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"Tomorrow is Friday, and I'm nervous all over again," Julie told Alyssa while they sat on Julie's bed after school. They were mostly talking but getting some homework done as well. It was a perfect balance if you asked Alyssa.

"There's nothing to worry about. It'll be the most straightforward discussion. Be confident and casual. Worked well enough last time." Alyssa glanced up from her phone that sat on her open textbook with Veela open.

She scrolled past a video of Goldenrod's airport in progress, another displaying a collapsed section of the Full-circle highway near Olivine, and paused the next of a massive, deadly chemical explosion that had happened yesterday in Sinnoh's Hearthome at a factory by its outskirts. She looked at Julie. "You have this. You have to have this."

"Ugh, I really can't afford to screw up... It's my only chance-- my only one." Julie lay back and rested her head on her pillow while looking at the ceiling. "I don't think I'd ever move on. It's like... when you choose your starter pokémon. You come across and catch more during the journey, but none of them are as special as your first. That's how I feel about him. I'd never experience this again if I lost him. Ever."

"Let that fuel you then, and don't act desperate or nervous if you can help it. You want that confidence and respect. Make him take you seriously."

"Hm..." Julie tapped her cheek with her pencil.

"Try not to overthink, either. I know you're good at that."

"Ali, would it still be like this if I had more friends, you think?"

"Don't know. I mean, more people in your life if they were decent could have led to some kind of belonging, crushes and..." Alyssa sighed. "But it's not like that, right?"

"Then why aren't you like me? Why am I the weird one?" A deep wistfulness filled her like a void, glossing her eyes and frowning her face.

"Julie, I am weird as fuck and willfully stupid on top of it. At least you study like every book's gonna disappear tomorrow."

Julie eyed her. "Don't say that about yourself..."

"You're missing the point. Yeah, you're weird, but so am I, and so is everyone else."

"But isn't being with an umbreon too weird?"

She shrugged. "Ask yourself and no one else. How it makes you feel is what matters. Like that huge friend group I had back at my middle school. I fought a lot because of them, and the teachers basically hated us. It was all negativity. I graduated from that awful place and feel better at Ecruteak even without friends."

"I get it... but you had friends in ninth and tenth, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but we fell off by late eleventh."

"What if it's because you were friends with me?"

Alyssa shrugged again. "I don't think so, but I wouldn't care. I'm not gonna leave you out to dry for a couple of small talk friends."

Julie rubbed her eyes.

Alyssa grabbed her phone, closed her book, and reached to hold Julie's leg. "Just be easier on yourself. You're gonna snatch Midnight and fucking dart from this school." She got up and went to put her stuff in her backpack. "We'll talk more tomorrow. I've gotta dash home. It's getting late."

Julie nodded. She wanted her at home before dark as well. "Text me when you're home."

"Uh-huh."

Soon after Alyssa left, Julie's mind wouldn't let her get an ounce of homework done; knowing herself, this would also lead to her getting inadequate sleep tonight.

It was as if she thought without thinking half the time-- or maybe she thought deliberately around the clock. Maybe she was taxed and plagued at every waking moment and couldn't get a hold of it. No matter the process, too much for her health.

For once, she wanted to get out of the house alone and put her mind elsewhere. She grabbed her phone, gloves, and wallet and got dressed. She then headed downstairs and saw her mother asleep on the couch with the TV on at a low volume.

Julie went over and reached for the remote beside her hand, grabbing it. She turned off the TV and set the remote farther away, then leaned in and kissed her mother's cheek.

She then went to the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher with what was in the sink, cleared the island and counters of any loose seasonings and items, and set everything in their respective places in drawers and cabinets while humming a tune. Afterward, she wiped the kitchen down and left it spotless.

She tended to the stove handles, burners, microwave, counters-- everything, before leaving her slippers and putting on her sneakers, leaving the house.

It was gray and expectedly chilly; she pulled her jacket down and zipped it up while stepping off the porch and strolling the pavement toward downtown. "Where are you going, though?" Only a couple of hours remained before evening, so she needed to decide. She couldn't go to the mall and get the mani-pedi she'd been putting off since it was over twenty minutes away, and Julie couldn't be bothered getting on a bus close to nightfall.

