a large assortment of miniaturized tools spread out before him, and was fiddling with an extremely complex-looking contraption, apparently made mainly of thin metal bars and a large amount of springs. "What's that?" David asked, straining to get a better look. The boy looked up. "Huh? Where'd you come from? And who are you, anyway?" He asked in surprise, having been too preoccupied with whatever he was working on to notice David come in. "Have you noticed there are five other people sharing this cabin? I'm one of them." "Oh, yeah." The boy grinned sheepishly. "Sorry, sometimes I get a little caught up in what I'm doing. My name's Bill." David nodded in acknowledgement. "Hi. I'm David." Bill made a small gesture of greeting, then continued talking. "This" he pointed to the device "Is a complex contraption of bars and springs." "I see." David said dryly. "And what does it do?" "Oh, you want to know what it does! Well, it's a strength enhancer for my Hitmonchan." "Cool!" "The only thing is, it's still experimental. I can't get it to work." "Huh." David paused for a moment. "Can I have a look at it?" "Sure, I guess." Bill moved over and handed the gadget to David. "Thanks." David sat down and took the machine. His brow furrowed in concentration as he turned the device over in his hands, looking at it from every possible angle. After a few minutes of silence, he pointed to one place, where a spring connected to a bar. "Have you tried tightening this spring?" He asked. Bill took the machine, and looked at where David was pointing. "That might work." He said, grabbing a screwdriver from the jumble of tools spread out around him, and making some delicate adjustments to the device with it. "Now, if this works like it's supposed to, when I wind it up like this" he grabbed a piece of metal that was jutting out from the body of the machine and twisted it. "It should stay that way when I put it down." He fitted actions to words and carefully laid it down on the bed. The device promptly went *spang!* and flew into the air, before landing with a *thunk* on Bob's bed, on the far side of the room. Bill sighed. "I was afraid that would happen." He said, getting up to retrieve the machine. "Hmmm..." David stared thoughtfully at the retrieved device. "Maybe if we tried this..." He suggested another adjustment, a process that went on late into the night, even after the others had gone to bed. "Well, maybe if we tried replacing this bar with one that's a little thinner." Bill suggested. David yawned, and pushed an errant strand of brown hair back under his hat. "Sure, try it." He said tiredly. As had been happening for the past several hours, no matter what they did, the machine went *spang* and launched itself off the bed. This time, it bounced off Bob's forehead. Bob was snoring loudly, asleep like everyone else in the cabin except for Bill and David. Seeing how he was a very deep sleeper, the impact on his forehead did nothing except cause Bob to mutter a bit and roll over. David yawned again, more deeply this time. "I'm going to bed." He told Bill. "Everyone else is already asleep. We can work on this later." Bill reluctantly put down the machine. "Ok," he sighed, then surprised himself by yawning. He grinned. "Well, I guess I'm more tired then I thought." "Yeah, sure." David said, already settling himself into his blankets. "Good night." He said sleepily. "Good night." Bill responded, but by that time, David's eyes had already closed, as he slipped into sleep. "Today, I will be reading out the team assignments." Mr. Chadram droned. Jack sat up, elated. Several more days had passed since the night Bill and David had spent working on the strength enhancer, and now, it looked like they were finally getting to do something other then take lesson after lesson. "Squadron A, group A. Joe, Leader. Jeremy, 1. Mike..." His voice continued on, a dull, dreary monotone that seemed to drag on your eyelids, no matter how much you wanted to hear the information he was saying. "Squadron D, group F. Bob, leader. Jack, 1. David, 2. Bill, 3. Lauren, 4. Susan, 5." He continued on, but Jack was no longer paying attention. He knew what his group was. "Outside, you will find trees marked with your group and squadron number. Please go now and meet up with the others in your team." Mr Chadram said a few minutes later, once he had finished reading off all the names. The class filed out of the building. Jack, after searching for a few minutes, found the tree with a sign reading "D F". He was the last one to arrive at the meeting place. His group contained his three friends, of course, but there were also two others there. One of them, a tall boy, with dark yellow hair that currently looked like it hadn't been brushed that morning, Jack recognized as the sixth person from his cabin, who he still hadn't been introduced to. After a moment spent going over the list of names he had heard in the classroom, Jack realized he must be Bill. The other stranger standing there was female. Very short, not even as tall as David, who up till then had been the shortest member of the group, she stared at Jack challengingly. Her long, light red hair flowed down her head to a few inches below her shoulders, and freckles dotted the tanned skin of her face. "And he's Jack, right?" She asked, turning to Lauren. "Yes, he's one of the ones I journeyed with." Lauren affirmed. "Ok, so we're all here." She sat down on a handy tree root. "I'm Susan. And you are?" She cast her gaze on each of the others in turn, who dutifully introduced themselves. As Jack had thought, the other boy was Bill. "So, how do you know Lauren?" Bob asked. "We shared a cabin." Lauren explained. "So," Bill said, from where he was leaning against the tree trunk. "Why do you want to fight against Team Rocket?" Susan clenched her fist. "They destroyed my family's livelihood." Her eyes blazed with anger. "The idiots destroyed my father's hamster farm." "Hamsters?" Jack asked. "What the heck are hamsters?" "Hamsters are a type of animal." "Whoa." David's mouth dropped open in awe. "I've heard of animals, but I thought they were just a myth. You actually had a farm of them?" Susan glanced over at him. "Yes, we had a farm that we raised hamsters, a very small and defenseless type." "It would be an amazing thing to actually be able to see these animals." David said hopefully. Susan frowned. "Unfortunately, you can't. Team Rocket somehow got the idea that hamsters were some sort of rare and powerful pokemon. They came in the middle of the night to steal them. My father was woken up by the barking of our Growlithe, but by that time Team Rocket was there in force. He tried to tell them that hamsters were just animals, not pokemon, and would be massacred by a level one Pidgey, but they wouldn't listen." Susan paused, and took a deep breath to calm herself. Judging by the fierce light still burning in her eyes, it didn't work well. "When they found that pokeballs had absolutely no effect on the hamsters, they settled for stuffing them all into sacks. Then, when they were sure that they had got them all, Team Rocket burned the farm to the ground." David stared at her in disbelief. "They actually thought that animals were pokemon? How could anyone be so stupid?" "It gets worse." Susan said grimly. "A few weeks later, Officer Jenny found the stolen hamsters. Or at least, she found what their remains. From their condition, it appeared that Team Rocket had been using them to battle. And against some of their strongest pokemon, too!" She paused momentarily as the horrid sight of the pile of poor animals replayed itself in her mind. Some had been burned, until little but ashes remained, while others showed the marks of teeth, claws, and spikes. The poor hamsters showed the sign of every kind of element type, and none of them had survived. Susan took another deep breath, that was almost a sob, and continued. "They were all dead, because of the monumental stupidity of Team Rocket." The fires in her eyes, which had died down into the dim glow of embers while she talked, flared back up. "But now we're going to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again." "They deserve to be arrested for that." David said. "I can't believe anyone could be stupid enough to mistake an animal for a pokemon, no matter how rare animals may be." "Well, we'll help to get rid of them." Jack said. A moment later, a piercing whistle split the air. David and Bob, who had the most sensitive ears of the group, winced. The whistle-blower was Mr. Chadram, motioning for all the scattered groups to return to the room. "We're going to do some fun team building exercises!" he yelled to everyone. Considering what he considered fun, (lectures, scrubbing floors, and long runs, to name a few), everyone walked back in with glum expressions on their faces, dreading the experience to come.