The angry-sounding call jolted the agent out of his thoughts, pushing through the surrounding noise. His grasp on mainland Kantonian was already flaky at the best of times; the islanders’ accent made it almost impossible to figure out what the man had said. Though, between the annoyance creeping on his sea-weathered face and the rusted fishing boat they were both on having just been tied to the pier, the situation was straightforward enough.
Skipping any inevitably botched verbal reply, the agent just nodded his head and got off the boat, the creaking of the wood underneath his formal shoes much louder than he would’ve preferred. The sun wailed down on him as he got going, with even just a short-sleeved white shirt feeling like far, far too many layers for the tropical sun. He could and had braced himself for Unovan summers, but this felt like another digit of temperature altogether—in either unit.
Hopefully, the interview he was here for would at least take place in the shade.
The seaside town was dingy at the absolute most generous. Not a single piece of infrastructure looked like it’d been made—or maintained—within the last twenty years, with whatever wallpapers and advertisements he recognized from the mainland sun-bleached into just faded cyan. He stood out like a sore thumb, yes—but so did basically anyone under the age of thirty. At least, if a single band of local kids playing on what remained of a basketball court being watched over by at least twice as many pensioners was any sign. Not dead, far from it, but definitely moribund. A place with plenty of past, but no future. Ironic, considering the locals’ name for it translated to something in the vein of “Island full of time”.
It was also, to his increasingly overheated dismay, the perfect spot for a house arrest. Remote enough for the government to monitor all arrivals and departures, insular enough for any outsider dropped here to be at best ignored and at worst shunned, but still free and ‘tropical’ enough to preserve at least some goodwill from the person held here. As far as the agent was concerned, said individual wouldn’t have minded remaining helpful even if he was held chained up in a shoebox, but the intricacies of the minds of the League’s Kantonian higher-ups were beyond his paygrade to dig into.
Including the decision to allow for this interview to happen at all.
He suspected it was a gesture of goodwill after what had happened following said person’s initial capture. To say that having one of the most wanted men in Unova be effectively stolen by the League caused controversy was… an understatement. Mostly internally, though—the public position was that he was still being held in a Unovan controlled facility. There have been some annoying leaks over the years pointing to the reality that this wasn’t the case anymore, but fortunately, the public interest had already long since faded. No matter how big of a scandal they had made back in the day, the so-called “Neo Plasma Organization” was long gone.
Not from the minds of his coworkers, though. To them, it wasn’t just an international policing mishap; it was a personal insult. And when the League had finally confirmed they had moved the man to Kantonian periphery under their watch, he had learned more slurs from his fellow agents in a day than he did in his entire high school.
That’s not to say he didn’t have his own reasons for being miffed. He was… heavily discouraged from asking about any research the man had done—what got him on the League’s radar in the first place—but he hoped that at least he’d get him to provide information to help catch his coworkers that remained at large. Foolish idea, perhaps, but deciding on it was again above his paygrade. He was just there to talk.
And so, to his relief, was the man he’d traveled halfway across the world for, sitting in the shade outside of a local watering hole. The agent had expected him to have blended in somewhat over the past few years, but the reality had decided otherwise yet again. He was much more tanned than what he’d seen on the wanted posters; that awful blue streak in his hair was gone. His lab coat might’ve been replaced with a loose flower-patterned shirt, but the expression remained unchanged. The same haunting hazel eyes, digging into the agent the moment he’d turned the corner, dissecting him with thinly veiled glee.
The ankle monitor and a couple of suspicious men watching over them from across the street sure didn’t help the scene, but those were at least expected. “Greetings there, agent! I see the Seviian sun has already made quite an impact on you?”
The agent sat down, ignoring the comment. “Dr. Isaiah Colress, correct?”
“In the very flesh!” Colress answered, the accent on his over-enunciated Unovan barely noticeable. Before the agent could continue, a waiter approached, regarding one overly pale man with familiar disgust and the other with uncertain apprehension. She said something curt, making Colress pass the request on: “What will you have, agent? The selection here isn’t the widest, but their local malt coconut drinks are to die for!”
“Just water, please.”
“Very well!” the researcher eagerly acknowledged, before turning back to the waiter. His Kantonian was what a mathematical sphere was to a physical ball—an overly perfect approximation, missing the texture and smoothing out the many crevices. Over-enunciated, correct in a dictionary sense, yet deeply off-putting. Something that the locals eventually got used to.
