Robbie was a little different. The little boy had of course talked to Keith for a while, but becoming crowded by the rest of the children had switched to Nick. Robbie ran or walked along by himself with an amazing supply of energy for much of the time, but also spent a while talking to Nick.

"Did you beat Allie, too?" he had asked. Nick had honestly answered that he hadn’t, and Robbie replied,

"I knew that!" When Nick asked the little boy why he had asked if he already knew, Robbie ran off laughing to the front of the group.

Another conversation showed that, beneath his overly large T-shirt, Robbie carried "not two, but four" pokéballs, containing two Rattatas, a Bellsprout, and a Pidgey.

"I’m gonna’ catch s’mmore," he had proudly explained. Nick was really surprized that the youngest child would have so many pokémon but decided that he probably couldn’t command them very well. That was when he overheard the quiet voice of Jenna correcting Josh and saying that,

"No, you cannot beat everybody else. Robbie beats you every time!"

"He does not!" Josh had denied. Keith had then looked at the two arguers and suggested,

"Well would you like to battle Robbie right now to prove it?" As Josh had backed down, Nick knew which side told the real story.

After ten minutes of travelling, Keith stopped the group, held up his hand motioning for them to be quiet, and said softly,

"OK, we’re going to look for pokémon now. The other group is far enough away, but we need to be quiet from now on or we’ll scare the pokémon away. OK?" The kid’s would have never been quiet under most other circumstances, but as catching real live pokémon depended on it, they became dead silent. Throughout the whole walk, Nick had been wondering at Keith’s ability to lead the group; it was as if it were something he did every day! Keith was a natural, Nick decided. Still, how would they manage to find any pokemon - oh yeah, the birds. At least one of these kids had to have something that could attack one of them effectively. Nevertheless, Nick pulled Keith over to one side, only Robbie following, and asked quietly as the other kids whispered among themselves,

"How are we going to find any wild pokémon?" Keith smiled and shrugged,

"We’ll just have to get lucky. Oh, and remember how you found Mankey?" That was a definite possibility, Nick realized. Robbie piped up and said,

"I know where some pokémon are!" Nick and Keith were surprised, and Nick asked,

"What do you mean?"

"The same time, um, I caught Bellspout," he mispronounced the name. "My Daddie was with me on the other side of that big tree over there," he pointed off the trail. "And I saw a bunch of pokémon on the tree!"

"What did they look like?" Keith kneeled down and asked warily.

"The were yellow and stuck to the tree! My Dad wouldn’t let me try to catch one," Robbie replied, proud that he had remembered.

"Too bad," Keith shook his head to Nick. "Kakuna."

"Are they... dangerous?" Nick asked.

"They evolve into Beedrills. Ever been stung by a Beedrill?" Nick shook his head but remembered seeing one of the massive bees.

"Let’s just say that it’s not good at all."

As Nick heard this, and he imagined one of the swooping poisonous monsters attacking someone, he felt a fleeting sense of strange fear for a moment. Robbie had quickly lost interest in the conversation as soon as Keith turned to Nick and had joined the others, not hearing Keith’s comments. But it was he who interrupted Nick's thought by exclaiming,

"Wow! Look!" The stocky Casey was wading through several low shrubs to reach a clearing on the other side. Keith shielded his eyes with one arm while he reached absentmindedly for his backpack to get his binoculars. Feeling nothing but air, Keith remembered that both backpacks had been left at the pokécenter, so he walked over to the edge of the trail to get a better view. The group of kids parted to let him through, and Keith noticed that a distant tree that Casey was waddling toward was covered not with moss and mold, but with living green Caterpies.

"Yes!" Keith exclaimed triumphantly. "Do you want to catch some pokémon, kids?" he asked.

"Yeah!" the group exclaimed.

"Charge!" Keith commanded. All of the kids, including Nick and Keith, ran toward the tree, overtaking Casey quickly. The startled Caterpies saw the boys coming and squeaked loudly, trying to scurry off in all directions, including up the tree. Many got away but others were cornered by the yelling kids who threw out pokéballs at the pokémon. They had watched enough television to know how to catch wild pokémon, though they seemed to skip the "weaken the target" stage. Fortunately, some of the Caterpies were weak enough to be caught without being attacked first. Nick started to attempt to catch a Caterpie also, but Keith held him back with one hand.

"Nick, they’re just Caterpies, let the kids catch them," he said. Nick realized his err, but had difficulty restraining himself from sending out his pokémon to battle the wild caterpillars. Nick then realized that by helping the kids, he would miss tempting opportunities to add to his own collection. And he needed more pokémon so that he could beat the gym leader! However, this train of thought did not last long because it was genuinely amusing to watch the disorderly scene formed by five young kids hectically chasing squealing green caterpillars while trying to catch them with pokéballs. But there was one noted exception. While the other four kids only managed to catch about one Caterpie each, and this out of sheer luck as most of their quarries broke free from the balls and escaped, either out of the clearing or up a tree, Robbie was battling his targets with skill and capturing them consistently.

