Now that you’ve completed that month, it’s April. Selecting Ignis gets you only three options- Enter, Equip, and Info. Since you can’t move your two Warriors (yourself and Oichi) around at all, and the only equipment you’re liable to have available is a Potion or two, you may as well just enter the fortress.
Here you encounter Keiji again, the somewhat leonine man looking more thoughtful than last time you saw him. He greets you affably before recalling that he was going to teach you about gaining allies. Declaring the task ‘pretty easy’, he goes on to explain that you can find Warriors that aren’t part of an army, wandering around on their own. He points out the Cave in Ignis, and suggests that you can find a few in there and should see if you can get them to join up with you. Keiji, meanwhile, is going to head off to the Shop- so you aren’t actually going to have him alongside you to help when you go to see about adding more Warriors to your army.
Oichi steps back in, a bit startled by what’s just happened, and reminds you that Keiji just said to head into the Cave.
If you like, you can poke around the Shop here, or the Ponigiri shop. While you have enough money to pick up a few things at the Shop, you’re better off leaving it be for now- in order to actually buy or sell anything there, a Warrior must use their turn, and you don’t have the spare Warriors to be spending actions on shopping.
The Ponigiri Shop is a different matter. Since this shop boosts the Energy of your Pokemon, and a higher Energy means more accuracy and better offensive power, the only reason not to head in there is if you’re concerned about spending your months of game-time. Since there’s no actual drawback to time spent (unless you’re trying for a speed run or low number of months for a personal goal or challenge), go ahead and step in there. The proprietor of the Ponigiri shop is a stocky, friendly-looking woman who, strangely, seems to run every Ponigiri shop in Ransei.
Since this is your first time in a Ponigiri Shop, she offers to explain the shop’s services to you. You probably won’t need the explanation- it pretty much just highlights the Energy system, which I have explained elsewhere.
The Ponigiri you can get right now are thankfully free, so go ahead and tank up both your Pokemon until their Mood arrows both curve to point straight upwards, indicating the best possible Mood. This should only take two Ponegiri purchases, but keep in mind that this puts you at Month 3, which means their Moods might change thanks to the time factor. If that does happen, it’s likely only one Pokemon will lose some Mood- in which case you can send the other Warrior-Pokemon pair to go into the shop and get the brief explanation there out of the way- hopefully, it’ll be Oichi, as a better Charisma means better prices, both buying and selling. The Shops, you may notice, are also all manned by the same person- in this case a wandering-saleslady type with a huge backpack that serves as her stockroom.