The agent’s gaze never left Colress’ eyes as he continued. “I am not here to enjoy drinks, Colress. I’ll be as straightforward as I can be—do you have any information that could lead us to your co-researchers at Neo Plasma Organization?”
The researcher’s attention snapped back at him instantly, with the understanding of the question coming after a noticeable delay. “Really now? Is that what you’re here for, agent? Is the entirety of Unova so boorish that they don’t have a single shred of a desire to understand, or even learn, my research after all those years!? Is writing people up, adding wads after wads of paper to that behemoth you call administration, before categorizing which exact size of cell each person is to go to the only thing you people can do!?”
Colress’s raised voice was unusual enough to catch the attention of any onlookers—as was the snarl that replaced his usual smirk. Unsurprisingly, his gaze had changed the least, growing only in intensity, but not in emotion. The flappy sounds of a Psyduck waddling away from behind the building were the only noise filling the street for a few moments.
As if on cue, he sighed and chuckled his way back to his previous self, shaking his head in a mix of pretend and real exasperation. “Well, I am very sorry to disappoint you, agent! Thanks to the generosity of my Kantonian hosts, I haven’t been able to keep in touch with any of my past coworkers—where they’d gone, what aliases they’d have, what they might be planning, none of that ever interested me, agent~. I was there for research, and research only, untainted by bureaucracy or ulterior motives!”
It took the agent a considerable amount of his willpower to not so much as scoff at the researcher’s words. He’d been part of the team investigating Team Plasma’s laboratories after the initial raid; he saw what kind of ‘research’ the psycho he was speaking with had done. He saw the bodies, the ones they hadn’t had the time to cremate yet.
Still, his personal opinions were for himself, and himself only. “You have no information to provide us about your past co-workers, then? Just as a confirmation.”
“Indeed, agent! Confirm it, triple check it, gather aaaaalllll the necessary signatures and rubrics for it, file your non-discovery into the right color-coded folder to be forgotten forever! Anything but to have to think, to investigate the implications of what we’ve discovered!”
The agent retrieved a form from his briefcase, beginning to fill it out right as Colress’s final remark hit his ears. He was supposed to be a professional, but so was the clown before him. He supposed he could step down to his level, just this once. “Oh, ever the implications of all the dead mons. I would have assumed you’d talked the locals’ ears off all about them by now.”
Colress grinned. Both at the drinks getting there and getting to sip on the off-brown malted coconut mix, and at his interlocutor taking the bait. “You would think, agent! Alas~. They care not, neither about our discoveries nor their impact on our understanding of the world! They were born on this island, and I can assure you their thoughts will never leave it—except maybe to rant about the Sevii regional government over the third cup of the worst moonshine you could possibly imagine~.”
The agent exhaled loudly from his nose. With the last field on the sheet he was holding filled out, he passed it over to the researcher, together with a pen. “Double check your testimony as written, and sign it.”
“Very well! If you so wish—Isaiah Colress, 16th of July, 548 AR, 五之岛，七之島，关东行政区! Now—is that all, agent? Because if the depth of your intellectual curiosity on this topic is just as shallow as that of the locals, then I would want to terminate this interview~.”
“You do not get to decide that, Colress.” The agent’s voice was grim at the disrespect, especially from the one person who he’d seen many of his coworkers go mad over their inability to bring to justice. Still, the seeds the researcher had planted in his mind weren’t easy to ignore, and once the testimony was back in his briefcase, he took a sip of water and tentatively continued that topic. “Why do you care so much about that, anyway?”
Colress’s eye twitched. “Why!? Because my research fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the one inscrutable trinket that has shaped the world as we know it! Do you not care about that, agent~? Do you not care how that thing you keep strapped to your belt works?”
The agent briefly glanced down at the yellow-black service pokeball, suppressing a mounting eye-roll. “I do not see how the ‘how’ of pokeballs has any impact on anything. What matters was that they were invented here in Kanto, fueled a wave of imperialism not seen before and hopefully since, and now the League has a monopoly on their—”
“Not ‘invented’, agent!”
It took a few moments for Colress’ guest to refocus after that interruption, the implication as straightforward as it was inane. “Excuse me?”
“Pokeballs were *not* ‘invented’ here, agent! You asked for any way in which the ‘how’ of their functionality impacts anything; there you go! They were not ‘invented’, they were rediscovered!” Colress insisted with an expression that was at most half-hinged.
