36 CH13 (36), Sapience And Space Upgrade
It had been a week since Mikail had his first mock fight and started his lessons with his parents.
Since then they had participated in 3 more fights.
They had held them every two days and his opponents were a Caterpie, a Pidgey, and the same Rattata from their first fight.
The fight with the Caterpie went nearly identical to their first one and Natu won it without any problems.
The mock fight against the Pidgey was way more difficult.
Due to Pidgey's ability, their opening move as it currently was, could not distract it, and Natu couldn't use a Gust that was fast and strong enough for his opening move yet, so they were unable to hamper it while it was in the air.
Because of this Mikail told Natu to forgo the opening move and they started with the passenger command instead.
Natu managed to land a Gust before Pidgey reached him but after that, the fight turned more into a boxing match than a Pokemon fight.
Natu tried to hit Pidgey with his Peck while Pidgey did the same with Tackle.
Both tried to dodge as well as they could but neither allowed their foe to retreat in case the other tried to use a long-range attack.
The training they did to raise Natu's parameters showed its fruits during this slugfest.
The Pidgey tired out faster than Natu and Mikail instructed Natu to retreat and use Gust if he saw a chance to do so.
After a successful Peck, Natu utilized Pidgey flinching backward to retreat a bit and hit it with a Gust.
While they won the fight it was a hard-earned victory and it showed that they needed to expand Natu's move pool.
Not only did they have to add new moves but they had to train his old ones some more because Natu took too long to perform them and they had to fall back to Gust too often when they needed a long-range attack.
The revanche fight with Rattata ended with Natu winning once more but it was not as easy as their last fight.
The Rattata seemed to have trained for this and had managed to learn Quick Attack, which allowed it to catch up to Natu a few times.
It succeeded in landing a few hits but Natu managed to open up the distance every time and at the end, the Rattata fell to Natu's Gust.
What was great was that just yesterday Natu seemed to have achieved full sapience.
Natu was nearly there before but it seemed these 2 weeks gave him the last boost he needed.
Mikail did not know if it was because of their strategy and training sessions, their mock fights, or the lessons that Mikail had to go through that he witnessed but whatever it was Natu went from communicating with emotions and impressions to words.
The first word Natu said to Mikail with his telepathy was 'idiot'.
Just as Mikail was about to smack him Natu added 'thank you' and Mikail decided to postpone Natu's smackdown.
He answered with 'your welcome bird head'.
They told his parents the good news but his parents were not as surprised as he predicted them to be.
Seeing the look on Mikail's face his father said.
"We had expected Natu to reach this point sometime soon because of how much he had progressed since he had come to our house.
He was practically able to understand everything we said lately and only him being able to express himself in his own words instead of feelings was missing."
They turned to Natu and congratulated him.
"Congratulations Natu.
You managed to achieve that last small but significant step, and we are happy for you."
Aside from the mock fights and Natu's sapience, there were his daily writing lessons.
Mikail decided to use two days as the period it took him to succeed in writing pleasant-looking letters and each writing session took about 2 hours.
He had currently finished with the letter 'D' and would start with 'E' the next time.
All this writing practice had helped him to increase the steadiness of his hands, which would be useful for many of the production occupations he was planning to learn later on.
He was currently eating his breakfast and the oran berry he was currently eating was really delicious.
'Did my parents buy low-quality oran berries instead of the lowest quality berries?
That did not sound how I intended it to sound like.
When I use it like this, it gives the impression that the berries are bad, which they aren't.
Let's see.'
Mikail used his observe ability on the berry.
'Name: Oran berry
Type: Plant
Quality: Lowest
Faults: None
Uses: Contains nutrition and plant energy.
Can be eaten as food and helps slightly with physical recovery.
Well, it looks like it was not a low-quality berry after all.
Damn, now that I had that thought with the quality being misunderstood as bad, I can not get rid of it.
Let's see if I can change the names a bit.
I hope that's possible.
I mean I can fold and unfold my screen and in the end, it is just a cosmetic change.
The meaning stays the same just the wording changes.'
Mikail tried to see if he could change the wording of the lines or not.
'Great it seems it is possible.
So what should I change it into?
Let's see, instead of Quality, I am going to use Class.
I should change the grades as well, lowest and low make me give off a bad impression to me now.
I will use letters to categorize the materials instead.
Lowest to 'F', low to 'E', mid to 'D', and so on.
Now, let me see how the new status screen looks.'
Mikail observed the oran berry once more.
'Name: Oran berry
Type: Plant
Class: F
Faults: None
Uses: Contains nutrition and plant energy.
Can be eaten as food and helps slightly with physical recovery.
That's much better.
Should I change Uses to Description while I am already at it?
Nah, that's okay for now.'
Mikail felt satisfied with the result of the change.
The days went by while Mikail continued with the mock fights and his writing lesson.
He naturally did not forget his own training, be it physical or psychic during this time.
Neither did he forget the Caterpie inside his space.
He continued to invest some time in them as well even if his main focus was elsewhere for now.
It happened during his telekinesis exercise on the sixth day.
