"Yes…yes…YES!" Jade Ashera Villerubia cried, jumping off of her bed, pumping her fists--and Nintendo DS--into the air, and spinning around. "Check it out, Amber! I beat Lance…using ONLY my Sneasel and red Gyarados!"

Amber Lee Spier grunted from where she sat leaning against Jade's chest of drawers. "Big deal! Remember, I defeated Lance using only my Ampharos and red Gyarados in SoulSilver!" She smoothed out her chestnut brown ponytail cockily.

"But your Ampharos has a higher attack stat than my Sneasel, so it was a lot harder for me to beat him."

"But your Sneasel has a higher speed, so we're even!"

Jade thought a minute, letting her light green eyes drift upwards. "True, Sneasel is pretty fast…alright, we're even, but I still get to brag. I mean, I just defeated the champion! Don't ruin it for me!" She flipped her long, wavy orange hair over her shoulder and directed her eyes back to her Nintendo DSi screen, where a guy who may or may not have been Billy Mayes had been saying "Jade defeated Champion Lance!" throughout the entire argument.

Outside Jade's bedroom window, the bright New Orleans sun was beginning to sink down behind the Gulf of Mexico, casting rays of orange, red, and purple over the city. Both Jade and Amber lived in the French Quarter of the city, where they had a great view of the Mississippi River and the Gulf, and the neighborhood was beautiful and quaint as well. (Jade lived alone, as her parents had died in a fire not long after her sixteenth birthday, and Amber lived with her Aunt Bee, in case you were wondering.) The two sixteen-year-old girls were about as different as it was possible to be, but they had been best friends for years.

Jade was a lighthearted peacemaker who liked being around nature. Amber was more of a pushy, aggressive person who liked being around action. They were alike in one aspect, however: their love for Pokemon video games, anime, and manga.

Amber plopped down onto Jade's bed, hanging upside-down. "Remember when you first started playing your HeartGold game and picked Chikorita as your starter? Falkner totally owned you…twice! You had to battle about fifty million wild Sentret and Pidgey before it finally evolved into Bayleef and you could win! I was surprised that there were any Sentret and Pidgey left in the game!" She laughed.

Jade pouted. "May I remind you that it took you four tries to beat Clair with your Typhlosion in your SoulSilver game?"

"That's only because you refused to trade me your Sneasel for thirty measly minutes, Jay-Jay. "

"I had to work my butt off to make that Sneasel like me, and if I had traded it to you, its happiness would have been reset all over again! Plus, you could have caught your own dern Sneasel in Ice Path! I may be too nice for my own good, but not when it comes from my video games. And how many times do I have to tell you NOT to call me Jay-Jay?" Jade hated it when Amber called her by her highly original nickname, modeled off of Dawn's nickname from Pokemon (Dee-Dee).

To call these girls "Pokemaniacs" would be the understatement of the year. Their lives didn't revolve around Pokemon, but they did know almost everything there was to know about it. I mean, who do you think figured out how to clone items and proved the Mew-under-the-truck rumor false? (A/N: Okay, I do realize that someone else did all that, but just roll with it for the sake of the story, okay?) They even started their own two-person YouTube music group doing covers of songs from Pokemon, called Johto GSC. Amber was very close to completing her National Poke`dex, and Jade was helping her out, but Jade herself wasn't interested in catching all the Pokemon in the game. She figured it wasn't all that important, since all you got was a flashy leveled-up Trainer Card and a virtual certificate. What was the point? She did better raising one strong, well-balanced team.

"You know," Jade mused, joining Amber in hanging upside-down on her bed. "If I were a real Pokemon Trainer, I'd only used Grass-types. Just Grass. Well, maybe some Bug-types, too, but mostly Grass-types."

"Bad idea, Jay-Jay!" Amber countered, ignoring Jade's request to stop calling her that. "You'd be at a disadvantage to almost everything! Fire, Ice, Poison, Flying, Bug…and you wouldn't stand much of a chance against other Grass-types, Steel-types, or Dragon-types either."

