Machoke

The sounds of scrubbing bounced around the empty dojo hall as a lone figure pushed a soaped up push broom over the well worn training mats that covered the floor. Today was supposed to be a rest day for Whit, but as with most small businesses there were no real rest days, just days to catch up on work that had fallen behind.
The accumulated sweat and grime from two weeks of training pokemon slowly stripped away under the brush as Whit shoved the watery detergent back and forth over the mats. Every time he did this he swore he’d get rid of the bristle brush and buy a floor scrubber, and every two weeks he’d check his business account and think, ‘next time’.
The mundane shuffling was interrupted by a rapid knocking at the door. Whit looked over his shoulder at the frosted glass windows of the dojo’s front entrance and sighed.
‘Can’t even read the damned close sign’ he groused to himself before putting the pushbroom down and approaching the door.
When he opened it a preteen girl in a school uniform stood before him, no older than most of the kids he’d been training pokemon for, but still a bit young to be alone as she was. The girl beamed a huge grin at him and opened her mouth to ask “Hi, are you the dojo that does one-on-one training with pokemon?”
This in fact was said dojo, something that originally started as a gimmick to attract trainers but quickly became the most significant source of his business.


Whit smiled back politely. “Yes this is, but we’re closed today I’m afraid,” he replied and pointed to the ‘closed’ sign on the door behind him.
“Oh, I saw that, but I thought you must just be closed for lunch,” the girl replied far too conceitedly for Whit’s liking, “In any case, I have a battle at school in a few weeks and I need someone to train my machoke for me, and you seemed like just the sort to do so!”
Whit patience was already worn by the girl, but the abrupt timeline and the fact that she interrupted his ‘day-off’ rubbed him as wrong as a person could.
Putting on his best customer-service voice he replied, “Well thank you for saying so, but we are still closed. If you’d like to have your pokemon trained here we’ll be accepting new applications on the 15th and I’ll be happy to add your machoke to my training schedule.”
The girl scoffed and replied, “But the 15th after my battle! I need someone to train her now!”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, but I need time to schedule in a new training program and I won’t have room for a new student until after the 15th.” The last bit wasn’t actually true, but taking this girl as a client was looking to be more pain than she was worth.
“Can’t you bump one of your others? I’m sure they don’t need the training as much as my machoke does,” she whined.
“No, I cannot just ‘bump’ one of my other students. They’ve were scheduled before you and I’m not going to force them to rearrange their time,” he replied coolly.
“Well there must be *something* you can do? This is a business is it not?”


Whit thought for a moment. This was in fact a business, but not one he was willing to sacrifice his personal life over just to appease a client, especially one this obnoxious. He smirked as he considered something that would either get rid of her or make this worth his while.
“Alright, you need a rush training regimen, and I don’t have time in my normal schedule for you. So how’s this, I’ll train your machoke during evenings for the next two weeks, but it’s going to cost triple my normal rate,” he answered evenly, pleased to return a bit of the superior attitude.
“See, I knew you could be reasonable!” she replied with startling glee. “I’ll have my driver arrange payment and schedule the drop offs for the training.”
Whit stood stupefied for a moment before asking, “Your... driver?”
The girl looked equally confused for a moment before replying, “Yes my driver, did you think I walked here?”
It was then that Whit noticed the gunmetal luxury sedan parked across the street.
“Now wait right here and I’ll go fetch him,” she replied before turning around and walking excitedly over to the car.
Still not entirely sure to what make of the girl or the situation, he was sure of at least one thing. He should have charged more.