The assertion certainly took the agent aback, but only briefly. He wasn’t an expert on Kanto folklore, far from it, but he recognized this particular reference. “Ah yes, of course. They were ‘‘‘rediscovered’’’ from the ruins of the mythical first dynasty of Kanto, descended directly from the heavens and having conquered the entire world at one time. I had taken you as more intelligent than to so readily believe the—” he snarked, only for his words to be cut off with laughter. It was loud, piercing, and utterly empty. A replica of the physical sounds associated with amusement, without any genuine emotion behind it.
“Oh, agent,” the researcher began, any pretend glee disappearing shortly after, “I assure you that what I’m saying has nothing to do with either Kantonian folklore, nor their national pride~. They may just be the things I care about the least in this entire flawed world, less so than even your wasteful bureaucracy~.”
The agent took another sip of water, growing increasingly curious about where Colress’ inane train of thought was heading. “Well then. Who first... invented it then, for Kantonians to rediscover? Aliens?”
“I, regrettably, do not have a specific answer to that question, agent~. However, I have full confidence that it is nothing as outlandish as that—after all, there are many creatures in our midst that would’ve been perfectly capable of that feat~!”
Colress’ allusion was neither subtle nor missed, single-handedly wiping away a smirk from the agent’s expression. He already knew the researcher he was talking to was a nutjob, but an obvious reference to mons as being intelligent enough to have been capable of inventing a machine like a pokeball introduced yet another source of disgust. There was exactly one group of people that couldn’t shut up about how intelligent and capable mons were, and when pressed hard enough on that subject, they inevitably crossed the line into wanting that fact to make it so that mons could give consent. And that they couldn’t, because the very idea was fucked up beyond description... rarely stopped them.
The very last thing he wanted to do was to investigate whether Colress was that kind of monster too, though. “Uh-huh. Well then, humor me—how does your understanding of how pokeballs work infer that?”
The grin that graced the researcher’s face filled its lower half to the brim without ever touching the eyes. “Well—are you familiar with how they’re built, agent?”
“I’ve seen some of the disassembly videos, yes.” They kept making their rounds across social media every once in a while, always attracting fascination that never turned into anything but idle speculation. Inside the shell of either metal or plastic, a rudimentary set of sensors and electronics, a few springs, and the most hotly debated center component. A radial assortment of cloudy off-color crystals, each the size of a fingernail. On its own, an interesting trivia and little more. Nobody but the League were said to know how exactly they worked, and that knowledge was itself a trade secret. Many speculated about it—wrongly—but almost all of them inevitably lost interest over time.
Because as interesting as the question was in itself... the answer didn’t really matter. They worked, and more importantly, they kept them all safe, gave them the reins to not just survive on the fringes of nature, but to tame it. And it was that fact that mattered the most, much more than the specifics of whichever bullshit mon magic powered them.
Colress continued. “I presume you’ve seen the central crystal assembly, then?”
“In pictures, yes. What about it? Did you crack the League’s trade secrets about its functionality?” Despite the joking tone of the question, the idea wouldn’t leave the agent’s head afterwards. That would provide a good reason for the speed with which Team Plasma went from just a blip on their radar to enemy number 1, especially with the League meddling in the mix.
“Oh, agent—there are no trade secrets!” the researcher flatly asserted. “I have seen the patent papers, I have seen the documentation, including the declassified appendices—do you know what they say about the mechanism of function~? Nothing! Not in the patent, not in the internal documents, not even in the top secret files held by the Kanto government! There’s nothing there but decades of speculation and feeble theorizing in an attempt to reverse engineer the miracle they’ve been manufacturing for almost three centuries~! That’s why both my hosts and your employers had taken such an interest in me and my research, agent~. Because we accomplished what they could not, developed a scientific theory that could scratch the surface of the physics that powers these devices!”
For the first time since he’d arrived, the agent saw Colress’ eyes go wide as they stared into him, the researcher himself leaning forward on the small table. “I know what you’re thinking, agent; I’ve heard it all! How can I assert the League has no idea how their own technology even works, you may think!? Because of how it was rediscovered, because of the written record of that time that the Kanto government has tried its hardest to alter! The only reason that pokeballs exist is that Wen Jingzhao, a second-century court craftsman in what is now the Pewter province, happened to find a pristine, still-functional one in a nearby swamp, and his Abra reactivated it before he could disassemble it for scrap!”
