Daisy stood with her face serious and determined. She looked straight at Gym Leader Gladion, her eyes showing she had made up her mind completely.
"Are you sure about this?" Gladion asked.
Daisy nodded without hesitation. "As sure as I ever will be."
"Very well then. You would be the apprentice to me and my gym as we decided earlier," Gladion said.
Daisy's expression brightened at once. A big smile spread across her face, and her shoulders relaxed. She looked like someone who had just been given a great gift.
Gladion turned slightly and gestured to the two people standing beside him. "These two are Kai and Mira. You can call them my right and left hand. I cannot do anything without them. I would not be able to survive without their help. I would become bankrupt in a week if they were not here to keep everything running."
Kai and Mira both turned red in the face. Kai scratched the back of his head and laughed nervously while Mira looked down at her shoes, trying to hide her embarrassed smile.
Gladion continued with a straight face. "Seriously, if Kai forgets to file one report or Mira misses one training schedule, the whole gym would fall apart. I once tried to handle things alone for three days. By the end of it, I had three angry gym challengers, two missing shipments, and my bank account was crying. These two are the real bosses here. I am just the guy who signs the papers and looks cool in the coat."
Kai finally spoke up, still blushing. "Boss, you are making us sound like we run a mafia or something. We just do the boring stuff so you can focus on battling and making money."
Gladion turned back to Kai and Mira. "Now take care of your junior sister, you two."
"Junior sister?" Daisy asked, looking confused.
Kai chuckled and explained. "Boss here likes to talk about some stories with cultivation and sects. In those stories, people call their juniors 'junior sister' or 'junior brother' and their seniors 'senior brother' or 'senior sister'. I do not know where he heard about these stories. But he likes to tell them, especially to his Riolu and Guy."
"Guy loves the fist techniques that some of these sect people use. He keeps asking Boss to teach him something called the 'Divine Mountain Breaking Fist'. Last week Guy tried it on a training dummy and broke three of them in a row. Now he walks around calling himself 'Guy, the Fist of Justice' and wants to know if there is a 'Heavenly Dragon Slaying Palm' move. Boss keeps promising to look it up, but I think he is just making half of it up as he goes."
Gladion smiled at the memory. "Speaking of cultivation, we would be working on cultivating your aura."
"Aura?" Daisy asked, clearly confused.
"Your grandpa did not tell you about it?" Gladion asked.
"Nope," Daisy said. "But I have heard about people with psychic aura like you who can do things that only Pokemon can do. And then there is also the ghostly aura of Agatha that scares people and makes her intangible too. I wish I had superpowers too." She finished with a small pout.
"Well, you might have them soon," Gladion said with a smile.
"Really?"
"Yup. Aura is something that not many trainers focus on. And even among those who focus on it, there are only very few with real talent in that field. And even among those talented ones, only a few manifest what we call aura abilities. Others just learn to project it to scare people or to use it to empower their Pokemon."
"Let me give you a secret," Gladion continued. "Learning how to use your aura to empower your Pokemon is the first step of mega evolving."
Daisy's eyes widened with excitement. 'Does that mean that I would be able to teleport or become intangible and peek through walls?' she thought.
"No, you would not be able to do things like me or Agatha," Gladion said, as if reading her mind. "You might, but it is not one hundred percent. The abilities depend on what type of aura you awaken. You surely do not have psychic aura because that kind manifests easily and you start hearing people's thoughts. As for ghostly aura, there is a low chance there too. You seem like a shiny young lady with a bright smile. There is no way you would get that scary aura like Agatha, that scary little old hag."
'Is he reading my mind?' Daisy thought, startled.
"No, I am not reading your mind," Gladion said. "As a psychic I can sense your emotions without even trying, and you wear them like a second skin. We would have to work on that too. Cannot have you giving out my secrets with just your emotions. The seasoned veterans can easily see through you. And do you know what that means? A lot of training."
Gladion's smile looked very wicked to Daisy. It was the kind of smile that promised hard work and very little mercy.
Kai and Mira smiled quietly to themselves. They thought, 'Let us see how long she survives boss training. Let us hope he does not give her the Guy regimen training.'
"What are you two smiling about?" Gladion asked, turning to them with an even more wicked smile. "You two would be joining the training too. You cannot let your junior sister do all the hard work while you enjoy yourselves."
Terror spread through the brother and sister duo. Their faces went pale at the same time.
-----Author Notes------
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