“I’ll be back at 7 to pick her up,” said the man in a sharp suit and a driver’s cap before he handed Whit a pokeball.
“Alright. I’ll try to have her ready by then,” Whit replied as he took the ball from the man’s hand.
The driver tilted his cap and began walking back to the sedan. Whit puffed through his nose before shaking his head and closing the front door. He was expecting the girl to show up at least for the initial session as other trainers tend to. Most of them seem to like watching how he worked and to offer encouragement to their pokemon, at least until they started getting bored. The girl however didn’t even bother with that, simply leaving her driver to deliver her pokemon like it’d been rented for a party.
Whit turned the black and gold-striped ball over in his hand as he wondered if the pokemon would be as stuck up as the owner. He sighed to himself and pressed the button on the front of the ball before tossing it onto the sparring mats.
A flash of blue-white light poured out of the pokeball and materialized into the form of a female machoke. Standing at a typical height for her kind, she was about a foot shorter than Whit and her well defined muscles gave her a somewhat stocky appearance. Oddly, she was also wearing what looked like a black unitard that covered most of her torso but left the purple skin of her arms and legs exposed. She looked dazed for a moment as pokemon often do after being released before she spotted Whit and offered a polite smile and a brief bow.
‘At least she has better manners than her owner,’ Whit thought to himself.
He offered his hand to the machoke and she looked at it in brief confusion before tentatively grasping it with her own.
“Hi there, I’m Master Burnett, your instructor. Has your trainer told you why she dropped you off with me?” Whit asked as he let go of her hand.


The machoke nodded and replied a brief affirmative in her own language, «Yes, she told me I would be trained here.»
Whit nodded and smiled back, “Good, that saves me the time of explaining what we’re doing.”
He started walking over to a set of machines in the corner of the train room and motioned for her to follow him.
“Normally I’d spend a bit more time just chatting, but we’re under a bit of a time crunch, so we’re going to get started right away,” he explained as he started pressing buttons on a machine that looked like a drum kit for an octillery.
The machoke followed behind Whit and watched curiously while he fiddled with the strange machine. After a final button press, the machine beeped a short chime and showed a display full of zeroes. He turned back to the machoke and started to explain. “This is a hit tester. It’ll look at how strong you can hit and how quickly. It’s rated for pokemon do don’t worry about being rough with it, just hit the pads as hard and fast as you normally would while using your moves in a battle.”
The machoke approached the machine and looked it over warily. Whit watched as she took her time before squaring up and delivering a quick punch to the machine. The numbers jumped and held a middling value for a moment before flashing back to zero.
“Go ahead, make that machine regret getting on the wrong side of your fists,” Whit encouraged.
The machoke smiled shyly before she unloaded a flurry of kicks and punches onto the pads, slapping and booming as they connected.
Whit walked over to a desk next to the training equipment and picked up the piece of paper sitting on the corner before leaning his hip against the desk top. He took a moment to look over the intake form he had the driver fill out. Her name was ‘Amethyst’ apparently. Whit shook his head.
‘Another victim of cutesy naming,’ he thought.


It was possible she did enjoy the name, he’d seen it before, but knowing how most pokemon deal with goofy names she probably puts up with it rather than enjoys it. After putting the form back on the table, Whit called out to the machoke and told her, “Alright, that’s good Amethyst. You can stop.”
He noticed the slightest cringe as he called her name and amended, “Do you have a nickname you prefer? Like Amy, or ... I dunno, Thysty?”
She seemed to cringe even harder at that last one, but shook her head and replied, «No, my trainer just calls me Amethyst»
He quirked a smile and asked, “Are you *okay* with me calling you Amy then? Just to keep things short.”
Amethyst looked pensive for a moment before nodding. Whit smiled at her and nodded back. “Alright, Amy it is.”
Whit pushed up off the desk he was leaning against and walked up to the control panel on the punching machine. He picked up a tablet resting on the top of a stack of storage tubs and connected its cable to a port on the side of the punching machine.
Amethyst meanwhile was watching him curiously, unsure of what the machine would tell him about her. Would it show that she was strong? Or maybe that she was out of practice as she worried.
Whit noticed her looking at him and replied, “Don’t worry, this just is going to give me an overall look at how hard your hits are. The point of all this, “he said gesturing to the other equipment, “Is to get a baseline of how you’re doing and let me come up with a training program that will help to round out your weak spots.”
Amethyst didn’t enjoy hearing that. So it would tell him how weak she had gotten after all. She sighed as she wondered how much the last half a year of being shown off at school and around various show competitions had dulled her fighting skills.
“Something on your mind?”


