He was in a room, situated before a panel of three persons. His understanding of what it means to defer meant that here in his capacity as potential student and neophyte pokémon trainer he was to assume the state of total and utter silence until prompted otherwise.

It was less a room as defined by an enclosure formed by walls, flooring, and ceiling and more a pocket of space. In the simplest of terms he was an occupant. In the barest of terms this was technically a room, uncontained of anything beside itself; structurally obsolete: uniform in the way of subverting adhesion. Something about the room seemed liminal and ephemeral.

He was a boy before the tunneled vision of his future. What he said would decide everything. Make it or break it. He had to convince them he was lightning in a bottle. That he was raw potential sitting in the palm of a hand, being proffered.

There was a kind of idle vacancy that swayed his errant body’s sense of being. Something in the atmosphere suggested this displacing swell of catatonia, and it tuned through his pores and began what seemed like a lifetime’s work of ingesting him — the phagocytic process of complete digestive annihilation. Tuning through and untuning. His blood was a sieving vessel through which an astringent body catalyzed. There was nothing in the room save four chairs and a table. Three judging sets of eyes before something not quite post-adolescent. His jaw was clenched and his upper molars delved into the tertiary level of his lowers. He can’t help but wonder what they see. There’s this feeling of being studied that makes the whole thing feel scientific. Like he’s a puzzle arranged and put on display to be solved and once they figure it out the novelty’d wear off. He has to be unsolvable. They don’t know him and nobody does. He’s complex and more than tenuously above simplicity. To be perceived was to exist inside of someone as imaged ephemera, reeled into form. There were three persons in front of him obtained of the retinal perception of his physical self, there in front of them. Three ocular sets of mirrors, beheld of his image. They were less people than they were himself beheld into the splinter of multiplicity.

The middle one was poring through a manila file containing what he presumed to be his reports. He was an ape of a man with a double chin. The cartilage near his nose’s bridge bulged with genetic Alolan vigor and grew inward on the way down that somehow gave his nose this quality of looking inverted. Caellum knew him to be the Director of Academia. Down and up. Down and up. From his manila folder back to him. He thought of the word sterile. There were wooden demarcations shafting through the walls that bloomed outward, so as to expand within a contained, backgrounded space. Each segmented breadth demarcating the columned outgrowths were striated by buttresses whose carvings were florally ornamented in geometric patterns; and there was a cerate unctuousness to the rosewood sheen that made it look laminate. Paldean rosewood. The latticed contortions foaming inward gave him the impression of being in something stretched, a kind of place where the dimensions of distance are warped so as to make it, the room, seem infinitely expanding; and there were petaled cornices ending the columns that bloomed a lateral and then upward continuation so as to resemble something in the likeness of a rotunda; and there was a solemn austerity to the emptiness that made it feel church-like. He kept thinking of the word sterile. Something about the word left a dry kind of distaste in his mouth that lingered. Either the Paldean rosewood was cut yesterday or someone was burning sage because there was a loose acridity of earthly and robust tones and but somehow the smell of sage couldn’t supersede this distinct non-odor of disinfectant lack that permeated the entirety of the room. Like the olfactory equivalent of oil sitting on water. He couldn’t pin down the strange overlap of olfactory sensation into words besides the fact that it bothered him. His nose wrinkled constantly and his eyes felt distant and photographic. Something about the air bothered his tear ducts. He couldn’t remember ever having bad reactions to sage before.

“Well, let’s get right into it. Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself.” The Director of Academia’s voice was baritone and ethnically accented. Alolan now was a definite: made doubly apparent by the overfamiliarity of his vernacular. He was looking at Caellum like something he couldn’t pin down.

