City of Billowing Sails

Some details from my journey through Kalos are scattered all across this very blog. I made so, so many friends. And I fell in love, though that’s... something that, sadly, just a sore spot on my heart that probably won’t ever fully go away. I still wonder how he’s doing, sometimes. I still have the Espeon that grew from the Eevee he gave me, and he is still an incredibly important Pokémon to me.

But I digress.

Choosing Froakie and getting started on my journey through Kalos was fun and easy. The experience was new and there was a new Pokémon type that had been recently discovered. I was also able to make friends with another Charmander, a decade and a half after having chosen my very first Pokémon.

Not many people still know me, I think, but anyone who does will know that on my journey through Kalos, I also met my Talonflame. And there’s not much more to be said about that.

I experimented with new forms of training, new types of evolution, and I trained many, many Pokémon. I went through the league, became temporary Kalos League Champion, and continued my work on my Dex. Then my life took a sudden painful and unexpected turn, and quite soon I was traveling again.

It was this that led me to experience the Hoenn region for the first time, briefly leaving behind my Greninja and my Talonflame and my new Charizard so that I could finally explore a region that was by no means new.

I was told that it was different, now, than it was ten years or so ago, but of course it was! I saw how Unova had changed over the course of two or three years. But I never got to see Hoenn when I was younger. I would certainly get my chance now.

For what it was worth, I did enjoy my time in the Hoenn region. I befriended a Treecko rather early, raised a tiny Ralts into something I had only ever been able to study from a relative distance, and was able to complete the Pokémon League Challenge within the region. I also was finally, finally, able to complete my Pokédex.

At least, for the time being.

My time in Hoenn was admittedly short. I was able to do quite a lot in a very short amount of time, and it left me hungry for more. For a little while, I returned to Kalos, and began a new challenge using Pokémon I did not choose for myself. With a team of random Pokémon, none of which I had ever used in battle before, I completed the Kalos League Championships again. I felt it was time for a rest.

Of course, that didn’t last long. My curiosity was still insatiable. I still wanted to learn more and more about Pokémon that were yet to be discovered.

I definitely feel like it was. It revitalized me. It made me hungry again, but a kind of hunger that was satisfied by every little thing around me. I had never felt such kinship with every single Pokémon around me. I had never made human friends this close. I had never sympathized so much with the plight of someone whose ideals clashed with mine so hard.

I’d never bonded so closely with a legendary Pokémon.

I spent years in Unova. I went through the entire journey two or three times. I spent time painstakingly learning about each and every Pokémon there, and then more and more of them as Pokémon not indigenous to the region began to flock in. I learned new things about Pokémon from the Kanto and Johto regions I knew so well. I also learned about Pokémon from the Hoenn and Sinnoh regions, which I had never been to. Absol and Kecleon and all of those Pokémon from my strange dreams? Yeah. They were real Pokémon. I still don’t have any concrete answer for what happened to me back then, but it was real enough in my head.

Unova’s regional Pokédex helped me get my foot in the door, and never having forgotten what I learned about as a child helped me along. I was no longer intimidated by the vast world around me. I had grown, both as a person and as a trainer. I was not afraid of the world, and I was not intimidated by the fact that the Pokémon world had, to me, more than tripled in size.

People still concerned me, of course. As a child, I had always been better with Pokémon than with other people. This was, unfortunately, still true, and now it was even true within the journey itself. I met plenty of nice people, of course. The average trainer didn’t bother me, but there were certainly more competitive trainers than there had been when I was a child. We were all grown up, now, with a new generation of Pokémon trainers starting their journeys right behind us.

More serious trainers were, as I understood it, selecting Pokémon with particular traits or personalities, and breeding them. Endlessly. They would hatch egg after egg until a single Pokémon from an infinite clutch stood out to them as having “perfect potential.” The others were released, or put away. That didn’t sit well with me.

Stats matter, I suppose. People selectively breed Pokémon until they find one that’s the very best. The best stats. The best values. The best moves.

But me? No, I don’t care for that sort of thing. I’m still in it for the Pokémon themselves. The Dex. The journey.

I’ll continue to use the Pokémon that I befriend along the way. Maybe, in the eyes of the true masters, I’m making stupid decisions. How can Leavanny, for instance, be a good Pokémon, with her extreme weakness to fire?

Well, she worked for me. And she was incredibly sweet, as well.

So the world has definitely changed. As a person, I’ve changed, too. But I’ll still raise the Pokémon I like, and travel the Pokémon world at my own pace. I spent a long time traveling Unova.

I don’t have a good relationship with my father.

That’s all I’m going to say on the matter. Seriously.

