Sundays with Saints [REFRESH]

The Refresh mini-game was his favorite, Saint decided. It didn’t need fighting, it was cute, and you could focus on bonding with your Pokémon. For his refresh room, he’d gone with a simple playroom so it could be easy to keep track of his team in a safe environment.

Well, presumably safe. He’s stirring a pot of curry over a little cooking fire as he watched his popplio crawl across the jigsaw puzzle-patterned floor like a grizzled soldier. Gumball’s face had never looked so severe. Taking a deep breath, he poked his head out from behind a Lapras plushie.

A balloon shot straight past his head, shooting a framed picture off the walls in a burst of water. Gumball honked in alarm.

Saint pursed his lips, wondering if he’d created a monster.

His newly-changed alolan vulpix, now deemed Slushie, was grinning victoriously from her throne. The throne was a pile of water balloons and an entire fully-grown Gyarados decked in gold. Taiyaki was playing dead. He had thrown in the towel about 5 minutes into the fight, when he realized being a chair was less work compared to resisting Slushie’s hostile takeover.

Gumball sounded the victory horns—even after months of being his trainer, Saint still couldn’t figure out where he was getting or storing these props—before charging forward, armed with nothing but his wits and a Nerf bazooka.

Saint closed his eyes. When the curry was done, the fight came to—amazingly—Slushie's win. Slushie took her seat at their little picnic table with a vulpix-sized Burger King crown on her head, while Gumball nursed his wounds, going full baby mode and clinging around Saint’s neck.

Once he finished pouring out the curry for the other Pokémon, Saint pulled Gumball off long enough to inspect, and was glad to find that all he got was a bruised pride. His seaform fins and frills still felt too flimsy for comfort, but if he could participate in water balloon battles with ease—maybe the infection wasn’t a cause for concern.

Observations would continue another day. “Let’s eat!”

GUMBALL'S RARITY INCREASED BY +5 (VERY RARE)