The Very Best by BrilliantLady

Chapter 2: Yr2: Pikachu, I Choose You!

"No."

"I'm going to bug you until you tell me, so you might as well. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Teeeeeell me!" Harry bounced up and down around him like a hyperactive squirrel. Luna had been a bad influence on him with her recommendation for a "guaranteed" way to get Draco to co-operate.

Draco sighed. "If I tell you, will you leave? Because this is just embarrassing."

Harry grinned at him. "Yup."

"Fine," Draco said grumpily, and told him the book it could be found in.

It turned out that the Serpensortia spell unfortunately didn'tcreate a snake, it just summoned a wild snake (away from humans) from another location somewhere else in the world, preferably close by. One theorist speculated that its popularity as a spell in the United Kingdom was why their country was so lacking in snakes, and why the spell had in modern times become a more magically challenging spell to cast. For while casting Finite did end the spell and return the snake to its original location, most were killed as part of the duel. Muggle zoos were apparently covertly warded to prevent the disappearance of their snakes, as a precautionary measure.

Parseltongue was an interesting skill, and Harry was proud to be so unique. It did make him wonder why one couldn't talk to other animals too, and Luna agreed with him that it made sense and would be a lot of fun to learn more animal languages. Trevor the toad didn't have much to say, and Ron's rat didn't seem to want to cooperate with his experiments for some reason, but Hedwig turned out to be quite the conversationalist with a bit of focused encouragement. In fact, she was getting smarter by the day. Harry decided that if he wanted to create some Pokémon that it would be easier to modify existing animals rather than trying to create them from scratch. So far he'd only managed to create plush toys out of thin air – he had no idea what their insides were supposed to look like, which seemed to be a big stumbling block in trying to visualise them as living creatures. Ron's rat must've been smarter than it looked, because it seemed like it avoided him more than ever after Ron (with Scabbers in his pocket) listened to him chatting one day with Luna about trying to transfigure a rodent, and what would happen to its insides. It had let out a couple of terrified little squeaks at some of Luna's more gory speculations in their brainstorming session.

Ginny Weasley seemed shyly interested in making friends with him and Luna (whom she insisted she'd been friends with for ages, somewhat to Luna's surprise). As an overture of friendship Ginny smuggled him a female white mouse out of her first year Transfiguration class for him to experiment on. With a couple of months of effort, he managed to slowly and carefully turn it permanently yellow with brown stripes, enlarge it to the size of a small cat, enhance its intelligence, and give it a zig-zag tail. All without a single official spell. He called her "Pikachu", which perhaps wasn't terribly original of him, but then, Harry figured that Ash never bothered giving his Pokémon original names either. It just wasn't something you did.

Some of the students had starting getting panicky about him ever since hearing him speak Parseltongue at the Duelling Club over Christmas, but it got worse as the mysterious petrifications continued. He even got attacked a couple of times in the halls with minor hexes and jinxes, before people learned that he was surprisingly good at defending himself, despite being only a second year. He started getting nervous about someone hurting Pikachu, who couldn't defend herself yet. He took her everywhere with him, except Potions class where Snape had banned him from bringing her, and Transfigurations, where Professor McGonagall seemed to make her nervous. Professor McGonagall seemed to like to pick Pikachu up and bounce her from one hand to the other. She never dropped his Pokémon or hurt her, but it made Pikachu twitchy. Harry figured her inner cat found Pikachu irresistible.