A giant question mark hovered over Luke's head.
Luke: ?
Is there some kind of misunderstanding happening here? Wouldn't cash just be simpler? Why does this have to involve an actual Pokémon — and the best-pedigree one available, no less?
He glanced back at Haunter mid-dumbbell-lift and Eevee still churning away on its wheel. The mental image of a potential third backstabber joining the household sent a genuine shiver down his spine.
"Appreciate it!" Luke managed.
Whitman laughed heartily. "No need to be so formal!"
According to Whitman, the assistant coach role mostly involved scouting and training new recruits — over summer break specifically, the workload dropped to near nothing, just the occasional campus appearance required. A paid, low-effort position like that suited Luke's general life philosophy perfectly.
Still, the looming possibility of a third Pokémon left him faintly exhausted just thinking about it. He sighed and hung up.
______________________________
Time drifted by — Luke spent a good stretch just petting Eevee. Lunch turned out to be Pokéblock. Eevee and Haunter stared at each other for a long beat, then tilted their heads at Luke in unison.
"What?" Luke said, chewing on a light pink peach-flavored cube. "Can't I eat this stuff too?"
He'd genuinely always wondered what Pokéblock actually tasted like — even that famous rookie Trainer from the anime had a documented habit of eating it raw. If he can do it, why not me? Logically, since the source Berries were human-edible to begin with, the concentrated version presumably followed the same rule. He wasn't about to test that theory on a Petaya Berry block, sure, but the peach one seemed safe enough.
The taste turned out genuinely excellent — sweeter than fresh-squeezed peach juice, probably even better chilled.
"...This is actually pretty good," Luke admitted, mildly stunned.
Both Pokémon stared at him, equally stunned.
Then something clicked for Haunter, and it lowered its head, quietly wiping away a tear.
Master's resorted to eating our food just to save money on us...
I need to work harder at my part-time jobs. For the family.
Haunter: o(╥﹏╥)o
Eevee looked equally resolved, nodding with grim determination.
Decided. Tonight, I'm grinding somewhere farther out.
______________________________
That afternoon, Haunter drifted solemnly out the door, offering Luke a formal wave on its way.
"Where are you off to this time?" Luke asked, waving back, curious.
"Kojie!" Haunter just floated through the door without elaborating.
"Be back for dinner!" Luke called after it.
"Kojie!" came the muffled reply from outside.
Since Haunter never actually got lost, Luke let it go without much worry. He had a pretty good idea what it was actually up to — but figured guiding was better than blocking outright, so he let the occasional unsupervised training slide.
The day these two get bored of overachieving is the day my actual plan finally works out. "I really have gone to great lengths for this," Luke muttered. "Better grind some extra BP, get him that Dusk Stone he's been eyeing."
Haunter had wanted one for a while now — 5000 BP was a steep ask, but a promise was a promise, and Luke wanted to make good on it soon.
Beyond BP farming, though, Luke had bigger plans for the summer: actual income generation. His current savings sat around $14,000 — modest as startup capital went, but workable.
______________________________
This time, the plan wasn't another video or another dirty tactic. It was putting his recently acquired Programming Lv3 skill to real use. Based on some early testing, building an indie game with this skill level was well within reach — and in a parallel world where a huge swath of popular real-world games had simply never been developed, gaming felt like a genuinely open lane.
He carried Eevee over to the computer by the scruff. By now, thoroughly desensitized to this kind of treatment, it just hung there with weary resignation.
Whatever this is, I've stopped fighting it.
Eevee: o(^｀)o
Luke gave its head a fond scratch and pulled up a new document.
"Vee?" Eevee looked up, dark eyes curious.
"Not streaming this time — building my own game."
"Vee..." Eevee scratched its head, thoroughly uninterested, hopped down, and wandered off to the next room to work on Substitute instead.
Haunter's Substitute got along genuinely well with the original — the two of them even split chores together without friction. Eevee's Substitute, by contrast, ran considerably more feral than the original. Something like a Pallas's cat scratching its own face bloody playing with yarn — that was more or less the energy.
"Vee!" Eevee bared its teeth, tangling with its own double in the next room.
Headphones on, fully absorbed, Luke had no idea any of that was even happening. His focus was entirely on the pitch document taking shape in front of him.
"Plants vs. Zombies."
The global popularity of this tower-defense classic barely needed explaining. Its real strength had never been production budget — the core concept and gameplay loop alone had carried it to massive success. Even on a limited budget, Programming Lv3 was more than enough to get a working core framework up and running.
Better yet, the concept mapped disturbingly well onto the Pokémon universe. A light reskin of the assets and backstory, and the whole thing basically wrote itself.
Luke typed:
"The apocalypse has arrived. Wandering spirits. Swarming insects. Ravenous beasts. Only your loyal Grass-type Pokémon stand between your family and the horde."
"Dave, your eccentric neighbor and a legendary Grass-type Master, becomes your closest ally — fighting alongside you against the coming invasion..."
Luke paused. "Okay, that actually has the right energy."
He'd considered building fully original assets, sure — but most indie-dev forums already had a huge library of freely available Pokémon art floating around. With only $14,000 in the bank, every dollar saved counted, and borrowing recognizable Pokémon art would make the game instantly familiar and easy to market on top of it.
"Sunflower... Sunkern works fine for that," Luke muttered to himself. "And its evolution, Sunflora — wait, that's basically already a twin sunflower design!"
Drafting the concept further, the overlap between the two properties turned out almost suspiciously clean. The classic Peashooter mapped naturally onto Bellsprout. The sturdy, stalwart Wall-nut became a Seedot running Substitute. For night-map or water-map variants, Amoonguss and Lotad slotted in perfectly.
Zombie types were even easier — an assortment of Dusknoir, Cofagrigus, Sableye covered most of it, and the enemy roster didn't even need to stay strictly Ghost-type. Beedrill, Muk — perennial troublemakers in their own right — worked just as well as hostile enemy material.
Before he knew it, Luke had typed close to ten thousand words into the design doc. He stretched, exhausted.
"There's no way I finish this in one summer," he muttered, doing rough math on the scope. "Going to need an actual studio setup. And some help."
The first name that came to mind: Daniel, and his increasingly concerning hairline.
"...Yeah. Daniel's solid. He's the one."