"Let's try them out!" I said eagerly as my friend and I sped into the house and leaped up the staircase and into Jacob's room.

"Yeah! I'd like to be a human again!" Jacob said, preparing towels for us just in case if we weren't clothed after being transformed.

We gingerly pulled out the cores out from their pouches and pressed the button. The cores instantly started glowing, and to my surprise, so did we. We felt our bodies change as we were lifted up into the air. In less than a second, we abruptly stopped glowing and dropped to the carpet. We were human again, and it felt strange to have fingers, toes, and that sort again. It worked!

Jacob then climbed into the shower in the bathroom next to his room. Then, I heard him call my name In a panicked voice. "Um, Mark? I still have ears."

"...Yeah, like everybody else does." I replied. I was laying in his bed waiting for him to get out so that I could take one as well. "What are you trying to do, chop them off?"

"No, you don't get it. I still have my ears!" He insisted. What Jacob had in mind was evidence that he was going insane.

"Jacob. Every human being has ears! You have nothing to be worried about." I said, getting a bit annoyed.

"No, like Pikachu ears. And a tail." He told me. Wait, what!?

"Wait, Pikachu ears and tail? Those must be some of the side effects! That means..." I paused as I looked in the mirror. "Oh, no. This can't be. I still have my Eevee ears and tail, too..."

"Actually, I think it's pretty cool!" Jacob said as he got out of the shower. "We can just put headbands around our heads so that it looks like our ears are part of them. And for the tails, we can just hide them in our pants." He entered his room where I was waiting and went into the closet to find some clothes. I got my towel, got off his bed and headed into the shower. I climbed into the tub and turned on the shower head. The warm water trickled down my freezing body as a cloud of steam rose from the water. It was hard and strange to wash my ears and tail, but what esle was I supposed to do, groom them?

It turned out that hiding the tails in the pants did work, but was extremely difficult to do so. We finished getting dressed and struggled to walk down the stairs. I've spent around what felt like a year running around on all fours; Jacob spending about six months with two short legs. Now, I only have two legs, making it a lot harder for me to walk. If we wanted to use the PokéCores, then we'd have to get used to the side effects and the different styles of walking.

When Jacob's mom saw us, she screamed and dived for Jacob. Through the tight squeeze, Jacob managed to say, "It- it's nice to be back, too... Please let go."

"Hey, Scarlett. Thanks for making breakfast for us!" I said, seeing the huge stacks of pancakes she made on the dining table, along with homemade syrup and butter. There was also orange juice, a plate of bacon and sausage, and plenty of berries from Pecha to Oran.

"You're welcome, Mark. You're also welcome to call me 'mom', if you want." Jacob's mother told me. I kindly rejected the offer or having a new mother, thinking it was rather strange.

Just then, Jacob's dad came in and did a double take at Jacob. "Wait, Jacob? The first thing I know, you're a person, then a Pokémon, and now you're a human again? What's going on? Oh, nice headband, by the way."

"Nevermind that, dad. I'll tell you all about it later. Right now, I'm hungry; let's eat! And thanks, I like the headband too." Jacob said, taking a seat next to the table.

"I agree; let's dig in!" I said as my stomach growled like a garbage disposal unit in a sink. Little did I know that my digestive system was used to human food, nor that the results wouldn't be pretty.

"Fine, let's eat before it gets cold," mom finally gave in, sitting down before the mountain of pancakes. We said a quick prayer to Arceus, thanking the food, then attacked the meal.

After eating, Jacob and I decided to go hiking. "I know a great place to go hiking," I told Jacob. "I heard that there's an old trail behind that haunted house a few blocks away," I told him as we looked on a map for a place to hike. Jacob agreed, and we packed some snacks, extra clothes, our phones, a map, and (of course) our PokéCores. We told our parents what we were doing and around what time we'd come back. Then, we set off on our bikes to the trail in which we were going to hike.

Ten minutes later, we came to the old, rickety mansion next to the woods. We got off our bikes, walked to the backyard. We stopped, noticing that there were three different trails to take than just the one on the map, which made me wonder why they weren't mapped.

"Which one should we take?" Jacob asked, looking at the map to find out which one was the one we agreed to take.

"Don't worry about the one we were going to originally take. Let's just go to the one on the left." I answered, pointing to the left trail.

"Okay. Let's go!" he replied as he put the map away. After deciding which one to take, we started the hike.

Along the trail, we saw some strange Pokémon, even ones that our PokéDex couldn't recognize. They looked at us with curious expressions as we walked by. Sometimes, one of the Pokémon would follow us, hopping from branch to branch or sulking behind us. That made me think that they wanted something that we had. Finally, we came to a clearing. On the opposite side from where we came from, there was a stone wall that was a perfectly shaped semicircle with a small hole in the middle that only a Pokémon, depending on the size, could crawl through.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Jacob said, taking out his PokéCore.

I smiled. "Now I am. You want to see what's on the other side of that hole, don't you? Well, I do too." I took my PokéCore out of its pouch and pressed the button. Instantly, I started glowing as I floated up into the air, my body shifting to an Eevee. Jacob did the same thing, changing back into a Pikachu. Then, I squeezed into the small hole and my friend followed.