What does it mean to make yourself known. To make yourself understood. To stand naked before another human being. Again the word sterile. There seemed to be nothing in the way of methodized sanitization and no clinical shade of white-gray or blue-jawed cloak-men that would implicate the contained environment of being in a lab and yet it all felt scientific. The latticed corrugations conforming into the architectural design of the room felt tracheated. Like there was something within them, pumping. Flowing. Looking up you’d think the ceiling never ended, like it was a moving body that turned in on itself, bending outward to summon width from pockets of space that’d already physicated the redundancy of the XY grid. Architectural folding. The illusion of room as occupied space. Himself beneath its winding mass, being studied. He’s never been more aware of himself seated on this chair. A chair that doesn’t feel like it belongs. Like there should be nothing in this room but the emptiness that serves the illusion of unending space. He felt like ink dotted on a blank canvas. Black on porcelain white. Something that stands out. His hands gripping the underside of the chair. His clothing carpeting his skin. His own gel’d hair curling against his forehead. His coccyx pressed against the chair. His inflamed shoulder muscle not so much a throbbing as it was a dull ache. Lungs contracting and expanding. He was an organism that exhaled carbon dioxide and inhaled oxygen. He felt the skeleton of his thorax ribbing out its caged impress from beneath his skin, the hairless valley of his fallowed, adolescent skin, nighted forever to the world by clothing fitted to make him somebody decent. Someone presentable. Humans are, after all, something more than animal. And so but somehow introductions always manage to feel degrading. To impart a sincerity that doesn’t quite feel right for the impersonal nature of the moment.

“Your name is Caellum Jennings. Age seventeen. This is what is known to us. We’re putting a character to the name, here.” The woman on the left had a nameplate in front of her that read Maya M. / Recruiting. “You’re a child. Maybe this is the first time you’ve had to assume agency. The act of asserting yourself. Thrusting yourself into the fore of the world. The world is a big place. You will doubtless furrow your brow at my usage. But you will come to understand that big is the most adequate word to describe it. Once you grow and develop. Once you begin to live. It’s not enormous. It’s not giant. It’s not massive, it’s not huge, it’s not gigantic. What it is is old. It’s vast in a way that humbles you. You will use big because that’s all it requires of you. You don't have the authenticity to call it anything else because you aren’t ready yet. That’s right: authenticity. You haven’t seen the world to call it anything other than big. Arrogance is assuming you’ve seen anything. Arrogance is assuming that you're in any way at all attained of this prerogative to try and describe the world — as if it had asked it of you. Maybe you’ve thought yourself capable of explaining your being here, alive and living. Vanity is wetting your lips to try. But you’re here because you are going to learn. Power is respecting what has come before you. History. I bet you think you know your history. I’ve read your essays. We’ve read your reports. Very academic. But to enter this academy is to experience. We receive applications from the best students coming from every region. Some with pokémon you’ve probably never seen before. Tactics you’ve never seen before. But it’s a community — an environment. What we’ve cultivated here is an environment. An environment for you to assimilate in a regimen fully geared to help you ascend the boundaries of which you are no doubt familiar. To be familiar with boundaries is to live in complacency. Comfort. You’ve heard of the term ‘comfort zone’ — we’re going to pry you out of it. The most important thing I want you to understand is that you’re going to work with people. This is an environment. It’s not just you and your pokémon here. When Kane says “why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself,” he means to tell us what you have to offer. We know who your mother is and you aren’t her. We’re not going to make it look like we just take in anybody. We’re not going to make it look like you’re an item we’re letting in to trophy around our halls. To parade you around in media campaigns. You aren’t an item, are you?”

“No ma’am,”

He could think of nothing clever or interesting to say to her. His ears were loud with his own heartbeat. Somehow the words always get caught somewhere before they could even reach the throat. They never die anywhere near the tongue: always smothered in an embryonic stage before the threshold of development. Blight of the mind. That’s what it was. Blight of the mind. Implicative processing. The general lull of verbal synthesization. He knows what he wants to say but doesn’t know how it’ll come out. How to make it come out.

