Testing from a regular map, you can encounter an enemy and get pulled into battle. There you go through your back-and-forth, try not to die, and come out victorious

Things that got implemented:
-Bonus power
-Defense (reduce damage by 1, 2 if you're lucky)
-Counterattack (much smaller window than Defense, but will turn attack back on enemy, melee only)
-Star Feathers (level up currency)
-Level up!!!

Some things that need obvious work:
-Real enemies, not stand-ins
-Special moves
-Item animations
-Animations for enemies
-Animations for the player and various followers
-Saving the scene when you go into battle and returning to it appropriately once victorious
-You Died scene

Odd bug:

-Enemy choice arrow does not spawn correctly when number of enemies left is an even number (if spawning into an even-number troupe, works fine). Functions fine with left and right, but spawn-in is incorrect

I think I'm going to take a short break from the battle maps. A bit of a quit while I'm ahead sort of thing. Except the next steps in improvement require actual enemies

But my new shiny project here is going to be the shopping. I had an idea I want to try out. Rather than doing strict buy and sell, which is normal and tedious, I have a mental sketch of a barter and trade system. So I'll box up the buy/sell system I already have, and see how this barter/trade method pans out. If it doesn't, well, I'll just unbox the buy/sell. If it does work, I think it will be pretty awesome because it might open up more opportunities to barter with more NPCs than straight "shopkeepers" and such. Or maybe "shopkeepers" will have a buy/sell option in addition to trade. We'll see