>>40573338But back to elementary for a bit:
Our stupid adventures weren't without trouble, though. We kind of made a "gang" and had turf wars with this other "gang", which landed us a couple of talking-tos from the principal, which imo was unfair as fuck. We weren't even FIGHTING fighting, we were just pretending to use Pokemon moves on each other while we used our fists & nails.
But even then, we just laughed it off and continued to fight and trade Pokemon cards
even though I ended up getting shafted most of the time; fuck you and your fake flea market cards, Tony, I want my god damn holographic Deoxys back. Hell, we were even kind of friends with the other "gang" kids, and I remember us hiding out at the far edge of the playground to watch their leader kid play Pokemon Silver.
That rival gang leader kid was something of a character too; he'd always make up the wildest shit, whether it was Spiritomb's secret evolution, Mummytomb, or this "cool Mystery Dungeon game he got from California" called Bones of Aegis Cave where your starters were Rayquaza, Groudon, and Kyogre, and they'd lose a layer of skin every level until they were complete skeletons at 100. He was cool, though.
Another friend I made after my best friend moved away was this other kid. Me and him made a LOT of fakemon, and this whole expanded canon of the Pokemon universe. It was... autistic, but also pretty neat, looking back. My self-insert OP Mary Sue Pokemon was called Litheosphire, and his was just his name with "chi" at the end. Roleplaying and dreaming up the weird lore with him was pretty fun, but we didn't ever see each other again after I graduated to middle school (he was a grade below me).
I remember he was ALWAYS begging me to get into Minecraft, and I was always refusing because I had no idea what it was. Funnily enough, I got into it on my own in middle school, and even today I've logged a metric fuckton of hours on it. Guess he got his way in the end, kek.