The bang on the table that punctuated his final sentence finally drew a reaction from the nearby locals, an annoyed sentence that snapped Colress’ attention over to them. His eyes burned with fury at being interrupted, even as his mouth remained mostly closed, before he straightened out and refocused on the interviewer. “All we’ve ever done was replicate that design ever since, with no knowledge of what makes it work! It’s as if we’d discovered a small radio unit and began to mass produce copies of it, without even as much as a rudimentary theory of electricity—that’s how laughable our understanding is! Or rather, was, before my team finally cracked it~.”
The agent reached for another sip of water, only to grab an empty glass. What the man before him was saying was, at the absolute kindest, batshit insane—but fuck if he couldn’t hold his attention. On the other hand... there had to have been a reason the League had been so insistent with Colress’s arrest, a reason they whisked him away, research and all, to Kanto-controlled territory where they had de facto unlimited power. This couldn’t have been it, but there had to have been some truth to his madness.
Figuring out just what said truth encompassed was, again, above the agent’s paygrade. As he tried to gather words, his attention shifted towards the burly, out-of-place men sitting nearby, the intensity of their ceaseless glares towards them betraying their role. A solid point of evidence against anything this lunatic was saying. “If all that was actually true, Colress, why would your handlers let you say any of it out loud?”
“In all truth, agent? Beats me! I… do have a reasonable guess, I’d say~,” the scientist replied, before gesturing for the waiter to refill his glass.
“That guess being?”
Colress smirked. “They’re laughing at you~. Not these guys, no, and not you you specifically, agent—the League is laughing at Unova, allows me in its infinite magnanimity to talk about broad strokes of my findings, as long as it serves to impress just what kind of knowledge it has access to now, and doesn’t give you any help in replicating it! I’d hazard a guess that if I as much as mentioned a specific number involved in growing the crystals at the pokeball core, they would have me knocked out and you shot before I could finish the sentence~. I can show one thing though—they haven’t had me tackled to the ground for it yet, at least!”
The agent had a hard time focusing much on Colress, his attention just as locked on the researcher’s handlers as theirs was on him. His hand rested on his service ball, but he knew better than to even think about letting out the Escavalier unless the situation went hot. Just a few feet away from him, Colress reached into a chest pocket on his shirt, and pulled out a small stack of round magnets, all connected.
Without saying a word, he laid them out on the table in a hexagonal grid, while keeping the last one in his hand. “Now, agent—” he began, the jolt from his interlocutor almost startling him. “Oh, don’t worry about them, agent. They’re dumb brutes, yes, but even they—and I—know better than to try to cause a diplomatic incident. All of us have a role to play here, and yours involves sitting there, listening, and enjoying the vacation on your employer’s dime, agent~!”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The disrespect from both Colress specifically and the League as a whole was... hardly surprising, especially separately, but together they combined into something that had almost made the agent make the kind of mistake he’d only get to make once. Gritting his teeth, he turned to look at the grade school science class demonstration the mad scientist was putting together.
“See this arrangement of magnets, agent? They appear stable like this, but—” he nudged one of the magnets, making the nearby ones slide a bit in return, “—they aren’t. They’re metastable; a lower energy configuration exists, but a potential energy barrier separates the magnets from reaching it~! But, if we, say, were to disturb the system and provide the jolt it needs—” Colress demonstrated by dropping the final magnet in the middle of the arrangement at the table, causing all the other magnets to jump up and reconnect into a single stack once again “—we could force it to reach the lowest energy configuration. The... ‘energy’ providing the jolt now also included. Of course, this demonstration is hardly comparable in the specifics, especially when we account for the impacts of the different type energies used, but I believe it’s enough to convey my point.”
The agent didn’t acknowledge the demonstration, instead eagerly downing half the glass of water the moment his refill was placed on the table. It was so hot here; he wasn’t doing well; he had very little patience left for this. Though, even in that increasingly suboptimal mental state, a jab aimed the scientist’s way reared its head. “Truly, a fascinating classroom demonstration, Colress. Tell me, then, at which point does fiddling with magnets justify killing thousands upon thousands of mons?”
Colress rolled his eyes. “I reckon the exact number was merely in the high three digits, agent! Not even as much as what many breeding centers accomplish in a year~. That aside,” he smirked, “this is that exact point! My generous hosts would not be happy if I were to discuss too many specifics about the impacts of different type energies on the pokeball core in our tests, or divulge which of them commercially made pokeballs use! What I can say is that almost the entirety of casualties during our tests came from experimenting with them, and analyzing their impact on the captured mons~. Many of them, despite extensive testing, inevitably resulted in damage incompatible with life—some of the effects observed were... particularly gruesome,” he mumbled, his expression flashing with disgust for just a split-second.
