“How much longer until we get to Azure City?” Aoife asked.  “My feet are about to fall off.  I’m afraid the next step I take my leg will move but it’ll leave my feet behind.”  She had walked part of the way there with Pele, her new fire Pokemon that Bill had given her, but Pele got tired so she had to return it (since she couldn’t carry it; it would burn her if she did).
 “Should be right up here,” Petra said, almost as tired as Aoife after walking all day.  “I’ve been seeing more flying-type Pokemon around.  That’s a good sign.”
 “Why, does the gym leader train that type or something?” asked Aoife.
 Petra hesitated.  “Weeeell…I know what type the leader trains, but I’m not supposed to say.  It’d be like helping you cheat, which I’m obviously not allowed to do.  But there are a lot of flying-types around here.  There’s even a flying Pokemon airport.  It’s really cool.”
 “Airport?” Aoife repeated.  “How does that work?”
 “Flying Pokemon can take people and other Pokemon as passengers,” Petra said, “as you’ve seen when we flew Spearow to the top floor of Bill’s house.  The Azure Airport is where they let their passengers off and on.  There’s even a real airport with airplanes there too.”
 “Cool,” Aoife said.  “Hey, there’s one!”  She saw a flying Pokemon overhead with a young man and his Meowth riding it.  
 “Yeah,” Petra said.  “You’ll see lots of those.”
 Shortly after that they came to a huge gate with statues of the legendary birds beside it.  Over the gate was the name of the city, Azure City.  “Wow,” Aoife breathed, running through the gate.
 “Wait a sec, Aoife!”  Petra ran after her redheaded friend.
 But Aoife was already inside the city gates, and she had seen the city.  There were very few buildings at ground level; most of them were supported on posts above the ground so the flying Pokemon could reach them.  “Cool!” Aoife shouted, running off to see the city.
 “Wait!” Petra called after her, but she had already disappeared into the crowd.  “Aoife!  Oh, never mind,” she muttered, resigned to the fact that Aoife had run off and she probably couldn’t find her in this crowd.  “She’ll be okay.  Chu-Chu and Pele can defend her if she needs them to.  Besides, I want to explore this place on my own anyway.  Maybe there are lots of girls here.”  Deciding this, Petra strode off to see the sights of Azure City.
 
