The silly tale you see below, accompanying yet another wonderful sketch a friend provided, can be thought of as a continuation to a prior story I wrote for another friend of mine, Hank. He the looming Pokemon Professor and I serving in as a sheepish assistant.

Hope you enjoy!

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“These Pokeballs really are more trouble than they’re worth,” Hank growled bitterly. “Honestly, why wouldn’t they let you swap a Pokemon from one Pokeball to another?” The wolf harrumphed at the unspoken assumption demanding as such. “That and at the very least they could extend me the option to order them in custom sizes.”

Sighing, the prodigious professor rolled a pebble sized speck, bearing familiar red and white coloration, between his padded fingertips. A homebrewed attempt at a Pokeball, crafted to Hank’s proportions, lay broken at his feet. “Surely he didn’t wander off too far…” he grunted as the wolf STOMPED about the lab. With a sigh, Hank dropped to his knees and carefully ran his hands across the sterile tiles lining the floor of his laboratory.

It was supposed to have been a simple enough procedure. The Pokeball that housed his assistant, a sheep most sweet, had become but a negligible pixel within Hank’s ITEM menu. Granted, it was an unfortunate, albeit expected, consequence of the wolf’s unending growth. Both as a professor and in general.

Hank’s knees scuffed against the floor as that baritone voice called out his Mareep’s name. He could have chosen to carry on as such. To squint and strain his eyes every time he desired to summon or recall the sheep who answered to Reep. The wolf snorted at the thought.

No! He could, would, do better. The technology existed to transfer Pokemon across vast distances after all. Surely it would be no matter to transmit them across shorter ones. Specifically from one Pokeball to another.

The wumbo wolf splayed his toes while he dragged a finger along the gaps between the tiles. “Thinking back on it… I really should have tried transferring Radda from one standard issue Pokeball to another. At least then I would have much fewer variables to sort through should that have failed as well.”

BZZZT

Hank’s ears flicked gently at the crackle and pop of exposed, and active, wiring. Chin tucked against his shoulders, he looked back at the arcs of electricity lashing out from the halves of the broken, and enormous, Pokeball of his own design. A gentle growl rumbled within Hank’s throat. “Radda, remind me to complain to Silph Co. about the quality of their Pokeballs. Their freely published blueprints leave a lot to be desired.”

Shaking his head, the wolf’s thoughts drifted to just what went wrong. Everything seemed to be going so well! A link had been established between one Pokeball and the other. A beam of light, Radda’s digitized being, connected the two. Until it didn’t, anyway. The larger of the Pokeballs hummed and wobbled unstably, sparks erupting from its interior, before it split asunder and abruptly cut off the stream of data. A pronounced bleat accompanied the disruption as Radda, his form siphoned of much of his size and data, slipped free from the stream and tumbled to the laboratory floor below.

Bothersome as it was, Hank couldn’t muster up much in the way of worry. That sheep always had a way of getting lost on him, or in him, as it was.

BRNNN BRNNN

“Hmm?” Reaching into his pants pocket, Hank thumbed at his phone. An envelope, indicative of mail, elbowed about for space within the app bar that lined the top of the screen. The wolf swiped down and tapped open the contents. He couldn’t help but smile, that and curl his plump toes, as his eyes scanned over the contents of the letter.

“Greetings from scenic wolfpaw! Wish you were here!”

A picture of a mountain range, each black capped peak separated by a gaping chasm, accompanied the message. Forests of grey furred fluff lined the valleys between them.

“Snrk. I’d almost forgotten. Mail is considered a Held item after all…”