"You can take it as a surname if you want."

She headbutts her Ellie. "Intrepid Ellievee it is."

She laughs, blushing a little.

That is an excellent look on her Ellie! Intrepid trills happily.

"All right, you. Come on, we must be almost there by now."

Well Intrepid Ellievee isn't the slow one here, is she? (She demonstrates this by running ahead a bit and glancing over her shoulder.)

Ellie lengthens her stride to catch up.

Then they'll definitely be there quite quickly!

Intrepid isn't so interested in the whole process of taking the Pidgey to the Pokemon Center to be treated and given the spiel about his assorted options. She's fine poking around the city nearby until Ellie's ready to go get food and such for themselves or to head over to the Eevee House near the outskirts (close enough to the forest that Intrepid got to feel like a Brave Explorer a lot as a kid without ever being in serious danger, and that the less human-social adults can actually properly get away from the city without a ton of effort, but close enough to the city to be in walking distance of most important stuff).

Pidgey's deal is not that complicated to sort out, and can basically be left in the competent hands of the Pokemon Center staff after Ellie signs the appropriate paperwork about it.

Mr. Brown at the Eevee House is delighted to see both Ellie and Intrepid again. He compliments Intrepid on the choice of name when Ellie tells him she picked it for herself. It suits her.

It does! Though Ellie helped a lot. Also, Ellie is very intelligent and made a very cool psychic collar and they are going to explore so much, so Intrepid will get to live up to her name even more!

(She has Ellie relay all this, of course.)

A Pokemon Journey, is it? How exciting. Ahh, it reminds him of his own youth, setting out to see the world with a bag on his back and a poochyena at his side...

She listens a little bit but starts trying to make excuses before he gets too deep in the ramble. (Not very graceful excuses, admittedly.)

She wants to go say hi to her other friends here, after all! (...Has anyone left lately? Or are there any interesting new people around?)

There's been some turnover but the adult residents are basically stable and most of the others in her age group are still around.

Okay! She'll go say hi, then! 

Ellie will stay to chat with Mr. Brown while she does that.

She's gone for a decent amount of time, but she does come back to find Ellie after a bit.

"Hey. I'm going to get a room at the hostel for the night, do you want to stay here or there?"

"With you!"

"Sure. Let's go get some dinner, then."

Intrepid has restaurant opinions! Mostly 'sorts of cuisine Pallet Town is too small to have.'

They can get something Unovan, then.

Afterwards, Ellie's shiny new League card gets them a room at one of the trainer hostels. It's not too big or fancy, but it's still comfortable.

"We should talk about the challenge rules before we visit the gym tomorrow," she says as they get ready for bed.

"Yeah. I know some of the general idea but not any specifics..."

"So basically, it's a team versus team knockout match. No limits on switches, but only one item apart from what the pokemon can use and carry themselves. The Gym gets to set the terms of the match, so sometimes they'll throw something like a doubles battle or a water arena at you, but they still have a favored type so you can have a strategy going in apart from that."

Hum. "So it'd be good to get someone else on our team before the first Gym?"

"It'll give us a little more slack, yeah. But you have to battle through Gym Trainers before you can face the leader, and they use those plus how many badges you already have to determine what level of challenge to give you. It's supposed to be hard but not, like, out of reach.