***
 
 “Woooow…” Aoife gasped, seeing all the Pokemon flying overhead and all the huge tall buildings.
 “Piiiii…” Chu-Chu echoed.  “Pika!”  Chu-Chu pointed to a strange looking Pokemon, the likes of which Aoife had never seen before.  It looked to be of the flying and grass element types, being in the shape of a bird but with leaves for feathers and a wooden-looking beak.  It had a crest of feathers on its head, and a vine for a tail.
 “Cool!” Aoife said for the fiftieth time, running over to the building where the bird was perched.  She hurried into the building and dashed up the stairs until she got to the Pokemon landing deck.  “What kind of Pokemon is that?” she wondered, pulling out Dexter.
 “Treagle,” Dexter said mechanically.  “The ivy-tailed Pokemon.  It is a mutation of a tree and a bird.  It is the only Pokemon with the attack Fury Thorn.”
 “Tree?” the grass bird squawked.  “Tree!  Treagle!”
 “That’s my Pokemon,” a girl on the deck that Aoife hadn’t noticed before said.  She was about 14 years old and had blue hair in two bouncy pigtails and blue eyes, the color of the sky.  Aoife noticed that she had a t-shirt with an Articuno on it.
 “Really?” Aoife asked.  “I’ve never seen one of those before.  It must not be in the known 250 species of Pokemon.”
 “I discovered it,” she said.  “My name’s Sora Starling, and I love flying Pokemon.”
 “Oh,” Aoife said.  “I’m Aoife Ketchum.  I want to be a gym leader someday.”
 “That’s a good plan,” Sora said.  “Gym leaders, especially the really good ones, earn a lot of money.”
 “My friend Petra’s a gym leader…” Aoife began, then stopped, remembering that Petra wasn’t there.  “She was with me a while ago but I think I lost her.”
 Sora laughed.  “I can show you where I found Treagle, if you want.  There are lots of other cool Pokemon there.”
 “Sure!” Aoife agreed.  “Let’s go!”
 “Follow me,” Sora said, leading Aoife down the stairs of the building.  Aoife tried to keep up with the older girl, but the crowds soon separated them.
 “Sora!” Aoife called after her.  “Where’d you go?”  Then Aoife saw Sora, except coming from the opposite direction than the one she had been walking in.  “Sora!  There you are.”
 “Huh?” Sora—so Aoife thought—said.  “I think you’re mistaking me for someone else,” she said, and walked off.
 “Piiiiiika?” Chu-Chu wondered, confused.
 “Hey!” Aoife called after this new girl.  “But she looked exactly like Sora…I wonder what’s going on?”  Still determined to see the place where Sora had discovered Treagle, she ran in the direction that Sora had gone off in until she was, for the most part, out of the worst of the crowds.  This was the edge of the city, and beyond that there were mostly fields and trees and forests.  “SOOOOOOOOOORAAAAAAAAA!” Aoife called off into the fields.
 “Aoife?” Sora’s voice traveled across the field.  
 “Sora?” Aoife called back.  “Where are you?”  She ran out into the bushes along a path when something dropped out of the tree in front of her.  “Aaaaaack!” she shrieked.
 The thing that had dropped out of the tree was mostly blue, shaped like a human, and it laughed… “Aoife?” The “thing” was Sora.
 “Where’d you go?” they both asked each other simultaneously.
 “I got lost in the crowds,” Aoife explained.  “And then I met someone who looked like you, but it wasn’t you, so I went off to find you and then you jumped out of the tree!”
 “Oh,” Sora said, then started giggling insanely.
 “What’s so funny?” Aoife asked.
 “You met my sister, I bet,” Sora laughed.
 “Your sister?” Aoife said, more puzzled than before.
 “Yeah, Raven,” Sora explained.  “That’s my sister’s name.  She wasn’t by any chance wearing a Treagle t-shirt, was she?”
 “I didn’t notice,” Aoife said.
 “Well, it probably was Raven anyway,” said Sora, who then pointed up to the tree she had just fallen out of.  “This is where Raven and I found Treagle.  There are lots of other Pokemon, like Voltorb, Vulpix, Ponyta, Meowth…lots of Pokemon in these fields.”
 “Cool,” Aoife said.  “I’m gonna go catch some!  YEEHA!” she whooped, charging off into the fields.  Sora rolled her eyes, then chased off after Aoife to make sure she didn’t get hurt.
 
(Who's that Pokemon?  It's Treagle!)
 
 “Interesting city,” Petra said, as she walked around Azure City.  She had just been shopping in some of the stores, getting some new potions for them to use while traveling, and she had battled a couple of the trainers there.  “But no girls yet.  Darn.  I wonder when I’ll—whoa.”  She stopped short, seeing a girl walking along the sidewalk.  “Hooold on a second.  I gotta go check this out.”  She turned around, to make sure it really was a girl she had seen, and indeed it was.  The female specimen had blue hair in pigtails, blue eyes, and a t-shirt with some kind of Pokemon on it…Petra wasn’t sure what Pokemon it was; she wasn’t interested in the t-shirt, just the girl who was wearing it.
 She ran up to the girl and jumped in her path, deciding to introduce herself.  “Uh…hi!  I’m, uh, I’m Petra.  Yeah, I think that’s it.  Yeah, it’s definitely Petra.  Petra Stone, and I’m from Pewter City and…what are you laughing at?”
 The girl was giggling.  “Whatever you want to say, just say it.”
 “Okay,” Petra more or less pulled herself together.  “Okay, um…I was wondering ifyou’dgooutwithme?”
 “Um…” the girl paused, not sure if she’d heard correctly.  “Are you asking me out?”  Petra nodded vigorously.  “Oh…kay.  Well, if you’d like to come back to my house for tea…you’re the Pewter City gym leader, aren’t you?”
 “Yeah!” Petra said.  “I train rock Pokemon, and I want to be the best Pokemon breeder like my parents!”
 “How…cute,” the girl said.  “Well, my house is right around here, so if you want to come and we could talk about Pokemon…I bet we have some things in common.”
 “Really?” Petra asked, eyes widening, not believing that the wondrous creature had invited her in.  “GREAT!  That’d be great!  Ehm…what’s your name?”
 “It’s Raven,” the girl said.  “Raven Starling.  Come on, maybe my sister’s in and I can introduce you to her.”
 “Sure!” Petra said, as Raven led her to her house.  “Sisters, huh?  This is GREAT!  This is better than I expected!”
 