He started off by releasing a Rattata and using a Bite attack on the first caterpillar he reached. That attack was finished up by a Tail Whip, followed by a capture of the Caterpie. The next pokémon met its match in Robbie's Pidgey, who Gusted its prey repeatedly before the capture. As a second Rattata defeated a third Caterpie, Nick quickly realized that Robbie then had seven pokémon.

"Wait a second," he told himself. "I thought that was impossible. Isn't there some reason that six is the max?" His wondering was rewarded by a brilliant white light flash from Robbie's pokéball as it completely disapppeared. All of the kids, as well as Nick, were stunned. The loud noise immediately died away, and the few remaining wild Caterpies scurried off into the shrubbery. Nick suddenly started to feel unaccountably nervous. Something wasn't right... Nick instinctively glanced upward at the overhead foliage. Then the eyes of the whole group turned to Robbie, who stared dumbfounded at his empty hand from whence the pokéball had vanished. Astonished whispers started up among the kids and Sam broke out in wonder,

"Where did it go?!" A brief silence ensued, after which Keith, who had remained absolutely quiet, started chuckling to himself.

"I should have known!" he exclaimed. Then he turned to Robbie and asked,

"Was that your seventh pokémon?" Robbie answered by counting the number of pokéballs on his belt and then nodding vigorously while saying,

"Uh-huh!" Keith had obviously expected this answer, for he replied by saying,

"I thought so. I'm not sure, but I think your pokéball was just sent by your pokédex to somewhere in the city."

"Hey... How'd you know I had a Dexter?" asked Robbie, frowning as he tried to solve the problem. Keith replied,

"Making your pokémon disappear like that is something your Dexter does." Then, he turned the affair into a joke, "I guess it doesn't like you to have more than six at a time!"

Though Keith tried to explain the functions of the pokédex to the children, something that even he wasn't completely successful in, Nick's uneasiness did not abate. Something was seriously wrong. After assessing his unnatural feeling for a few more moments, he interrupted Keith by pulling him out of the group of children, who immediately started talking to one another, no longer paying attention to Keith.

"What?" Keith asked, wondering why he had been interrupted. Nick replied in a low voice,

"Can we, um, move away from here?"

"Huh? Why?" asked Keith. "I was going to see if we could find some of those Caterpies that escaped into the shrubbery. Jenna didn't catch one." Nick felt unsure of himself, and wondered why he said it, but replied hurriedly,

"No, Keith. We need to move..." he paused and put his hand to his head. "Flying..." he said.

"What? What are you talking about?" Keith asked, perplexed. "Flying? Flying what? The Beedrills?"

"I don't know, I don't know!" Nick replied, starting to look around hectically in different directions. "But we have to go!" Nick's mind became confused; he didn't understand the way that he felt, but a undefined fear and an urgent feeling of a neccesity to move the kids and move them quickly pushed reason out of his mind. "Let's go!" he said, jerking his head in about as if expecting to see palpable danger in every bush. "We need to get out of here!"

Keith was astonished by the sudden odd and unexplainable behavior of Nick. To Keith, leaving seemed to be the last thing to do on such an occasion! How often was it that a trainer had the opportunity of pursuing a whole clan of Caterpies through the woods? But there was something convicting in Nick's tone - no, it was his darting eyes...

"OK," Keith decided, hushed. "I'll tell the kids." He turned to the group of five, who had begun to wonder absently around the clearing and told them in the quiet tone of a school teacher evacuating children from a burning building,

"Sam, Jenna, Josh, Casey, Sarah, Robbie... Get behind me and follow me quietly. We are going to leave the woods." A chorus of "what? why?"'s and "aw..."'s immediately rose from the youngsters. Keith glanced and saw that Nick was becoming frantic, so continued speaking to the children, already starting to walk back toward the trail, catching some of Nick's fear.

"Just pretend we're chasing a pokémon. You have to follow me." Then he shouted loudly, "Now!" The children were startled by the tone of their, before, friendly and understanding leader, and all sensed the urgency in his tone and realized that something was seriously wrong. Without further question, they gathered behind Keith by instinct, seeking the protection of on older person from something they didn't understand. Robbie asking fearfully,

"What's happening?"

Nick glanced about. He heard rustling in the trees then saw a black form swooping toward the group of children. He shouted,

"Watch out!"

Though no monster of darkness really even was seen in the sky, Nick's voice filled the children with a sense of great danger. Their eyes became glued on Nick and something about him began to seem unreal, as if he radiated power. Nick's mind was reeling, seeing things that didn't exist as he whirled around and around glancing desperately for the black form he had seen. A small piece of reason returned to Nick's mind as he realized that no swooping creature had really attacked, but he still shouted to Keith, who only stood several yards away,

"Let's move!"

The group broke into a sprint as if they had no control over themselves after hearing Nick's words, but had been empowered by them. Keith scooped up the small Jenna in his arms, as Nick did to Robbie, and all dashed to the path, headed out of the forest.