But let it suffice to say, from my mid-teens to the time of me reaching drinking age, my Pokémon journey had come to what seemed like a permanent close. There was traveling, sure. I wandered a lot, and lived where I could, eating whenever I could and sleeping wherever I could. I occasionally heard whispers about dragons, of villains aiming to flood the world or build one anew. But me? No, I wasn’t any kind of hero. I’m still not.

During that time, I learned a lot about myself. I changed a lot about myself. I also changed the way I saw other people, learning to recognize when a human being had secretly been Poison type all along. Or at least starting to.

Somehow, I ran into a stranger, another wanderer like myself. He wasn’t an entirely pleasant person, but he was passionate about Pokémon in a way I didn’t commonly see anymore. I think he saw a similar passion in me, a passion I had never lost, but had tucked deep inside myself. After a time, I admitted something I had been denying for some time.

I missed the journey. I missed the Pokémon. I missed the challenge of seeing new things and meeting new people and traveling through new towns and routes. But, I told him, the world had moved on without me. There was too much new, and I was no longer as new as I had once been.

That stranger was not a good person, but he gave me one piece of good advice. And it seemed so, so simple.

He told me that the Hoenn and Sinnoh regions I had heard of were not too far off from Kanto or Johto, no. But Unova? Unova was secluded from them. The Pokémon from the Unova region were the only Pokémon there. If I went there, I wouldn’t recognize any Pokémon at all. It would be a fresh start.

I was born in Unova. But I had never been back after having been raised in Kanto.

Like a flower, starved of water.

Like rough sand, yet to be softened by the ocean.

Like a bird, breaking free from the shell of its egg.

Please, don’t make a joke or a pun. I can guarantee you, I’ve heard it before. You’re not as clever as you think. And I may, actually, take offense, as it is, in fact, my name that you happen to be making fun of.

I was born in the Unova region, but was raised, and thus, began, my Pokémon journey in the Kanto region. Like so many others, my first Pokémon was a Charmander. I’ll be honest. I was a young child when I started my journey as a trainer, and I don’t even remember the first team that I used when I battled my way through wild Pokémon, trainers, villains, and masters alike. But I remember that Charmander, and raising it with love and gentle care even after it had evolved into something more than capable of fending for itself.

From the very start of my journey as a Pokémon trainer, I was fascinated with the Pokémon themselves. Sure, the training was fun. As I left my friends behind in Kanto and advanced to the Johto region, it wasn’t the need to be the very best, like no one ever was, that drove me forward. It was the promise of new Pokémon to be discovered. Even as a child, that was what drove me. I’ll admit, I did get stalled at quite a few Game Corners. Distracted by the gambling and the games.

But the Pokédex, the creatures around me, drove me to complete my goals. If I needed to defeat a few trainers to advance into the cave that would allow me to discover new species, then I could do that. If I needed to collect some badges in order to teach my friends to fly and surf to new places, that was simple enough. If I needed to defeat the Elite Four in each area and become, even for a short time, the region’s new champion?

I could do that.

In the Johto region, Cyndaquil accompanied me through each new town and route, and even back to Kanto once more after I defeated my second league. I spent a lot of my childhood going back and forth, even leaving Typhlosion and Ampharos and the rest of my Johto team behind for a time in order to explore Kanto more thoroughly with a Pikachu, rather than a Charmander, as my partner.

These journeys were repetitive, but fun for me. Every time I used a Pokémon in battle that I had never used before, I learned more about it, and it became clearer and clearer to me that my interest wasn’t in battles, or breeding, or being the best. It was, indeed, in Catching ‘Em All.

This... was my childhood. And as I started to inch closer to my teens, I had a series of strange dreams. Maybe they were out of body experiences, or some run-in with a Pokémon too powerful to question. I remember being a Pokémon. I can’t even recall what kind. Perhaps a Skitty or an Eevee, or maybe a Charmander. Something about that is muddy or blocked, but I remember befriending a Pikachu along the way.

I recall hazy details of an adventure. We befriended a Stantler that we had to leave behind when we escaped... something. I remember a terrifying Kecleon, an insidious Gengar, a sweet Kangaskhan. I remember an Absol, keen on helping us, and a Ninetales, keen on something else.

I also remember Pokémon I was not familiar with, even as a human. Kecleon was one example, a species from outside of the regions I was familiar with. I met a Medicham that was not terribly friendly, and still noted that I had never seen one before. Absol was new to me, though it seemed gentle enough. Was I in some new place? Was I truly a Pokémon, for that time?

After the experience, I was left with a sense that there was a region I hadn’t yet explored. There were Pokémon I hadn’t yet discovered. And, from my time where I may have in fact, through some strange occurrence, actually become a Pokémon? I felt that I understood them more. I wanted to know more.