Whit belly laughed at her apology before catching himself and apologizing himself. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed.” He cleared his throat. “No harm done by the comments, I know my methods are a bit unusual so I’m used to both people and pokemon finding them strange.”
The machoke groaned to herself and buried her face in her hands, «Not even ten minutes and I’ve already ruined this...»
“Don’t worry about it. That’s not even the worst thing I’ve heard a pokemon say about me,” he encouraged.
Amethyst lifted her head up and looked at Whit before asking, «Really? What did they say?»
Whit smirked as he remembered the story. “I was training a diggersby and either I was pushing him too hard he’d just been having a bad week, but I was trying to get him to at least match his hit strength from his previous session. Eventually he gets so fed up that he stops and yells, ‘I’d like to see you do any better you berry-picking monkey!’”
Stifled laughter spilled from behind her hand as Amethyst covered her mouth. Seeing the previously nervous pokemon suddenly in better spirits, Whit joined in her giggling, which seemed to spur Amethyst into laughing even more openly. The tension released like a flood and soon both of them were laughing more at each other than the story.
Soon enough they were able to quiet down again, and Whit cleared his throat before asking, “So, now that we’ve shared some stores and gotten to know each other a bit, what do you say we keep going? We’ve got a couple more tests to do then we can talk about how you’d like to train and call it a day.”
Amy smiled openly for the first time since she arrived and nodded before replying, «Sure, let’s keep going.»


Whit led Amy over to the treadmill and started pressing buttons on it. Before long the machine was set for whatever test Whit had in mind, and he turned to Amy and asked, “Have you ever used a treadmill before?”
«Yes, of course I have. Haven’t most pokemon?» she replied.
“You’re actually in the minority. Most pokemon haven’t, or at least the ones I’ve taught haven’t,” Whit explained.
As he started fiddling with something else, Amy stepped onto the treadmill and waited. ‘How could most pokemon *not* have used one?’ she thought. Was her early training really that unusual? She thought all pokemon raised by humans must have been to a pokemon gym at least once, and basic exercise equipment should have been common to them. That said, she hadn’t actually been to more than one gym, so maybe the one she had been trained in was different.
Whit finally finished what he was doing and came back with a palm sized box with multiple wires hanging off it.
“This is a vitals monitor. It tracks your heart, lungs and blood flow and I use it to get an idea of what you’re endurance is like,” he explained.
Amy looked unsure of the device, but it didn’t look like it would hurt. No needles or clamps to be seen, just some wires with pads on the end.
“I’ll need you to pull your top down so I can apply the pads. They go on your chest.”


Amy nodded and slipped the straps of the unitard down off her shoulders. She extricated her arms from the insides of the loops and then pulled the part covering her chest down, exposing her small breasts. Whit looked on dispassionately, or at least has much as he could with humanoid pokemon. ‘Nudity doesn’t bother them, so it shouldn’t bother me,” he thought to himself. Whether or not he actually felt that way was another matter.
Realizing he’d been staring a bit, he started peeling the backing of the first gel pad and walked up to Amy.
“These things are a little cold at first, but they warm up pretty quickly,” he explained as he knelt down and pressed the first pad against the left side of her rib cage, underneath her breast. She gasped slightly and Whit glanced at her apologetically. He worked silently for a bit before the quiet started to feel awkward.
Not taking his eyes of his work he asked, “So, why are you wearing this thing anyway? Don’t see to many pokemon wearing clothes, and the ones that do wear like, a hat, at most.”
«My trainer wants me to wear it. She says, ‘A lady can’t go around naked like that!’» Amy parroted, «I’m not sure why it bothers her that much, but humans *all* seem to have a problem with nudity.”
Whit shook his head and chuckled, “That we do. Some of us more than others apparently.”
A few more of the sticky pads later and she was all wired up, looking something like a patient in a cardiac ward.
“Ok, I’ll start the treadmill now. This will run you through a program that lasts about five minutes. It’ll speed up and slow down but gradually.” Whit pointed to the large red button on the center of the control panel. “This is the emergency stop. Hit it if you feel like you absolutely need to stop, but obviously try keep going for the whole program if you can.”