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“It’s an important imperative, you understand, to show us that you’re capable. These papers only tell us. They paint a picture. What we want to see is a film. We want actualization. Of course, these interviews don’t have you conduct battle exercises. We’re not going to make you do that right now. However much our academy emphasizes battle, that is very much not the point here. You’re here to give us an idea of who you are. What you are setting out to accomplish. How we can help you. We are here to groom students into something more than what they could accomplish normally. I’ve been to one of your matches. Your name draws a big crowd — you are, of course, aware of this. But this is not the actualization process I refer to.” The most discernible feature about the woman was her bangs. A cut so uniform it looked like an incisor, one long incisor opened above a face countenanced in the monotone manner of something rehearsed. “You’re good. You have a feel for battle. That’s important. But that’s all you are. We get kids like you all the time. Born with I don’t even have to say it. Sheltered kids born into rainbows and sunshine. Do you know what I did when I read your starter on your report? Honest to God you should have seen me reading your file, just there in my office perusing — that’s right perusing — through the coming year’s batch, the one part of my job I could delegate to management that I personally choose to do myself because I care about equal opportunity: I care about due process, because if I left it up to management they’d never let some nobody’s kid see the light of day, which don’t even get me started on because were it not for me the only thing they’d be getting would be the ground’s eye view of a bureaucratic landslide — as in fat bastard chance in hell they’d get in; but do you know what I did when I read your starter? Why don’t you take a guess. No? Nothing? God help me.

“You’ve never been pushed. That’s the issue. You’ve never summoned the phantom inside you. That’s what we call the fight buried deep within human ability. The manifestation of potential. The person you become when adversity stares down the length of your horizon. What we value is potential. Potential between your pokémon. The ability to grow alongside your pokémon. It’s a two way effort. To develop a bond. To forge one. True bonds between trainer and pokémon are forged through fire and flame. Trials and tribulations. Gained land is not given, it is conquered. Taken with force by the calloused hand of — ”

“Lay off the kid will you. For God sakes. Look at him. He looks overworked. I think you shorted a circuit. You don’t have to give every wall-eyed kid that stumbles in here The Speech. Spare us if not the kid. How many times do we have to hear it just, — please. Have you thought about that? We don't know what he's experienced and it's not our place to comment on it anyhow. Our duty is to take them as they are: as they are given to us. And why don’t you say something for a change. Brecht. I’m talking to you when I say this. Are we going to get a word out of this kid is what I’m asking. Wow look at those notes. Holy cow. Have you been taking those the whole time? Somehow I haven’t even noticed. You’ve hardly said a thing. You’ve just been there, slinking in my peripheral vision. I’m going to have to take a look at those later if you don’t mind. But we’ve gone through how many of these and you’re just going to . . .”

The ring you hear when you palpitate. The funny thing about dreams is that they strike you at random, even during hours of wake when you’re somewhere in the basest physical sense and the auditory congestion of voices becomes deafened behind the tolling bell of a memory once lived. His mom brought him to one of the three Great Lakes of Sinnoh, where she's from originally, and he was running through the grass that decorated the perimeter of the lake. His mom was somewhere around the entrance sitting on a picnic blanket telephoning a sister or a close friend — he doesn't remember who exactly, only that he left her because she was distracted by the call and he was bored of staring at the water like she liked to do. She hadn't summoned any of her pokémon yet so he took the chance to finally have an adventure unsupervised. He was rounding the lake's periphery chasing a Bug-type pokémon, either a Beautifly or a Butterfree, and he can remember scattering a flock of Starlies feeding on a berry bush, and the whole time he was smiling and laughing really hard because it was the most fun he's ever had, being alone and away from his mom — the feeling of freedom was intoxicating: the refreshing breeze of lakeside winds, the sun's warmth upon his skin, the feel of soft grass against his bare feet, the harmonic pull of all the pokémon's whimsies, joyous and beckoning, like the outstretched, proffered hand of a long-time friend. He felt in harmony with everything around him, everything in the air and trees and flora and land surrounding him felt vibrant, colorful; the laughter coming from his lungs felt resounding and releasing of something rich and profound; the pokémon, even the Starlies that he'd bothered almost seemed drawn to him, to trail his running along the edge of the lake, compelled to be a part of this almost divine feeling of exaltation. He kept running, himself too, drawn to something unknowable, something indescribable. Before he knew it he was on the back of something hard-shelled, floating across the surface of the lake, and a few Starlies and the Bug-type butterfly pokémon were hovered around him while they traversed the lake's surface and he remembers being overcome with such marvel and splendor right up until somehow the world flipped on its back and he was head-first in the water, eyes face to face with something he couldn't understand.

