Preparation for the playoffs in Los Angeles, California has been a bit of a shitshow. The team discovered Pokemon Go during the season after one of the prospects, Blitz'-player, got caught trying to catch a Magikarp behind the goal during training camp in the middle of practice. Like the brilliant role models they are, the Los Angeles players took advantage of the job's travel requirements to catch pokemon across the country and battle each other during flights. The only player who had remained hitherto uninvolved with the team's pokemon craze was Grzegorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz, the goalie, who grew up without a cell phone and consistently misunderstood what his teammates meant when they tried to tell him to open "Google Play". He kept typing the word "play" into Google instead of opening the indicated app. Even Aleksi Kettu gave up on him after a few hours of boomer futility. Grzegorz enjoyed watching his teammates shout about the funny pictures fighting on their phones, but could never quite figure out how to participate despite the best efforts of Frenchie's-player to get him in on the fun.

The night after their final game of the regular season, with their matchup against the Seattle Argonauts now set and scheduled, most of the Panthers stayed up a bit late. Grezgorz awoke from his postgame nap to hear his teammates shouting in the hotel lobby, arguing about something he couldn't quite make out from the comfort of his pillowless bed. Perhaps it was his English getting in the way again (luckily one doesn't need to know much more than "left", "right", "behind you", tapping your stick on the ice, and "fuck you" to communicate during the game as a goalie) but his ability to connect with his teammates off the ice still needed improvement. He was better than he'd been when he got here, making steady progress, in his own mind, but he still couldn't guess what this "Charmander" was. Maybe some chess joke?

He rubbed his eyes as he emerged into the hotel lobby full of hockey players standing in a circle with their phones out and a single older woman staring at them with her arms folded, wondering if she dared approach them and tell them to calm down.

"Friend teams, what is happen? Why the shout?" Grezgorz approached. The woman tried to say something to him, but she spoke too quickly and with an angry tone that reminded Grzegorz of an old woman from the village of Siemieniakowszczyzna who had once told him to stop shooting pucks off her garden fence to save them as they bounced back towards his goal made of wooden sticks and cut-up soccer netting. He did not understand her English perfectly, so he said "thank you", smiled, and walked forward to his team. The woman huffed, just like old Mrs Katarzyna, but Grzegorz did not care.

His teammates had either not heard him or ignored him, so he approached and looked over Nathan Meagher's shoulder to see why everyone had their phones out. He saw a picture of a lizard grimacing in agony and hopping around with its tail on fire. Why were his teammates arguing about who should catch this poor thing when it was in such distress? Grezgorz sprinted across the lobby, past the old woman, and just as his teammates had narrowed the potential captors of this "Charmander" down to three of their number, their goalie returned with a fire extinguisher and blasted the empty space in the middle of the team's circle.

Derek Martin spent the next fifteen minutes talking hotel staff out of kicking the whole team onto the streets at 1 AM. Meanwhile, Grzegorz was slowly made to understand that the Charmander liked having its tail on fire, and that was in fact the point of this pokemon. He even more slowly understood that pokemon were not real, and that the Pokemon Go app was just an interactive movie and not a window to the spirit world. Grezgorz, after spending 22 minutes objecting that Nathan's Gengar was very clearly a ghost, at last understood the hotel's request that he clean up his fire extinguisher mess himself. The fact that he did so without complaint would remain in the hotelier's mind as the most baffling event of the night. The old woman who was not Mrs Katarzyna had to be escorted out by police after pulling a knife on the hotel secretary after he tried to explain that she was not entitled to a refund.

Cormac Ponaire captured the Charmander while the rest of the team was distracted. The next day at morning skate, no one except Grezgorz would talk to him.

"Friend Cormac, I download the Pokemon gee-zero, but nothing is happen when I open this thing. Screen is only black now. Can you helping?"

The involuntary IT department grumbled to himself about feeling like he was 9 and helping his dad set up a WLAN again, but took Grzegorz's phone to have a look.

The goalie had downloaded "P0kemon g0", not Pokemon Go, and his phone was learning a new definition of pain and suffering while being slowly tortured by an incredibly low-quality dogecoin miner.

The team tried to help, but to no avail. Derek restarted his phone for him, but when it booted back up, it was locked at the root screen with a ransomware message:

`It's like my grandpappy used to say: some days you catch the pokemon, some days the pokemon catches you! Hahahaha!
Wire 5 Dogecoin to this cryptowallet and I'll unlock your phone.
See you soon!`

It was quickly decided that this would not stand. Wuma was once again press-ganged into IT service, this time to track the transaction history of the cryptowallet in question and therefrom deduce the location of its owner. He found this distressingly easy; the wallet itself was reasonably secure, but the VPN used was not. It only took him a few hours to find that the IP consistently used to access this wallet belonged to a trashy apartment building in eastern Germany. The team booked a transatlantic flight that very afternoon.


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