"That's enough, you two!" Brock interjected, finally stepping between his two fuming charges. "I am getting sick and tired of your childish arguing! While I admit that it's been pretty damn hilarious sometimes, this really has gone far enough. You guys have been friends for far too long to allow this to keep going on. Now I want you two to apologize. You too, Misty, 'cause for once it's not just Ash who's acting like a four-year-old."

Ash huffed indignantly but remained silent, casting a slightly annoyed glance at Misty.

"If you'll remember," Misty replied curtly, returning Ash's look, "I already tried to apologize once, but Captain Brain Damage here just had to inflate his ego and ruin it."

Brock sighed angrily. It's hopeless with these two. Maybe I should just let them kill each other. "Wait a minute!" he said suddenly, snapping his fingers. "I can't believe I overlooked this until now!" Grabbing the message pad and pen from next to the phone, he began to write, occasionally looking from Ash to Misty and then scratching down a few figures.

Ash and Misty looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders. "Um, Brock? What are you doing?" Ash ventured, leaning across the kitchen table to try and see what his squinty-eyed friend was writing.

"Ta-da!" Brock cried with a flourish, ripping the sheet of paper from the pad just as Ash caught a glimpse of the title.

"War of the Idiots?" Ash cried indignantly. "What the hell are you doing, Brock?"

Brock chose to ignore Ash's anger and slid the paper across the table. "Take a look; this is how we're going to settle this childishness once and for all."

After a brief tug of war that resulted in one of the corners of the paper being harshly ripped off, Ash and Misty held the paper between them and began to read:

WAR OF THE IDIOTS

Ash Ketchum (Idiot A)  v. Misty Waterflower

As of 19 August, the score is as follows:

Ash: 3 (removal of towels while Waterflower was in shower; placement of shaving cream in her pajamas; placement of various bug Pokemon over her bed while she was asleep)

Misty: 3 (blasting heavy metal music into Ketchum's ears while he was asleep; placing dry Kool-Aid mix in shower head before he got in, leaving the subject covered with blue streaks; filling his shoes with peanut butter [crunchy])

The observer of this war proposes that, as the combatants are tied at the present time, the next person to carry out a successful practical joke will be declared the winner of the aforementioned war. Also, the loser will become the winner's unconditional slave for exactly one week. The observer asks that the combatants agree to the above conditions and sign their names below, assuming that they have stopped glaring at each other long enough to read the above conditions.

The two were silent for a moment after they finished reading. "What exactly does that mean?" Ash asked curiously.

"It means that the next one of you who carries out a successful prank is the winner," Brock said, a bit annoyed that he even had to explain such a simple thing. "Don't tell me you guys haven't been keeping track?" At the puzzled looks on his friends' faces, he sighed and shook his head. "Look, just forget it. Just—hurry up and get this stupid thing over with. Preferably before lunch, okay?"

Ash frowned a bit. Though he was almost sure he could win this thing, the idea of being Misty's slave for an entire week was definitely not appealing; after that stunt he had pulled yesterday in the kitchen, he was pretty sure she was ready to kill him, and he didn't even want to begin to imagine the kind of humiliating things she'd subject him to if she got to control him.

"What are you waiting for?" Misty's impatient voice cut through his doubtful thoughts, and he observed with a bit of surprise that she had already signed the paper. Guess she's not nervous about this. Taking the pen from her, he signed his name in the large, wobbly handwriting of a kindergartener. Misty frowned as she observed the signature, shaking her head a bit at his poor penmanship. "Here you go, Brock," she said, handing the paper to their conflict's new moderator of sorts.

"Okay, then," Brock began, folding the paper and tucking it into his pants pocket. "Let's make this even more interesting; you guys have until midnight to give me a winner, and they must have physical proof of their victory." He smirked. "Knowing the kind of tricks you guys tend to pull, I'm guessing that won't be a problem. I set you to your task." Laughing, he mocked a salute as the two trainers cast one final glare at each other and separated to different sides of the house.

----------

 At ten o'clock that night, Misty sat uncomfortably at the paneled desk in the guest room, scribbling down the day's events in her Staryu-patterned diary. Its corners were bent, the cover marred by pen marks, the edges of the pages smudged with dirt; this diary had been with her since the first day of her Pokemon journey—that fateful day when she had hooked on her fishing line a reckless young boy that would turn out to be her best friend, closest companion, and first and only love. She and Ash had been to Hell and back together.

I think we're currently in the former, she observed with a small sigh, closing the book, bulging with the addition of added pages after the original blue watermarked sheets had long since been endowed with the task of keeping the young girl's secrets from prying eyes. Misty had exactly two hours to put one over on Ash, and she had used up everything in her artillery. Earlier, she had attempted the old 'bucket-of-water-suspended-over-the-door' trick, but Ash had unfortunately picked that day to finally become intelligent and had kicked open the door, sending the water splashing over the floor and his left shin, but nowhere else.

Not that Ash hadn't failed in his attempts to win as well; his attempts to strew her underwear across the front lawn for passing motorists and curious passerby to see had been met with pain—from the carefully-placed armed mousetraps she had set in the drawer. The second she heard the telltale metal 'snap!', followed by a yelp and a string of curses, she was upstairs, leaning against the doorframe of the guest room and laughing hysterically.

I really don't know who's going to win this, she thought warily. What if neither of us pulls this off?