<span style="font-style: italic">This. Doesn't. Make. Sense!</span><br/>It was with gritted teeth that Odd saw the zubat fall motionless to the ground with a high-pitched squeak.<br/>"Whyyy!?" Odd groaned loudly, which resulted in another zubat awakening and for some reason seeing him as a reasonable target. Odd decided to skip trying to use the attack that made him groan in desperation when it inevitably failed and just sent a mental command to his cubone:<br/><span style="font-style: italic">Headbutt.</span><br/><br/>Why did that work? Why could his cubone leap into the air and slam its head against the zubat, but it could not jump into the air and slam its bone club against the same zubat even though cubone's head was covered in the same type of bone as the club!?<br/><br/>Or, Odd thought, puzzled, was the skull that his cubone adorned of a different material than the club? He would have to find a geodude and test if the headbutt would as functional as the bone club attack, and maybe try to calculate density and mineral composition, if he could find anyone with the knowledge of how to.<br/><br/>After he had caught the clefairy, of course. That took priority. Odd had entered the cave with a group of people specifically so they could handle the zubats, but it was obvious he would need to leave the group for the actual capture. Catching clefairies during their ceremony apparently constituted a crime, even though Odd had little understanding of laws or respect for the spirit of them. It just seemed cost-effective to capture a clefairy when they aggregated.<br/><br/>And being psychic - or borrowing the psychic powers of the abra on your back - was quite an effective way to search a dark cave for anomalies. Odd did not know what a clefairy's mind was like, having never met one, but five minutes in Mt. Moon had let him experience geodude and zubat brain waves ad nauseum. It seemed reasonable that anything that deviated from the barely self-conscious zubats and the single-minded, aggressive geodudes was a clefairy.<br/>And then he had felt something different. Something bubbly and curious, a mind that was not preoccupied with fear or anger, but which just felt... busy. That corresponded well to a clefairy according to everything Odd had heard about them, and the strange boy had immediately teleported in the presumed clefairy's direction, never-minding the group. No one had been paying attention to him anyway.<br/><br/>And then zubats had slowed him down. It was obvious that the Flash that his sleeping abra was casting awoke them, and apparently zubats were inherently grumpy (and suicidal), but he needed light to navigate. Unless they consisted of geodudes he got very little psychic feedback from the rocky walls.<br/><br/>And speaking of things he could not trace psychically...<br/>A soft cry echoed and Odd spun around, holding his abra out in stretched hands, sending a concentrated beam of light against the walls. Odd had learned not to just light the entire cavern, since the zubats mostly rested on the ceiling.<br/>Odd froze as he saw Irvine, but he did not scream. The mental faculties that still worked, even in the face of the horrible dark monster, told him that screaming wildly was the surest way to get attacked by a thousand zubats. Instead Odd made a strangled sound and held his abra close against him like a shield and hurried behind his cubone, which was undaunted by the type disadvantage and held out its club in defiance of Irvine.<br/><br/>Irvine just stood there. It seemed to struggle with the bright light, and in that moment it did not look very scary. But the dissonance between knowing it was there, but not<span style="font-style: italic">sensing</span>was unsettling enough. The knowledge that the creature could elude him was terrifying.<br/>Nonetheless, Odd got his brain working again and analyzed the situation as best he could. The dark creature had announced itself, was not running or leaping into shadows despite clearly not liking being shined on, and Odd allowed the intensity of the flash to vane soely because he did not wish to provoke the monster. Furthermore his cubone was getting tired from headbutting zubats, and the mental trace of the clefairy was getting more and more difficult to follow. Irvine was, Odd had learned, dark type (the existence of which was a horror story) and ice. He was at home in the cavern and effective against both zubats and geodudes. In essence, if Odd could resist the urge to flee, and if Irvine did, as it seemed, not want to disembowel him, then together the two should be able to catch a clefairy in no time.<br/><br/>It helped that Odd did not consider the sneasel to have any capacity for moral, nor an appreciation of the clefairies' ritual, so it seemed Irvine alone did not mind Odd catching one.<br/><br/>And so, Odd took a deep breath to further steady himself, it was just a matter of getting the sneasel to hunt with him. Odd had absolutely no idea what he could possibly offer it. Did it like random facts about pokemon or special moves? Did he need to promise to buy it fresh milktank blood once they left the cave? Did dark types even have any base desires beyond all slaughter?<br/><br/>"Hi," Odd whispered, and he did not completely manage to unwind his larynx. "... have you ever maimed a clefairy before? I can find them... I would love it if you could butcher everything in this cave for me, please."