Amy scoffed slightly and smirked. She could run for five minutes no problem. What kind of battling pokemon couldn’t keep up that kind of exertion for such a short a time?
Whit pressed the start button on the treadmill and backed off. It started moving at a comfortable jog, which Amy kept up with easily. She focused on keeping pace at first, but quickly acclimated and soon her mind started to wander. She’d used treadmills and other exercise devices before, but this was the first time she’d had something that looked like it belonged in a pokemon center attached to her while doing so.
She looked over to Whit and asked, «Why do you use all these testing machines? I never saw anything like these when I lived at the gym.»
Whit puffed through pursed lips and replied, “It’s a bit of a story, but I guess you’re going to be busy for the next few minutes anyway.”
“When I was younger I had originally trained to be a pokemon med tech, err sorry, medical technician, the guys who run tests and take blood and tissue samples. I even found a job at one of the local pokemon centers. I liked the work," Whit smiled, “and working around different pokemon all day was a dream come true.”
He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “What wasn’t so fun were the hours and my schedule. See, in the medical profession seniority matters a lot, so the new guys get all the worst shifts, working twelve-hour nights, twenty-four hour shifts on holidays and constantly having to cover for people.”
“After thee years of that I was completely burned out and couldn’t handle it any more. The problem was that I didn’t have any other job skills and I wasn’t going to go back to stocking shelves at Pokemart, so I had the idea to take one of my hobbies and try to make a job out of it. I’d been doing judo since I was a teen – and honestly it’s probably what kept me sane through most of my time at the pokemon center.”


“But, I knew there’d be no way I could make it as an instructor, too many better students than me who’d been doing it for longer, so I hatched a scheme to combine both my pokemon medical knowledge and martial arts skills to create this,” he explained as he gestured to the room around them.
Amy gave a grunt of affirmation as her feet continued to pound away on the treadmill. She could see how knowing the ways pokemon work physically could make Whit a better trainer, but one could never know. In the time she had spent living in the gym she had seen so many training fads and rumors about how best to train or what to eat. Even something as odd as whether pokemon should be prevented from masturbating before a battle. That one had been rather unpopular among the pokemon.
She swallowed to wet her throat and asked, «Does it work?»
Whit shrugged. “It seems to, at least compared to the amateur training most pokemon get. Part of the reason I do these tests is to provide numerical proof that my training works. Gives the trainers who hire me something to look at and know that their pokemon are getting stronger.”
“Normally the trainers get pretty excited about seeing how much harder their pokemon can hit or how much their endurance improves, but to be honest I don’t think your trainer is going to care that much,” he wondered.
Amy chuffed to that. «No,» she panted, «I doubt it.»
She continued plodding along at the timer on the machine counted down, speeding up or slowing down as the program went. If she was honest, this was harder than she was expecting it to be. Those last six months of idleness really had done a number on her. They were relaxing certainly, but she was definitely off her peak. She was actually looking forward to the training now, not only as something to do, but as a way to get back to where she was. Maybe even stronger.


With thirty seconds left on the timer, Whit interrupted her thoughts as he announced he was going to get her a towel. Amy offered another breathless grunt and continued on, the burning in her legs becoming unpleasant. Soon enough the timer reached zero and the treadmill started beeping as it slowed down. Finally allowed to catch her breath, she panted as her the hammering in her chest started to slow. Whit finally returned with a towel and a bottle of water, both of which she took gratefully.
“I’ll give you a few minutes to rest and then we’ve got one more test to perform,” he explained, “It’s a simple strength test. First a grip strength test, then an over-the-head lift and shoulder carry. I’ll be hooking you up to some more sensors, this time on your arms and legs.”
She nodded before sitting down and chugging more of the water. After finishing off the bottle she handed the empty to Whit and began wiping off the sweat that had beaded on her skin. Whit tried chucking the empty plastic bottle into the recycling bin from where he was, but missed and let out an, “Awww,” before sauntering over to the fallen bottle and placing it in the bin. Amy giggled at his antics, pleased that Whit seemed to be more playful than the trainers at the gym. As she continued wiping herself down, she was thankful that the air in the dojo was pleasantly cool. Even so, there still wasn’t much airflow and her unitard was noticeably darker in areas where sweat had pooled. She stood up on sore legs and quietly stripped out of the garment. She wondered if her trainer would be mad that she got her clothes all sweaty, but knowing the girl she’d probably just buy her a new one if she needed.