Far more than the agent thought he was even capable of, that’s for sure.
“They also included the sedation present in mass-market pokeballs, confirming the hunch that led me to research this area in the first place~!”
Now that was something concrete, something the agent had heard of before—something he’d also dismissed just as many times. “Sedation? Wasn’t that debunked?”
“Oh, I’d certainly love to see what kind of PR paper the Unovan government had paid some postdoc schmuck to come up with to ‘‘‘debunk’’’ that. Then again, I suppose ‘sedation’ isn’t the very best term for it, though I struggle to come up with a better one off the top of my head.”
“‘Brainwashing’?” the agent suggested, almost jokingly.
Colress laughed knowingly. “Oh, that is an even worse term, agent! It truly inspires the mental image of a thrall obeying its master’s commands without question or concern for self-preservation~! No, that is a term best applied to soldiers and government employees such as yourself~. I suppose a more precise description would be an outpouring of love, almost always more than enough to break through the mons’ brittle psyches! Because, see—the mons’ actual feelings aren’t manipulated much; they can—and do—think and act for themselves, just that they consider their newly found master to be loving and looking after them~. And for many, perhaps even most, that is true, agent!”
The agent was almost too focused to overlook the insult, his gaze narrowing as he nodded for the researcher to continue.
“For many feral mons, capture by a trainer is a Faustian bargain they would eagerly take, even without the ball’s influence! Especially the young, feebler ones, left to fend for themselves away from a nest or a colony; choosing safety, in return for being forced through training more brutal than what they could possibly imagine~. And the ones that are secure in their position in the world enough to reject that idea, to roar in your face and incinerate you for even suggesting it... would likely croak a different tune if beaten to within an inch of their life, would they not~? What’s the term for it, again? ‘Winning their respect by proving your strength to them in battle’? Something to that effect, at least! I can only imagine what kind of willpower it would take to resist that~.”
The hand that had grasped his service pokeball minutes earlier now shook weakly as the attached mind chewed through the implications. It certainly sounded much more like a personal hunch than anything that psycho had claimed earlier, giving the agent just enough of a firm mental ground to dismiss the idea and not have to think about it. Especially with him contradicting himself just now. “How would that be any different from ‘brainwashing’, then? It’d still be forcibly getting their trust, just after weakening them first.”
Colress nodded slowly, briefly stroking the stubble on his chin. “Not incorrect, agent~! There is a detail I discovered in my research, though—namely, that this effect isn’t permanent~. In fact, it lasts much less than what I had initially theorized, the implications very entertaining to ponder on! Let’s just say that it doesn’t take that long in the grand scheme for the mons to remain loyal out of psychological dependence alone, especially if they were captured young~. And doubly so if their trainer is on, say, a ‘journey’ that takes them far, far away from their homeland! Of course, much of that is still conjecture, and,” he bitterly chuckled, “I doubt I’ll ever get the funding, the resources, or staff to scientifically test it myself, ha~!”
The joke landed, but the agent couldn’t think of many things that were less amusing to ponder on than the process that the nutjob before him would use to verify said conjecture. In light of all that, of the distressing implications and horrid, downright unhinged assertions, the agent had only one question remaining, one pertaining to Colress’s idea of just who the beings that had actually invented the pokeball were.
And he wasn’t in the mood to mince words anymore. “How can you square mons somehow being intelligent enough to invent a pokeball with everything your—your ‘experiments’ have done to them, with everything you’ve said!?”
Out of all the questions he’d asked, this one made his interviewee think the longest. Not out of any sense of internal conflict, though, nothing as humane as that. “I believe it would be more accurate to say that a mon culture had invented the pokeball~. For better—certainly for us—or worse, they’re gone now, and all that’s left are their feral descendants!”
To the agent’s dismay, Colress wasn’t done yet, either. “That is a reason, but it’s hardly the reason, however~.” How true that was, neither of them were certain of. “See, a... part of the construction process involves the exposure to a... type energy field,” the researcher continued, glancing at his handlers over his shoulder. “Said field has certain... requirements that essentially preclude it being generated in any way we’d classify as humane~. And from the archaeological records, from all the uncountable pieces imperial Kanto had diligently gathered to smelt for scrap, we know the pokeball’s original inventors had made tons of them~. Millions, if not more! What I’m trying to get at is—they certainly weren’t bothered by the horrid conditions involved in their manufacture~. Why would we?”