"Yeah, but I'd have an advantage over Water, Rock, and Ground-types," Jade argued. "Besides, a lot of Grass-types have secondary types like Poison and Flying, so that neutralizes two of their weaknesses right there. And they have a lot of useful disabling moves like Sleep Powder and Stun Spore. And they're just awesome! I don't like to judge by Type alone. You've gotta think about moves, stats, and your Pokemon's nature, too."

"Well, if I was a real Pokemon Trainer, I'd train Fire and Electric types. They're the most powerful, not to mention intimidating, types in the game! And the Electric-type is one of the best in defense, since its only weakness is Ground."

Jade laughed. "But don't forget, you'd be totally screwed if you were battling a Ground-type! Fire and Electric are both weak against Ground!"

"Oh, who asked you?" Amber growled.

Jade flinched in mock fear. "Sorry!" she squeaked.

Amber laughed. "Kidding! Hey, Arceus and the Jewel of Life is coming on in a few minutes. Wanna watch it?"

"Sure! But…don't you think we should start on that assignment for Creative Writing first?"

Both girls looked at each other, then smiled and said, "Nah!"

"After all, we've got all summer," Amber pointed out, hoisting herself back up to sit upright. Jade simply did a back flip off the bed and landed feet first on the floor. "Really! Giving us homework over summer break! It should be outlawed, it really should."

"It's kind of a hard topic to write on, too," Jade added as she flipped on the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. "I mean, really. 'Your Greatest Adventure'? That sounds so cheesy and predictable."

"Heh, the greatest adventure I ever had was trying to prove my Uncle Waldo innocent of robbing a gas station," Amber laughed.

"You have an Uncle Waldo?" Jade asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, I told you about him. He's a lawyer, remember?"

Jade giggled lightly, then turned her attention back to finding Cartoon Network. She knew by now to just smile and nod when Amber started talking about her in-prison-or-on-parole relatives. (And there were a lot of them.)

I know what you're probably thinking right now: Jade and Amber sound a lot like Carly Shay and Sam Puckett. Well, it's only natural that they would be a lot alike, because they're cousins. That's right, Jade was Carly's third cousin, and Amber was Sam's. The distant families of both Carly and Sam lived in Louisiana; it was Carly and Sam's sides of the families that had moved to Washington.

The girls spend the whole movie singing along loudly to the song "Battle Cry" from the opening battle scene, laughing at how Ash sounded like a girl, crying when Arceus almost died, and pointing out random details they had missed the last time they watched it that normal human eyes could not normally detect. After the movie ended, they both slouched back against Jade's bed and sighed.

"I never get tired of that movie," Jade stated.

"Neither do—I know this has nothing to do with anything, but I have a crazy idea!" Amber suddenly squealed.

"Oooooh, I love it when you get crazy ideas, girl! What is it?" Jade asked eagerly.

"We're going to visit Carly and Sam next week, right?"

"Right…"

"And we're coming during a week they're doing iCarly, right?"

"I like where this is going…right…"

"So why don't we ask them if we can perform a few songs on the show as Johto GSC?!"

Jade of course, agreed enthusiastically, though she wasn't sure that iCarly's viewers would get much out of Pokemon music. She was sort of an agreeing machine and had a hard time saying no to people.

And so, Amber and Jade called up Carly from Jade's cell, who excitedly agreed to let them sing on the show, saying that they'd been getting a lot of requests from fans to showcase an anime and that they hadn't had any live music on the show lately. They spent the next twenty minutes deciding which songs to sing, and eventually picked "Battle Cry" from the Arceus and the Jewel of Life movie, "We Will Meet Again" from the Lucario and the Mystery of Mew movie, "My Best Friends" from the 2BA Master album, a fan-dubbed version of "Aim to Be A Pokemon Master" from the first season of the Japanese version of the anime, and "Brother My Brother" from Pokemon: The First Movie.

After having a few battles over Nintendo DS Wi-Fi, the girls fell asleep on the blanket-covered floor, the cool night breeze drifting in through the open window of Jade's bedroom.