***
 
 “So do you wanna come back to my house?” Sora asked Aoife.  “Maybe you can meet my sister…if you haven’t already.”
 “No thanks, that’s okay,” Aoife said.  “I better go look for Petra.  Thanks anyway, maybe I’ll take a rain check.”
 “Sure,” Sora said.  “That’d be great.  How long are you here for?”
 “Until I get a badge at the gym,” Aoife said.  “It’s kinda late now so I might do that tomorrow.”
 “Okay,” said Sora.  “I’ll see you around, then!  Bye!”
 “Bye!” Aoife said, while Chu-Chu said, “Pii!” and waved.  “Now where would Petra be?”
 “Pika pika pi?” Chu-Chu copied its owner in Pikachu-speak.
 Aoife wandered around for a while, when she spotted Petra…with another girl.  And to top it off, the girl was Sora!  “Hey, Petra!” she ran up to them.
 “Well, I gotta go,” Petra said to Sora.  “I’ll see you later, Raven!”
 “Sure,” the girl said.  “Bye!”
 Petra waved after Sora/Raven, then turned to Aoife.  “So where ya been, Aif?”
 “What about you?” Aoife asked.  “And why’d you call her Raven when her name’s Sora?”
 “Huh?” Petra asked.  “That’s Raven.  She told me so herself.  Her sister’s name is…ohh.”
 “That’s a funny name,” Aoife puzzled.
 “No, it’s not oh,” Petra said.  “Her sister’s name is Sora.  Maybe you met Sora and that’s why you think that’s her name!”
 “I don’t get it…” Aoife admitted.  “All I know was that I spent the afternoon with a girl named Sora, out in the fields where she discovered a new Pokemon, Treagle.”
 “And I was with a girl named Raven…well, I wasn’t with her, per se…” Petra said, pressing her index fingers together.  “But I spent the afternoon at Raven’s house, and she said she had a sister named Sora.  But if you mistook Raven for Sora…”
 “That must mean they’re twins!” Aoife caught on.  “Okay.  So, ah, Petra?  What exactly did you do at Raven’s house, huh?  Was there any…” she made a few gestures with her hands.
 “No!” Petra protested.  “No no no no, none of that.  We just talked.  We have a lot in common, except she’s a gym leader and she wants to be a—”
 “GYM LEADER?” Aoife interrupted.  “Sora’s sister is the Azure City gym leader?”
 “Guess so,” Petra said.  “That’s what she said anyway.  And they discovered a new species, which you already know I guess…”
 “Yeah,” Aoife said.  “Well, we better go back there.”  She started off back towards the Starling twins’ home.
 “Back where?” Petra wondered.
 “To their house,” Aoife said.  “We need some place to stay.”  She stopped walking momentarily to turn back to Petra.  “And don’t even THINK about—”
 “Yes, yes, I know,” Petra said, following Aoife back to the Starling house.
 
 
Author's notes
This was sort of pointless...but I did set the scene, did I not?  Oh, and here's my nifty little edited pic of Treagle:
Isn't it cool?  I looove it!  It looks like a legendary bird but it's not...or maybe it is?  Who knows?  Maybe Sora and Raven just found a weaker baby one, and there's actually a really big Treagle that's really powerful.  Hmm, good idea.  Well anyway, if you've ever seen or read The Comedy of Errors you'll know this episode is based on that (and if you haven't, well, now you know!).  Except in it there were two sets of twins and they had the same names (one set was named Dromio, one was named...oh, I forget.  But they were both named the same name anyway, which was kinda stupid).  So there was even more confusion and chaos!  Whee!  
 
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