Afi’s trainer days were long behind her. In her early twenties she’d wandered the region, catching powerful pokemon and taking on as many comers as possible. She’d never made it to the League, but she’d acquired nearly all the badges she could, and she was proud of her hard work.

But “professional pokemon trainer” wasn’t as viable a career choice as the vids made it out to be. Eventually life caught up with her in the form of a young daughter, and she had to settle.

Afi was in her late thirties now, and her daughter Jo was thirteen and attending a very prestigious private school that took her away from home for months at a time. Most of Afi’s pokemon had been traded away to battlers who could give them the exciting life they craved or given to breeders to help continue their lines. But the pokemon that Afi kept with her was her oldest and dearest friend:

Orphys the Goodra.

Orphys was a tall and powerful specimen, mighty despite having not seriously battled in well over a year. He’d been Afi’s primary battler back in her journeying days, and even now she still had a close bond with him. The thought of trading him away was unthinkable. He was content to lounge about the countryside villa where they lived; wandering through the nearby fields, chasing bug pokemon away from the gardens, that sort of thing. He helped out around the house, too, even if his species’s penchant for slime sometimes made his assistance pyrrhic at best.

But he usually had a handle on that, which is why the day that he suddenly didn’t, Afi grew worried.

She woke up early to a low bellow, a long and drawn-out sound of animalistic need. Recognizing the voice as Orphys, she wandered out in her pajamas to see him swaying in the dawn light. His body had kicked into overdrive, producing huge volumes of slime, an incredible amount. The liquid was pearlescent and viscous, running down him in rivulets, and was bright in color.

Afi knew what the problem was immediately: heat. Male Goodra went into heat about once a year or so, being consumed by the need to breed and producing slime that was said to have an aphrodisiac quality. It wasn’t clockwork, however; Orphys’s time had passed a few months ago and she’d chalked it up to him getting older. But it seemed his heat had only delayed and was all the stronger for it.

“Orphys?” she called out. Her pokemon glanced over his shoulder, his eyes vivid with such a tableau of vivid needful want that Afi felt bad for him.

Normally, it was considered prudent to avoid pokemon in heat unless you were a particularly knowledgeable breeder; this was especially true for pokemon whose mating cycle caused them to produce aphrodisiacs, like Goodra, the Salandit line, and most Bug- and Grass-type pokemon. There were whispered tales of well-meaning trainers who approached a desperate-looking pokemon, found their mind swimming, and ‘woke’ a few days later with their pokemon still passionately rutting them.