[attr="class","samjermain"]The request is a kind of summons, Memo realizes, though until this exact moment he hadn’t known what he was trying to summon.

It had been simple: help each other get stronger by playing off of each other’s strengths. Alex was amazing in the air, like he and his Pokemon were the same creature, the same being. Memo, meanwhile…

…yeah, he was struggling to come up with a positive description of his fighting style. He didn’t really even have a style, per se. But maybe that was it! He was creative. There. There you go.

But he did have a tendency to throw himself face-first into the fire and think about the consequences later.

Alex, meanwhile, didn’t enjoy traditional battles. So they could consider this a trade.

“The thing you’ve got to realize about fighting,” he explains, stretching in the light streaming in from the Gym’s open ceiling-- he’s wearing several layers because it’s still freezing and he hates the cold-- “is it’s not really the big guy you gotta worry about.”

He says this as an old pro. He’s lived on the streets, slept under park benches, woken up to strange people in his hostel rooms. He knows this grind. It isn’t the big people you have to worry about.

It’s him. And the people like him. Wiry, clever, quick. Survivors.

[attr="class","samjerpoke"]