Mikail had already increased the number of stones he could levitate to 20 before and he managed to increase the range of his telekinesis to 20 meters thanks to his efforts as well.
His current objective was to increase his time to 20 minutes too.
His best time, for now, was 19 minutes and 20 seconds and he was really close to his goal.
Mikail knew that this milestone would not help him advance to first-class Tier 1 psychic because he had felt no inkling of any kind concerning this but he thought his combat capacity would be equal (mid) or (high) iron-stage Pokemon and hoped that it would expand the size of his space.
Normally, he would train for 90 to 120 minutes, but today he kept going.
He tried to reach the 20 minutes until he was exhausted, after which he would try to recover as fast as he could.
Finally, nearly three hours later he succeeded.
He did not hear any breaking or storm sounds after his success, but he did see how his space grew.
Confirming that his strength had taken a step forward.
To find out how strong he really was, would require him to challenge either a (mid) or (high) iron-stage Pokemon and he did not feel ready yet.
Either way, it helped increase the size of his space so that was great.
When his space stopped growing it had gone from 2000 sqm to 10.000 sqm in size and this was only his area without adding the habitats of the Pokemon.
If he added the 900 sqm from Natu, 1600 sqm from Magikarp and the 600 sqm from Caterpie to the total then the final size was 13.100 sqm.
This was not bad and Natu was not far from upgrading his strength as well, so it would increase once more as soon as that happened.
Aside from the increase in size, the production rate for nonfloral materials increased from 3 to 4.
That was not all, the most important change that happened was to the house.
Its area increased from 150 sqm to 200 sqm.
It looked a bit classier and went from 2 stories to 3 stories.
The first two stories were still the same just bigger but the third story was another story.
There was only a single room on the new third floor, a working space.
A working space to make Pokeballs to be specific.
The room had two working tables as well as all the tools necessary for the production of hand-made pokeballs.
A drying station for Apricorns, a sawing station, an area with brushes and pens of all sizes, an area with all kinds of containers, one for storage, and many other things he needed to produce Pokeballs.
After he saw the new working space he could barely stop himself from directly trying to make his first Pokeball.
He had already spent quite some time on his telekinesis and it was time for his father to come home.
Mikail shelved the idea until sometime after dinner and went downstairs.
Shortly after his father came home and they had dinner.
After dinner, Mikail did his writing exercise and spent some time relaxing with his parents.
When it was time for him to sleep, he told Natu to keep an eye out for his parents and entered his space.
He looked around the first two floors to see if anything had changed but saw that aside from the size of the rooms everything stayed the same.
After confirming the situation of floors one and two, Mikail went up to the third floor.
His eyes started to sparkle as soon as he saw all the tools and working stations.
He immediately started going over every single tool and station to see what exactly was available and to see where everything was.
He tested everything to check if there were any problems.
It wasn't that he didn't trust his space to provide adequate equipment, he just wanted to make sure.
Safety first like they say.
Once he had been to all stations, seen what was available and where everything was positioned Mikail decided to check up on the knowledge he had for Pokeball-making.
He knew that all occupations had a starting knowledge pack that he had access to and that he needed to unlock the rest of the knowledge through his efforts.
"Let's see.
There is the sea of knowledge.
There is the occupation area and here is the section for PokeBall production.
Now let me go over the knowledge I already have access to.
That's not as much as I expected.
Well, it is a large amount of information but most of it is basic and general knowledge that I will need as a foundation, which is why I don't feel too disappointed despite only having the instructions for an equivalent to the standard Poke Ball.
If I had tried to learn all that basic and general knowledge on my own, it would have taken me 3-4 years to remember everything and that's if I spend 10 to 12 hours daily on it.
Assuming I had access to all that knowledge.
So this saved me quite some time because while I haven't internalized the knowledge I have it inside my head and I don't have to be afraid of forgetting anything."
Mikail nodded to himself.
He continued talking to himself, like every self-respecting mad scientist and since he was a fake one for now he decided to respect the classic.
"Let's go over every material I will need for the production of the equivalent to the standard Pokeball.
Hmm, that's a mouthful.
I am going to call it Common Ball from now on.
So first are the Apricorns, to make a Common Ball one needs either White or Grey Apricorns.
It would be better if one used both.
The Class required of the apricorns is 'E'.
'F'-class apricorns can not be made into PokeBalls of any kind.
The higher the class of the apricorn the higher the class of the produced PokeBall.
This is important because Pokemon of higher stages can only be captured by PokeBalls of higher classes.
Otherwise, they simply break out of the Ball even if it manages to "absorb" them.
Most of the time they can't even do that.
For example, Stage 5 Pokemon would need at least a 'C'-class PokeBalls or better.
This is naturally only for new captures, so capturing a weak Pokemon and training it didn't mean the old PokeBall won't work anymore when it reached Stage 5."
Mikail nodded happily at this point.
"While I don't have grey apricorns, I do have white apricorns and they are 'E'-class so that's no problem as well."
He continued going over what else was needed for the production of PokeBalls.