Whit had just finished putting the bottle in the bin and turned around to find a fully naked machoke turned away from him. While briefly caught off guard by her nudity, he quickly admonished himself. ‘Of course she is you dolt, she’s a pokemon’. Still, man that he was, he couldn’t help but notice the shapely curves of her darkened buttocks.
Needing to normalize this quickly, he asked, “Oh, too warm?”
She nodded over her should and folded the soiled unitard over her arm. «Is there some place I can put this? I don’t think I should just leave it on the floor.»
Whit thought for a moment and answered, “Just leave it on the treadmill. I’ll need to wipe it down anyway.”
As Amy walked over to the treadmill to place her clothing on one of its support handles, Whit couldn’t help but watch as her muscular thighs bounced and her perky nipples jerked with each step. Closing his eyes and breathing deeply, he prayed to Arceus he could get through the next two weeks.


Whit busied himself with getting the next set of tests ready. The grip tester machine was a simple device, a small handheld thing that looked like display of a food scale with a boxy handle welded to it. Setting it took only a single button press and he handed it off to Amy as he explained how to hold it and which buttons to press to reset the scale and store the measurements.
While she was occupied with that, he set out the next part of the test, a fifty pound medicine ball and a couple pylons set apart at ten meters. The pylons were easy, the medicine ball, less so. As he struggled to heft it over to the starting point of the exercise course, Amy approached him and asked, «Do you want some help with that?»
As much as he did, Whit shook his head and replied, “Can’t. Need to make sure you’re fresh ... before you start the test.”
Amy wasn’t sure why that mattered or how after running on a treadmill she would be ‘fresh’, but she supposed it just part of his method.
Whit finally hefted the ball over to the pylon and after carefully lowering himself into a squat, dropped it on the floor with a dull thud. He breathed out in relief and then turned around to deal with the much bigger problem – wiring up Amy while she was completely naked.
“Alright, I need to wire up your arms and legs with some more sensors. These ones wrap around your limbs and while they aren’t sticky, I’ll need to use a bit of surgical tape to keep the wires out of the way,” Whit explained while walking over to the table the muscle sensor was resting on.


He knew he shouldn’t be bothered by it. He’d dealt with many humanoid pokemon wearing nothing but their birthday suit while working as a med tech, but something about Amy was doing things to him. Was it her musculature or something silly like the fact she was wearing clothes? Frankly he had no idea, but that didn’t change the fact that he needed act professionally, regardless of how he felt.
After taking a second to collect himself, he picked the muscle monitor up off the table and turned around to face Amy. Deliberately looking at her face, and only her face, he approached her and said, “Ok, hold your arms out to the side.”
She complied and Whit pulled open the velcro strap attached to the sensor. He wrapped it around a bicep and adjusted it to fit with practised ease. He noticed that so long as she wasn’t talking it was a lot easier to focus on the work. Maybe that was why he was having such a difficult time with her in particular. Thinking back, the last time he had been around a humanoid pokemon like this had been before his pokespeak had gotten to a conversational level. Back then it was easier to think of them differently, not quite human, not quite people. Now though, there was very clearly a woman standing completely naked right next to him. Not a human woman, but a woman still.
After finishing with the wire on other arm Whit handed her the main box that all the wires connected to and instructed, “Ok, you can put this around your waist while I get the sensors on your legs. You’ll need to stand with your feet apart for this. I’m going to wrap one around each calf and each thigh.”


Amy complied again and dropped her arms while spreading her legs slightly. She took the belted box from Whit and ran the belt around her waist before clipping the front clasps together. She wasn’t sure where the box was supposed to sit, but having it to the side felt like it would stay out of the way there. She would have asked Whit but something was off about the way he was acting and it was making her worry. He seemed colder than before, more like the doctors who did her physicals at the gym. Was it something she did or said? She realized it only started once she had finished on the treadmill and after getting all sweaty. Did she smell now and he was too polite to say anything?
While he was focused on her calf, she took a discrete sniff of her underarm, but thankfully didn’t find anything off. Then was it some other part of her? Or maybe it was the clothing? She really had no idea, but the silence between them was killing her. Desperate for relief from the silence, she abruptly asked, «Um, so how do these things work?»
Whit stopped for a moment upon hearing her speak, almost startled, and then continued on while explaining, “They sense the electrical impulses produced by your muscles and use them to determine how much you’re exerting yourself.”
He pulled out the next sensor and pointed to the black plastic disk on in the middle of the strap. “This is the actual sensor.” He turned the cap over to show the metallic dots on the bottom. “And these are the electrodes that ‘listen’ for the signals your muscles make.”