"I could go to that classy noodle restaurant. Pretty close." But she didn't feel like being waited on either. "Oh, Cherubi's." Julie's favorite fast-food place that was close by. Between both of those aspects, she wouldn't be there for long.

Cherubi's used to be the quintessential Johto restaurant until they started outsourcing to other regions in recent years and putting locations across the map.

She pulled out her phone to text her mom her whereabouts in case she woke up and couldn't find Julie. She glanced up from her screen when a few cars drove by.

Julie walked for around ten minutes before reaching the big city, stuffing her hands in her pockets and passing some shady people and homeless sleeping on blankets by markets or in alleys, feeding their pokémon scraps or asking for change. One held a large sign claiming Arceus wasn't the true creator of all in bold red letters; she didn't bother to read the paragraph explaining why under it.

She took a right at the end of the street and upped her pace, soon spotting Cherubi's logo ahead: a rounded, lit-up, and flickering white sign elevated over the sidewalk with a smiling cherubi berry in its center.

She pushed the double doors after arriving and looked around at a half-full house.

Low pop music resounded off the walls adorned with framed black and white paintings, such as older-modeled cars driving on city streets among buildings or simple homes, the Magnet Station with men in formal suits boarding, and historical Cherubi's paintings. One was a shot of the restaurant decades ago with customers at tables and employees cooking in the back.

Vibrant writing was under the gallery with the restaurant's slogan: 'Everything's sweet!' The indoor seating had vibrant colors too-- a pink and minty light green blend.

Julie stood in line behind a few people and sought with her eyes all of the available seats. The center was packed and full of voices, but the free booths in the corner by the restroom looked perfect.

Only two lone people, a quiet couple, and a younger teen girl with her raichu were over there. Julie inched up after a person in front of her ordered, leaving one more.

She took a breath after seeing the last two customers in front of her separate and approach the two cashiers behind the green counter. They wore the restaurant's colors and a hat with the restaurant's logo. One was an older teen male on the left end who looked beyond tired, and the other was a female around the same age, who seemed to have more spright in her.

Julie gathered her words before going up to the counter.

The customer on the right left first with a card he put in his pocket; the woman called for the next in line and beckoned Julie, who approached and held her breath at first.

"Hi." The woman grinned. "What can I get you?"

Julie looked at the digital menu above and spotted one of her favorite dishes here among many cherubi-related ones, like cherwraps, rubi-coated chicken, and the popular rubi-drizzled fries.

She hadn't been here in too long. Their cherubi smoothies and deep-fried candied berries were to die for but contained at least fifty percent sugar. "Uh, I'll... Can I have the Rubi Salad and a small fountain drink, please?"

"Sure thing." She rang it up. "Total is seven hundred. Anything else?"

"No, that's all." Julie took out her wallet and counted her pokédollars, giving exact change to the woman with a minute grin and brief eye contact.

She took the money and put it in the register, then printed out a receipt and handed it to Julie along with a straw and paper cup sporting the restaurant's color scheme and logo. "You're twenty-two. We'll call it, and think we could interest you in the all-new Rubicard?"

"Sorry, the what?"

The woman reached into a drawer under her and pulled out a card with the restaurant's name in and a smiling cherubi underneath, holding it out to Julie. "It's some incentive to boost business pushed by the higher-ups. You buy, we input the ten-digit number on the back into our system, and you earn and build points you can use to get free drinks or sides after enough saving. Dunno if it'll last, but at least if you're buying what the CEO dude's poisoning us with, your money is put to something."

What a reminder. At least Julie was getting a salad. "Oh... That sounds nice, actually. How much is it?"

"Free." The woman handed it to her. "You can go to our website on the back of the card for more info."

"Thank you. Fascinating concept." Julie put the card in her wallet that she slipped into her back pocket, then made a beeline to her booth with her items. She slid in to the end by the wall and took a deep breath. The environment was quieter over here, so Julie could relax. She leaned back and took out her phone to see if Alyssa had texted her.

