"What do you think?"

Jade stepped back, showing off her creation with much jazzhands and finger-wiggling. Roger, who was currently sitting on Jade's Rookery egg, cocked his head all the way to one side.

<I don't understand what I'm looking at,> he said honestly. <What is it? A new art piece?>

The air in the Beta Island Canopy was hot and sticky, but for once, Jade had the right clothes for it. Her mesh net shirt out of the 90's did a great job of letting the humid air pass right through, and swathes of bare skin were exposed. Thankfully, this wasn't a real jungle. If it was, she'd be bitten all up to hell and back by insects. Good thing there's no mosquito Pokemon, Jade thought, dabbing at her forehead with one of Roger's shed feathers for an impromptu sweat rag.

"It's a trap," she said to answer the Torchic's question. "See? A Pokemon trap. Now we don't have to go into that scary-ass Tall Grass. We can just have a cookout or lay in an hammock and wait."

Jade didn't see why she needed more Pokemon - the ones she'd gotten were spooky enough. She'd put Andy firmly in Support for now, hoping if the brat was gonna be putting out big volts she could at least mitigate the damage and make it healing electricity. However the hell that made sense.

Jade froze. She and Sprigatito stared at each other, deer-in-headlights style. Then Sprigatito put its head back down and went back to sleep. She let out her breath.

So, the problem now was that the next part of her trap - the part that actually caught the Pokemon - wasn't done yet. She'd been thinking some kind of snare - the sort of rabbit snare that caught them by the legs and hoisted them up off the ground without breaking their neck. She knew the Pokemon around here were just digital, but she didn't want any of their pseudo-deaths on her hands.

Looked like she was gonna have to catch this Sprigatito the old-fashioned way, though. And that way meant throwing a Pokeball.

...Hell, but she'd never done that before. Was it just like the games? Was she supposed to just huck it? Press a button? Say some triggering phrase, like "You're mine, Sprigatito!" like Ash Ketchum in the anime?

What was gonna happen if she made the wrong choice?

Out in the wild, the wrong choice could get you killed. Playing dead for a grizzly instead of a black bear. Trying to take a mountain lion in a footrace. Looking at Sprigatito, it felt hard to believe that the little feline could represent a serious threat if she fumbled her Pokeball and made an ass out herself here while literally nobody was watching.

"Hiyaa!"

Well, here goes nothing.