Right as he had finished his sentence, the two intimidating men finally got up from their seats and approached their table. They didn’t have to say a word—the gesture was straightforward enough.
“Well, agent, it appears our interview has come to a forced end~. I immensely enjoyed it—just like I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay in what the mainland calls ‘Kanto’s Heaven’!”
“I doubt we’ll see each other again~.”
----------------------------------------
“Geodude, Rollout.”
The command carried through the stadium despite the racket of battle, reaching the rock beast’s stone ears. They obeyed immediately, shrugging off the Tackle that impacted their hide soon after. They flung themselves at the taken-aback Nidoran, launching them halfway towards their trainer. The Poison-type’s little body shuddered as they staggered back to their feet, with their attacker in short pursuit.
“Nidoran, d-dodge!”
The startled, childish shout from the opposite side of the battlefield got lost in the noise—not that it would’ve accomplished much even if it had reached its destination. The mon kept trying their hardest despite that, only narrowly evading being hit by the Geodude’s ever-potent attack again and again, desperately trying to mount even the semblance of a response.
They didn’t get very far.
Just a few seconds later, their umpteenth dodge was but a fraction of a second too late, leaving the Rock-type crashing into their flank at full force. Their squeal was abruptly cut off as they struck the rocky dirt of the gym’s battlefield, only barely twitching anymore.
Before they could be attacked again, a loud call carried through the hall from the judge’s seat. “HALT! Nidoran is unable to battle!”
The mons themselves knew very little Kantonian as a whole, but they knew the command to stop, the single most important word in any human language for them to learn. The Geodude obeyed without question, growling triumphantly as they scuttled back to the marked spot on their side of the field. A few dozen feet away from them, the human teenager held in tears at seeing the blow his friend took, before returning them to their ball. Just one mon left for him, and two for their opponent, the fact underlined by the scoreboard under the ceiling of an almost-empty stadium. He would have a type advantage here; maybe that would be enough to win!
The boy reached to his belt, unlocking the ball attached to it before almost dropping it with his shaking hands. He turned towards his opponent and pressed the button on the sticker-covered plastic shell. “Go, Squirtle!”
On the opposite side of the battlefield, his opponent sighed, the gesture modest enough to not be visible from a distance. Thankfully, with the stadium cameras turned off because of the piddling attendance, he could get away with only occasional commands while spending most of the battling time lost in thought. And that he had in abundance.
Comes with the territory of being a Gym Leader.
“Ready,” Brock confirmed once his opponent’s Squirtle got into position. And, once the boy he’s facing also said that magic word, the battle between the two mons resumed, stilted as they always are.
There were very practical reasons for his intervention in his Gym Leader battles to be minimal. It would be very easy to be as hands-on with these battles as he was in the League Circuit ones, to take on fights against what are almost always children with the same seriousness as those against his fellow Gym Leaders and professionals. It’d also go against his intended position on the trainers’ intended progression, as someone who was beatable with enough practice and training by essentially anyone. The monetary costs involved in maintaining a budding trainer’s lifestyle already served as the sufficient barrier to entry—he needed to be encouraging.
Besides, the League had specific quotas they wanted to hit, and trying to meddle with that would be... unwise at best. Even if at worst they’d just fire him from this specific position and get someone else to replace him, that’s still a sizable Gym Leader paycheck he would not be getting anymore. Something so, so many people around him, his family especially, absolutely depended on.
He would be lying if he said that those were the actual reasons behind his near-silence, though. More than wanting to provide the correct League HQ-mandated difficulty for his opponents, more than wanting to avoid overwhelming his own young mons in the short time before they grew too strong for his gym and were handed off to trainers with him getting younger, weaker replacements, he just wanted to pay very close attention to his opponents. Not the mons’ skill, not the strategic brilliance with which they were ordered around, but how they—mons and trainers alike—were handling the battle, how enthusiastic they were about it all.
He preferred these battles over his professional ones for a reason. And that reason was that almost everyone present still wanted to be here. His human opponents, stoked about their first Gym Leader battle; their mons, excited at feeling their growing strength; his mons, raised from hatching to love battling. There were very few of the looks and expressions he saw constantly in the kinds of battles that people watched, almost none of that pervasive exhaustion in humans and mons alike, none of that crippling fear of results. This wasn’t a career yet; this was still an adventure in all its glory.