Julie may prefer staying inside a lot of the time, but going out was refreshing as long as she did it on her terms. Julie mainly did so when it was required unless Alyssa wanted to do something. Julie was more willing when she was with her, and she could fall back on Alyssa, but Julie couldn't be like that forever. Alyssa wasn't with her 24/7.

Around five minutes later, when the woman called her order, Julie went and got the plastic bowl, fork, and small cup of dressing from the counter.

She stopped at the fountain drink machine and eyed her options. "Lemoña, Violet, Xix," she muttered and passed over a few more options.

She actually enjoyed Xix. It was a soda as strong as Violet but took a tart-with-a-sweet-edge approach, combining nomel and pecha berry extract. But Julie settled on Lemoña a Paldea-founded lemonade brand popular worldwide. She then pressed for ice and filled her cup with a light amount before sitting back at her booth and setting everything down. She pocketed her gloves.

The salad looked delectable. It was full of greens, flavorful berries, nuts, cheese, and more. The savory sweet house dressing was the cherubi on top, which Julie wasted no time popping the lid off of and pouring over. She tore open the fork's wrap and took a bite of the salad that filled her mouth with a rich, sharp, tangy flavor containing bursts of sweetness coming from the berries, then washed it down with a sip of her drink.

Julie had no one to talk to, so she was back on her phone and opened Veela, scrolling through a few posts and stopping on a pokéfact fact by 'Deadlymon.' It was an image of a beedrill pasted onto a white background with black text underneath: 'Did you know that beedrill are responsible for over eight hundred deaths per year between humans and pokémon? They are a highly aggressive species that could attack at a slight or unintentional disturbance. When one engages, the entire colony follows without fail.'

Julie kept scrolling. "One of the most terrifying species out there. Wish we could get rid of them." She remembered what they'd recently done to that poor girl on the news. She was lucky to have survived the initial attack; Julie wondered if she had recovered and was still alive, but she didn't even want to check.

Beedrill weren't the only concerningly aggressive species to exist. Ekans avoided humans, but on occasion, especially when hungry or pent up for any reason, were known to attack and strangle humans to death. Arbok were capable of messier scenes. Onix and graveler in caves were ruthless. Nidorino charged and stabbed people, pinsir literally ate people-- and the way it handled its prey with those claws and teeth ensured pain and suffering.

Ursaring incidents were rare due to them living in secluded, deep forests; however, explorers and rangers still went missing. If the ursaring hadn't killed the person for a meal or to defend its cubs, they were sometimes found, and don't even get her started on those perverted hypno.

Rangers patrolled routes for such reasons; pokémon assaults in general were why authority urged people to travel in groups, with their pokémon, and to avoid routes at night.

Julie passed the next few posts and a few product ads, stopping at a trending video with hundreds of thousands of interactions from WorldOrigins playing clips of the after-effects of the tragic chemical explosion. Its cause was equipment failure, which had killed twenty employees, several pokémon in the area, and injured other pokémon and citizens that lived up to half a mile away.

It showed shots of dilapidated homes and other buildings that owners and families cleaned out or stood by, medics lifting people onto stretchers or tending to peoples' and childrens' wounds by ambulances, and Doption trucks taking pokémon to their centers to patch them up.

White text faded in and out on the screen that gave updates on the calamity as the video played, including that there were an estimated thirty casualties and fifty collective injuries so far, but the investigation was still underway.

"That's so awful..." At least humanitarian aid groups were helping those affected. There were clips of them giving water and food to pokémon as well.

She scrolled over another couple of posts and stopped on one of a video by JohtoNN. It was of the Accord's current president serving his five-year term, Jacob Vallint, a bald older male in a white and burgundy suit. He gave a speech on a developing category four hurricane en route to the Ferrum region, apparently rare to form during the winter. Jacob assured that the entire Accord was on standby and ready to aid by sending resources and medical supplies if necessary.

He was a transparent, kind, and just leader, one of the best the Accord had had in ages, and reached out to aid and financially support regions in need often.

While friendly, he also defended the Accord's honor and reputation valiantly, unafraid to sensibly challenge or speak out against other first-world regions for disrespecting the Accord through words or actions and even for questionable or criminal acts toward their own citizens.

