Lucas can't give verbal orders, and Barry can't focus on the right things sometimes-- but they leave Twinleaf, get a Pokedex, and try becoming trainers anyways.
"...are you guys teaching Chimchar sign language?"
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※ Current Progress: Veilstone City...
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A teenage boy's been staring at Barry for the past thirty minutes.
Here Barry was, minding his own damn business training his Pokemon, and there comes this perfect pristine pompous boy, knee-high jeans and kempt tie and all, just staring like he has no concept of manners.
He's holding a little machine in his hands, not quite a Pokedex, but a more complicated-looking radar communicator-esque device for sure. But he wasn't focusing on that, he had his full attention on Barry specifically.
"Oh, sorry, don't mind me," he says.
It's very hard not to.
In fact, every time Barry made a bit of a misstep, the boy would frown, or roll his eyes, or click his tongue in disapproval. It was getting really annoying. Also, why is he so clean? This is the marshlands, even if you didn't fall, you should at least have some mud on your shoes. So the fact that this guy didn't have any— definitely meant that he's been avoiding all the mud like an acrobatic master, or he's been making some Pokemon take the dirt for him.
Barry finally stops when he defeats the Croagunk, glaring in the boy's direction.
Croagunks are hard to fight, since they're fast, and poisonous, and he doesn't have a decent super effective move outside of Staravia. He needed to learn something new, or get somehow better, but he's making no progress no matter how many he fights.
He's frustrated.
And the boy just scowls, "you are filthy."
That's it.
"Major!" Barry yells, throwing Munchlax's Poke Ball into the air. It opens right above the boy— whose eyes widen in horror, but he doesn't get out of the way before Munchlax spreadeagles and magnificently crashes onto him, plunging him right into the deeper swamps in an instant.
Barry laughs boisterously.
"Who's filthy now?!"
Prinplup whacks him over the head.
-
"I am very sorry," Barry is made to get on his knees and apologize.
"YES, YOU SHOULD BE."
They'd found a grotto nearby, clothes taken off to be washed by a very careful Azumarill. Prinplup was observing carefully. Now they were dressed in a little more than their coats, around the campfire that was Ponyta sitting still. A Medicham was helping Staravia get the fishing line out, trying to figure out how and where to attach them so they could function as clotheslines.
The boy, who was maybe a handful of years older than Barry, had introduced himself as Thorton.
"You're lucky that my machine didn't get destroyed by that spelunking you did," he sneers. "Unbelievable. Irredeemable."