Whenever he saw an opponent that already didn’t want to be here, human or mon alike, he made sure to crank up the heat a bit. Not enough for anyone to get suspicious, but hopefully enough to at least make his opponent reconsider, to pressure them into getting out while they still could. After all, no shame in that. Very few had the means to even set out on a journey like that, but even most of that group flaked out before the first two badges. This was the time to quit. As for the others, the excited trainers and mons, he could only hope that their excitement would last.
“Geodude, Defense Curl.”
But, deep down, he knew it wouldn’t. His didn’t.
Oh, how proud everyone was, both back home and even in the League itself. What a story, of the eldest son of a family crippled by poverty and alcoholism breaking out of that cycle and making it in the world, sending his earnings back home. A motivational tale come to life, an underdog that completed the Gym Circuit before eventually taking up the mantle of the first Gym Leader, helming the Gym nearest to his home and guiding a new generation of young trainers to come. The framing made him uneasy at the time. In hindsight, it was nauseating. For every one of him that made it out of that place, there were several who didn’t, lives lost to alcoholism or overdose or ruined by non-violent offenses.
He was the exception to the rule nobody wanted to acknowledge, because that would mean having to do something about it. And even in that exception, mass-marketable as it was, he as a person and his team inevitably fell to the same changes he’d seen elsewhere, the ones he’d dreaded since he first noticed them. That spark, that hunger for battle and growth and strength, was there in his entire professional team at the start. In the wild Onix he’d nursed back to health before saving up for a pokeball for him, in the runt of a Zubat flock that wanted to make a name for herself, in the Pineco that was oh-so-eager to take on a Steelix almost a hundred times her size.
And then, at some point, he realized it wasn’t anymore. Not anywhere near as vivid, at least—Steelix still trained diligently, but only when he was around. He knew exactly how far away he had to be for the Steel-type serpent to not bother anymore, and he couldn’t judge him for it in the slightest. Crobat only trained when peer pressured to, and more often than not actively avoided him these days. Forretress only ever wanted to repeat defensive moves, to push her shell to be just that bit harder. To make the hits hurt just that bit less.
He regretted not giving them names. None of the famous trainers he’d heard of had given their mons names, and he assumed that was for a reason. It was only many, many years later, when he was interacting with them not as a star-struck boy but as a co-worker adult, that he learned that they did use names. But only in private, at the League’s insistence.
Wouldn’t want anyone thinking of mons as beings that deserve names.
It was uneasy to acknowledge how differently most people thought of mons, even those he thought better than that. They certainly weren’t human, no, but they weren’t driven by feral instincts and raw desire to battle nearly as much as the culture thought, or as the League presented them. For every mon that had joined his team, there were a dozen dozens that wanted nothing to do with him, that clearly either fought in self defense, or ran away the instant they saw the balls attached to his belt. One time, he explained that to himself with cowardice.
Now, after seeing it all, it just felt like common sense. Of course they weren’t all battle hungry, of course they could think and reason, of course they had personalities, of course they were—well. He wasn’t sure if ‘people’ was the right word for it. It made him even more uncomfortable than usual to think about. At the very least, they weren’t beasts. Even if that’s how the League trained its trainers to treat them as.
Even if that was still how he had to treat them in battle.
“Geodude, Tackle.”
Sometimes, he wanted to swallow his pride and contact someone he could trust and who owned a Psychic-type, to find out just what exactly his team thought of him. The thought was too terrifying to go through with, each and every time. The realization of just how much of a hypocrite he was burned painfully, no matter how many times he’d had it. Even if he knew better, even if a decent chunk of his professional opponents knew better, even if a non-insignificant portion of the population knew better... he remained quiet about it.
Talking to trusted friends had some impact on them, but it tended to be transient. Those that themselves owned mons in a non-trainer capacity fared better, but still internalized what he’d told them as only applying to the ‘domesticated’ mons, those who had been stuck in a pokeball immediately upon hatching. An action that was supposed to remove any and all of their feral brutality, to make them safe to be around. He doubted it. He doubted it all. After all, the Geodude that was evading Water Gun after Water Gun on the dirt before him had also been pokeballed at hatching—and then trained with just as much intensity as a wild caught mon.
What worried him the most was when his words elicited unease. Sometimes, it was aimed at him—the epithets for those getting... ‘too close’ with their pokemon were many. He doubted anyone actually thought of him like that, if just for the physical difficulty of doing any of that with any of his mons, but the attitude was there, one of moderate, but persistent disgust at the whole idea. That wasn’t the worst part, though.