As was more or less the current case toward Unova and its current president in the middle of serving his fifteen-year term. The Unovan people and most of the world had seen him as a great leader during the first half of his term. Now, he seemed to be making concerningly radical moves that raised eyebrows; no one knew where it was coming from as of yet.

A melodic beep sounded, and a white '1' appeared at the bottom right of her screen over her message tab. "What now, Ali," she mumbled and opened her messages, then she and Alyssa's conversation, where she saw a linked video post of a cinderace sitting at a desk above an accompanying text Alyssa sent. Julie first read her message:

'Thought you might like this one. Pretty sick.'

Julie clicked the link and paused the video posted by 'GIS,' an acronym for 'Galar Institution of Science.' She read the post's short description with thousands actively reveeing, liking, and commenting since it had been posted an hour ago.

It stated that the cinderace shown in the video clip had been trained extensively in language, math, and had been evaluated 24/7 by contemporary machinery utilizing sensors that monitored its brain's responses to various situations. It included stress, physical and emotional pain, grief, love, pleasure, and more.

Its emotional and social intelligence had been measured like never before from a scorbunny under a safe and healthy seven-year scientific experiment in Galar. A team of ten renowned scientists assessed and documented information closely throughout the process.

She pressed play; clips played of the cinderace sitting at a desk in a white room resembling a classroom while writing with a pencil in its curled paw. It then cut to it reading a book, and finally to one of the scientists giving it a spelling exam before a whiteboard.

It finally cut to a red-haired female scientist in the study standing before the board in a red jacket; Julie upped her media volume to listen. The woman had a Galarian (british) accent that Julie had always been fond of.

"Greetings, I'm Chloe Aldra, a pokétologist at the Galar Institute. This multi-billion-dollar project was one that broadened the scope and created new breakthroughs in how intelligent bipedal pokémon can be in curricular activities and day-to-day life.

By the time our cinderace, Era, evolved into what she is, she was well-versed in middle school level English and math. She could solve multiplication, division, algebra, geometry, data analysis and probability, and more. She could read and recall much of what she'd read from books and wrote them out in short eighth-to-tenth-grade essays. Her handwriting was subpar, but the content was clear and flowed well for the most part with only a few punctuation and grammatical errors here and there.

At one point, we brought in a male cinderace, who we set up with sensors, and monitored their interactions, emotions, and brain activity while putting them in a natural environment for a week. It lined up roughly with our intelligence in that regard, down to their mating practices and what they felt and thought that we won't cover here-- but you get the idea."

The scene cut to the two cinderace chatting and grinning, then to various others of them eating together, walking, and napping, overlayed by the woman talking.

"We then added a male lucario to the equation, which Era showed little to no interest in while with the cinderace. Her body and mind displayed attraction and whatnot, but she didn't seem to follow it. Many bipedal species have been known to practice monogamous relationships. This is less so the case for most quadrupedal species through past observations, excluding those like ninetales and less than half of cases with eeveelutions.

Our final assessment is that Era exhibits the general intelligence of a fifteen-to-sixteen-year-old human teenager. Bipedals are more like us than they aren't. They are very, very capable creatures; we are indebted to the Regional Science Association for funding this project.

We plan to run similar future experiments on quadrupeds next, such as ninetales, lycanroc, eeveelutions, bidoof, rattata, and more. We would also like to test and observe larger groups over a long period to study the social aspects of community, cooperation, altercations, and more. Unfortunately, these studies consume a staggering amount of time and money, so we are unsure when this would be possible again, but we're anticipating. Thanks for watching!"

"Alyssa was right. Wow." Julie hoped they would gather the funding to run more on different species-- especially the eeveelution tree.

She opened GIS' profile and followed them, texted Alyssa to thank her for the post, then closed the app and set her phone aside. Besides that video, maybe this wasn't the best time to be on Veela, as she never knew what she would come across.

Eating at a fast-food place wouldn't erase her troubles, but it pushed them aside for a moment in time. Julie had urges to get out of the house sometimes and should adhere to them more often. The polluted city air and inviting environments lifted her spirits.