Whit continued to explain how the sensors worked, talking about things like how the signals sent by the brain cause the muscles to move and how the little metal circles ‘hear’ those signals and ‘make them louder’. Amy couldn’t understand most of it, but she was glad that he seemed more animated than he had been. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened before, but at least now he looked to be over it. Maybe he was just nervous too? His hands were rather close to certain ‘parts’ of her that she normally wouldn’t let anyone near, so maybe he was expecting a bad reaction. Had other pokemon done that?
Whit continued to expound on how the electromyogram could convert muscle movement into readable data while he finished up with the last sensor band. Truthfully he was thankful to have a distraction, something to focus on instead of the fact that his hand occasionally had to reach between Amy’s legs to loop the straps around them. Being this nervous around a pokemon was a rare feeling for Whit, and something he normally only experienced with larger more temperamental pokemon. With Amy though it was different, less caution and more anxiety, like she would see something perverse about his behaviour. Thankfully she either didn’t notice anything or chose not to say
Once Whit finished with the last band he stood up and let out a quiet sigh of relief. He offered a friendly smile and explained, “Alright, you’re all wired up. For this next bit, I’ll need you to lift the ball and rest it on your shoulder, then carry it over to the other pylon, and then you put the ball down. Then pick it up again, carry it on your shoulder, put it down and so on. You’ll do that ten times and then that’ll be the last of the testing.”


Amy nodded and got started on lifting the ball. Unsurprisingly it was much easier for her than it was for him, but it still had some heft and required a least a little bit of exertion. She started the walk over to the opposite pylon and funnily enough this actually reminded her of a strength training exercise she had done many times at the gym. The only different was that instead of carrying a medicine ball it was a tire from some kind of large vehicle. Whit probably couldn’t have fit something like that in here though, hence the ball.
Watching Amy easily lift the ball he had struggled with left Whit feeling the slightest bit of envy. It was well known that pokemon were pound-for-pound stronger than humans, and it was something he’d had plenty of first hand experience seeing. All the same, he still felt like after years of martial arts and occasional weight training, that he should be a little more able to keep up. Truth be told he was easily better than most humans, but even so, on the pokemon scale he may as well have been a wimpod.
As Amy finished her last run, she dropped the ball with a heavy thud and let out a loud breath. She had broken a sweat again, though only barely this time. Whit approached her with another water bottle and her towel and she gratefully took both once again, though a bit less desperately this time.
Whit approached her side and grabbed the data collector from the belt. After pressing a button and waiting for the machine to beep, he started disconnecting the wires and told her, “You can take off the sensors. Just undo the velcro and peel off the surgical tape holding the wires. You can put them in this bag once you’ve got them off. I’ll be over here building your fitness report.”


Placing said bag on the floor, he wandered off to the collection of machines and grabbed the tablet from the punching machine. Amy watched him fiddle with the tablet, connecting a wire to the box that used to be on her hip and pressing buttons on the glowing screen of the tablet. Realizing she was staring, she started to remove the sensors from around her arms and legs. The straps themselves were easy enough, but the surgical tape was starting to annoy her. Somehow it was still incredibly sticky even though she was sweating, and more than once she simply resorted to pulling at the wire to remove the tape from her skin. Why did humans even need to make tape this sticky? It seemed completely excessive to her when normal bandages stuck on just fine.
Having finished with the wires, she looked over to see if Whit was done with whatever he was doing. While he was finished with the punching machine, he now had the tablet connected to the device from the treadmill. Having nothing better to do, Amy sat down on the floor mats and took another swig out of her water bottle. She looked around the dojo, noticing for the first time the colorful mural on the back wall. It showed a faceless human leading a bunch of pokemon in what looked like martial arts exercises. Amy smiled. It was cute in a way, seeing someone – who she can only assume was supposed to be Whit – leading a bunch of pokemon like they were human students at a school. Normally trainers were much more hands off with their training, designing the exercises or setting up pokemon sparing partners, but other than that they tended to be out of the way. Whit was different though, or at least he seemed different. It was like he really wanted to teach pokemon what he knew about fighting.