The worst part was when people he talked to did give the idea a fair shake and only bounced off after trying to think it through. Those reacted more strongly, coming up with the wildest of excuses, often leaving soon after. It was the kind of thought that changed a person, and even though some let themselves be changed, and many others kept the idea while compartmentalizing it into only applying to domesticated mons, many others didn’t.
Because, to Brock’s endless anguish at rediscovering that fact over and over again, they didn’t want it to be true. The implications were too severe; it went against too much of what they’d been raised in; it contradicted the very foundational tale of not just Kanto in specific, but of humanity broadly.
That of a race destined to hold dominion over others; to bring knowledge and wisdom to a feral world.
They were sacred in that regard, contrasting the profaneness of wild mons, posing an unending threat to them all because of their raw might. If that distinction wasn’t true, if mons were even close to as intelligent as humans were—then that meant they weren’t special. Weren’t divinely ordained, be it literally as interpreted by some religions, or figuratively. Weren’t destined to create their heaven, but had only gotten there because of some lucky inventions. It was a terrifying idea to consider.
Sometimes, especially after a couple of stiffer drinks, he wanted to scream. He wanted to ride into central Pewter on Steelix and use that mighty voice of his to shout the truth from streets and rooftops, to have that confirmation that he wasn’t the one going crazy. It wouldn’t accomplish a thing. At best, he’d be labeled as having gone insane—likely with the blame being shifted on one of his mons—before being forced to step down. At worst, he’d be imprisoned outright for whatever incidental damage his stunt would cause, with sentencing being as stiff as legally possible to drive a point.
In both cases, or if he’d just stopped being a trainer altogether in protest, would cause almost his entire team to be confiscated from him. He’d be allowed to keep one of them, and the rest would be taken over to be ‘watched over’ by the League. Couldn’t have ‘civilians’ getting access to ‘dangerous’ mons, after all. And that was besides losing the only source of income he would likely ever have—could only do so much with a high school diploma he had to call in some favors to even get in the first place.
If he’d tried organizing, he’d be charged with sedition. If he’d defied the League’s requirement and kept his mons, with threatening public safety. He had a part to play in the horror that had been strangling him for over a decade now, and he was chained to his post on the stage.
Brock clenched his fist, finally re-focusing on the events taking place before him.
“Geodude, Rock Polish!” he raised his voice, the change noticed by the few onlookers.
The Rock-type was terrified at the idea, but went through with it as ordered. His trainer had estimated correctly; it gave him just enough of a boost to outrun the Water-type’s Aqua Tail.
“Geodude, Bulldoze!”
The mon’s fists glowed as they struck the dirt before him, sending modest quakes that the dampeners deep below the battlefield prevented from escaping its boundaries. The Squirtle wasn’t so lucky, getting tossed into the air and stumbling as they landed on the ground again.
“Squirtle, W-Water Gun!”
“Geodude, Rock Throw!”
Despite the turtle’s best efforts, the blue energy gathering in their mouth could only fizzle out as the fist-sized rock struck the side of their head faster than they could react, leaving them tumbling. And then another, and a third still, the Gym Leader’s mon continuing with their onslaught—
“HALT!”
The judge’s call brought the fight to a standstill again as everyone waited for the dust to settle. As he’d expected, the Squirtle was out cold already, and at least one of those Rock Throws could be classified as overkill. Much, much sloppier than he’d expected from a trainer of Brock’s caliber, but nowhere near enough for a write up. “Squirtle is unable to battle! Gym Leader Brock wins the match!”
The Geodude cheered excitedly for the couple of seconds before they were enveloped by a red glow and returned to their pokeball. On the other side of the battlefield, the defeated boy ran up to his starter, double checking if he was okay before carefully lifting him up in his arms and holding him tight.
Brock regretted this. But he knew, deep inside, that he would regret letting the boy and his mons proceed, letting their bond be inevitably defiled, even more. His expression remained his usual serious as he approached the boy, drawing a small, fearful gasp out of him.
“Don’t worry, your Squirtle will be alright. Battling just isn’t for everyone.”
If he’d repeated this stuff too much, he was certain to get in trouble, but... but he had to. Just this once, to express his defiance however he could, in however petty a way possible. What had it accomplished? Nothing. As always.
At least this kid was the last contender for today. He needed a drink, and he needed it badly.
Just like he would tomorrow, and the day after.