Aces And Eights

"You have answered four-hundred-ninety-two questions out of five-hundred correctly in only one hour, four minutes and Eight seconds. Your Pokemon Fanatic Score is: 127,859! You currently rank 5356th in the world!" The website for the test informed Ashley.

Ashley jumped up on her chair and shouted in triumph! "Booh-yah! Take THAT fucking Instinct!" she cried before a yelp of, "Whaa-!" escaped her lips as her rolling desk chair slid out from under her and she toppled onto the floor with a crash! "Owe..." Ashley whimpered, as her two best friends, one Kevin St. Cloud from across the hall and the other her roommate Lucy who was over there studying for their Comparative Religions final came bombing in to see what had happened.

"You OK Ash?" Lucy Vanderpool, AKA 'Lucky' asked, while Kevin went to the bathroom for the first aid kit.

"Yea, I'll be OK, don't think I broke or sprained anything..." Ashley replied from where she lay amid the drifts of "Pockie" wrappers and empty trays of 'heat in package' yakisoba which had broken her fall.

"What was this about 'Take that fucking Instinct'?" Lucy asked, and Ashley knew she was busted.

Ashley had met Kevin and Lucy just earlier this year, and they really hit it off. They all were total freakazoid Pokemon fanatics, they'd been watching the show and playing the games since before they could remember. However, things had nearly come undone almost right out of the gate when they discovered that they each were on a different "team" in "Pokemon GO!".

Ashley, better known to her intimates as 'Ash' was Valor to the core. She didn't just fight for Red, she LIVED it: there was no cliff she wouldn't climb, no challenge which made her balk. It had been that way since she was a kid, growing up in the neighborhood she did as a mixed race Asiatic/Caucasian she'd had to develop a warrior spirit or die, and the fact that she was attending a prestigious and long standing university like Antioch proved which side that had come down on.

Lucy, AKA "Lucky" was straight up Instinct. Like both the others she chose Yellow because it fit her personality: she went with her gut feelings and lived in the moment, her team totem Zapdos being a Thunderbird, and her life being built around snap decisions and responding to changing situations like a flash of lightening.

Kevin's veins ran with the same liquid nitrogen of team mystic's patron Arcticuno. He also was a seriously Mystical dude. His mind was a finely tuned instrument of cold relentless logic balanced by magical warmth and rock solid BELIEF. Just to top it off his favorite color happened to be blue.

When the three of them discovered they were all rivals it had sparked their first big fight, but the next day they each independently came to the conclusion that they were being childish and had apologized. Since then it had remained a frequent bone of contention about which they always had to 'agree to disagree', and for the past three months their policy had been that they handle the teams of "Pokemon GO!" like 'Fight Club'*, a policy that Ash's outburst had been in serious contravention of.
*("The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club"...)

"Sorry, got carried away there," Ashley began. "See I may have just won all of us an all expenses paid trip to the opening day of that new Pokemon theme park they've been renovating for the past two years..." Ash explained, and then showed them her score...