Amy found herself staring at Whit once again while she was lost in thought. He had moved over to the desk now, working on that ‘fitness report’ she guessed. Seeing him work so diligently for her was oddly comforting. It was strange to be fussed over so much with all sorts of machines and devices but not have it feel like a doctor visit. It felt like she was being cared for.
She shook her head. They’d known each other for less than an hour. He wasn’t fawning over her like some devoted trainer, he was just doing his job and getting the data that he needed to do it. Still, it was more concern than her actual trainer had given her in the six month’s she’d known her. Amy frowned at that. She always thought that once she had finished her training at the gym she would finally have her real trainer, someone who would look after her, a friend even. Instead she ended up a trainer who seemed more interested in showing her off like a prized furfrou.
Sighing wistfully, she looked over at Whit again only this time she found him looking back.
He smiled at her and replied, “Hey, almost done. Your scores are looking pretty good so far. Just need to finish compiling some data and we can go over some training recommendations.”
Amy nodded and replied «Okay,», but realized something else and quickly amended, «Actually, do you have a bathroom? I think I drank too much water.»
Whit chuckled and replied, “Sure, it’s down the hall there, first door on the right.” He pointed a thumb down the hall, and Amy stood up and followed his directions to the toilet.


Whit went back to compiling the last bits of Amy’s report. Overall her scores were good. A little rough with the endurance test, but that’s nothing some endurance training couldn’t fix. Having a two week deadline would make things trickier, but he’d seen fast recoveries from pokemon before. The real issue was if the level of improvement would be enough to make her trainer happy, though she did seem like the sort that was never satisfied with what she got anyway.
The sound of a toilet flushing broke Whit out of his reverie and he checked the tablet to see that the report had finishing compiling. ‘Perfect timing’ he thought. Amy emerged from the hallway and Whit called her over and offered her a chair. She took her seat and he turned the tablet to face her and started his explanation.
“So, overall your power and speed scores are pretty high, definitely in the top eightieth percentile for a machoke,” he explained and while pointing to the coloured line on the bar graph.
“You’re endurance scores are a little lower than I was expecting given your strength, but still a respectable fiftieth percentile.”
Amy was expecting that but still wasn’t pleased to hear it. She explained, «I felt like I had gotten worse. My trainer hasn’t been doing any kind of training with me for the past six months.» Looking contrite she added, «And if I’m honest I haven’t been doing much on my own.”
Whit nodded and continued, “I had a feeling it was something like that, but the good news is that pokemon tend to rebound pretty quickly so I’m comfortable saying we should be able to get you back in fighting form before your battle.”
Any looked surprised. «Really? Two weeks doesn’t seem like a lot of time.»


Whit nodded. “If we were trying to train you up from scratch it wouldn’t be, but given that we’re just trying to recover some lost capacity I think we should be able to get you up to about eighty to ninety percent of your previous endurance levels. You’ll have to do some exercises on your own time to make the most of it, but I can to teach you some exercises you can do even if you don’t have any equipment.”
Amy was dumbfounded. Making up for six months of inactivity in two weeks sounded too good to be true. But if Whit said it was possible then she was at least partial to believing him.
“One other thing I’d like to do is get a sense for how good your fighting techniques are and if possible offer some improvements,” he explained, “Not that I think they’ll need too much work given that you’ve had training at a gym, but having some extra tricks to pull could make the difference.”
Amy still wasn’t sure what to feel about everything Whit said. On the one hand what he was promising was extraordinary, but on the other it seemed like an impossible goal. She didn’t think he was lying, but he was maybe overstating his abilities or at least her recovery potential. Still, it wasn’t like she had any better options and she doubted his training could make her worse.


«Alright. Will I be doing fighting exercises with another student? I didn’t see any of your own pokemon around.”
Whit got that cock grin again. “Nope, you’ll be doing them with me!”
She couldn’t have possibly heard that right, «But ... you’re a human.»
Smiling proudly he explained, “You’re absolutely right, but what we’ll be training is techniques, not power. I might not be able to hit as hard as a pokemon or move quite as fast as some of them, but what I’m going to teach you is how to use your arms and legs by showing you how I use mine, and more importantly how to defend against a more experiences opponent.”
Amy was once again dumbfounded. What Whit had suggested before was crazy enough, but this ... well, there was only one thing for it. This human was clearly insane.