“. . . To maintain a moderate level of professionalism at the very least, I mean what are we doing here? — you don’t have to dump your purse on every kid that comes in here with a better upbringing than you. Because I’m telling you right now he won’t be the last.” The Director of Academia’s elbows were on the table and his head was resting on his left hand. He looked to Caellum like the Rillaboom in a business suit with glasses that’s pictured on the back of his Razzy Rillo’s cereal box. His arms were huge and he had brown-orange tanned skin that looked neonatally depilated. He didn’t know what to think except that he found him not unlikable. Personal in a way that didn’t feel dishonest.

“I’m preparing them for the real world you — never much mind. Forget it. Let’s not get sidetracked. We’re behind schedule, here. I realize we haven’t actually asked you anything, but these are less screening interviews and more us cultivating your profile. Your exam scores are the reason why you’re here: so you’re already in. Maybe you didn't know that. Every student comes in here and we make it a point to interview each new student. We take great pride in making this academy something real and efforted in the interests of student development. Our goal is to correlate ambition with curriculum. We’re here to create an environment for students to succeed. Understand that I don’t resent you. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: I’m getting you ready for what’s to come. This won’t be a walk in the park. I don’t know what you’ve been through and I don’t presume to know, just understand that there are students here who’ve played at a high level before coming here, and that you’re one of many — big fish, small pond, et cetera. I don’t want to emphasize it to the point of ad-nauseum but humble yourself before someone else does. Remember that there’s always someone out there that’s better than you.”

Her face was slightly asymmetrical which especially bothered him, and which doesn’t usually bother him or even prod at his mind normally because everyone's face was someway or another asymmetrical but the incisor-like bangs made such a perfect line that it formed a like, comparative grid which the right side of her face skewed acutely against, and her nose looked like it was slightly bent to culminate in form the heighted side of a scalene; and but so somehow she was still able to appear attractive in a way which he was trying to make sense of but the longer he stared at her the more his eyes started to get worn by a like, gradation bordering on familiar, and her face started to look less abstract and more pretty-looking and not at all asymmetrical — and then he’d blink and she was back to wearing at his vision like something mosaic.

“My name is Caellum Jennings and I am seventeen years old. That’s already on there. I am possessed of a starter that I probably don’t deserve. I am understanding your image of me as someone that’s had it made since before he could even say the word pokémon. I am interested in many things and there’s a lot I want to learn. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and seeing new pokémon — I mean this sincerely. What else about me: I like to document everything I see — I keep a journal. And I like to read. I read a lot, more than you know. I study film, pokémon film. I’ve been watching my mother’s old battles since as long as I could remember. Every single one that’s been recorded and archived. I consume battle film like there’s no tomorrow, like you wouldn’t believe. I have the entirety of Sinnoh’s, Kanto’s, Hoenn’s and Paldea’s nationals dating back to 1989 memorized. I haven’t worked my way through Unova yet, not even mentioning Galar, Ransei, Orre, Fiore, Johto, Alola, — and but I’ve weirdly got Decalore down pat which has got the strangest history of regionals because it’s basically a monotype parade-fest with strategies utilizing tide in a way you’ve never seen; and so I know it might be weird I don’t have Unova memorized yet but it’s only because I thought I’d save it to like, give me a kind of novelty when I’d come here; I mean I’m familiar with a lot pokémon from this region but — I don’t know. I don’t know how else to explain it. Is it arrogant to say I wanted the challenge? I have a deep interest in pokémon theory and in anthropokémic theory especially: as in the human identity in relation to pokémon as a species. I’m a complex person whose ears are the furthest thing from wet — they’re totally dry and arid and flaky and chapped. Bad image, sorry. What I am meaning to say is that I know at least a few somethings about the world.

“I am not screaming into a loud room, here. I am not just looking eyes and a pair of legs. I have the normal designated amount of fingers and toes. I'm sorry if I'm sounding like I'm having a deer-in-the-headlights moment, you'll have to allow me this. I can't really find the words to make myself adequately understood right now, at this juncture. I am an interesting person and I have a lot to offer. Thank you.”