This is an anonymous trainer's story of how she caught and evolved her six teammates. There's no "journey" per se, she lives in a people-don't-go-on-journeys-but-they-still-train-pokemon kind of alternate universe.

Constructive criticism regarding any aspect is always appreciated.

My Starter

When I was four, I got a mareep for my birthday. I named her Snowflake. My parents tell me it was because I thought her wool looked like snow. So now, whenever anyone asks me about my first pokemon, I always describe her as "my ampharos" instead of calling her by name, otherwise they think she's an ice type.

My mom used to make clothes for me out of her wool. She'd spin the yarn with her donphan, and dye it with her vileplume. The red of the dye was exactly like her pokemon's petals, which inspired my mom to knit her vileplume's polka dot pattern into all my sweaters. And hats. And mittens. It got so pervasive that I'm pretty sure Snow thought the polka dots meant I had evolved until she evolved herself and my mom no longer had any wool to make vileplume sweaters with.

Snow evolved into a flaaffy on the night of the christmas parade when I was eight. A float passed by with all kinds of light-up pokemon, and she was so dazzled her tail light started glowing as brightly as she could manage, and when that wasn't bright enough, her entire body started glowing. As luck would have it, a local camera crew was filming right in front of us, and caught her evolution on camera. The next morning, Snowflake was on the news under the title "Merry Christmas and Flaaffy Holidays".

She evolved into an ampharos when I was eleven and waiting for the late bus. It was already dark out, and Snowflake was so hungry she was chewing on my coat. Not wanting to see my favorite coat destroyed, I dug out my lunchbox and gave her the rest of my food. After wolfing down every last crumb and licking the box for good measure, Snow moaned and curled up into a ball. She does this fairly often, it usually means her tummy hurts because she snuck a few batteries or light bulbs behind my back. I'd been trying to ignore her whenever it happens to avoid encouraging that behavior. I focused on the looking for the bus in order to not look at my pokemon, so I didn't notice a thing until her next moan was much lower and I turned around to see an ampharos sitting where my flaaffy had been.

I completely forgot about how I was supposed to be ignoring her, and threw my arms around Snow in my excitement. The jostling of her newly elongated neck was apparently the last straw, and with one last moan she threw up the contents of her stomach all over my coat. Ironically, my it would have been fine if Snow had been eating batteries like I suspected-they would have just bounced off my coat without issue. But it turns out she hadn't been sneaking battery snacks, so instead my coat got covered in ABC leftovers-and was completely ruined because of it.

When the bus finally arrived, Snowflake got to ride shotgun to keep her from throwing up more. She ended up staying at home for three days with a stomach bug she got from eating my food, but once she was better, I gave her a whole box of batteries to munch on and I haven't fed her leftovers since. I also switched to waterproof coats.