There is nowhere in Hoenn where Johto is accepted. Not fully. Their religion, their strange, slow dialect of the worldwide tongue, the fact that they worship their legendary Pokémon as gods, that they keep their monuments if only to remember better days. All of it is disregarded. Johto is prone to bouts of dreary rain that last for weeks, and droughts soon after. The only reason it's as green as it is, is because Kanto helped them along technology-wise a couple years ago. Hoenn is a land where the weather goes from zero to hurricane in about ten minutes, and if you live along the coast (and let's be serious, who doesn't?) your house just might be swept up and away with next to no warning whatsoever. The people are just like the weather, here-hot headed and prone to fits of temper, going from zero to hurricane because you didn't say good morning correctly. There's a rift between the two cultures so wide it seems impossible to cross.
May is a creature of that rainy region. She is slow in speech but fast in action, rising with that famous Johto fearlessness and cunning to overcome her obstacles. She refuses to be bent or burnt, like the famous Burned Tower of Ecruteak City, and she wears her foreign clothing with pride in a place where wearing Silph Co. sneakers gets you glared at and beat up. I have never seen anybody keep her head so high under the weight of all those fire-tinted Hoenn stares. If they're the hurricane, then she's the bulwark, protecting Hoenn from her own citizens.
Maybe it was the way she listened to my ramblings on everything from geology, to Mega Evolution, to the pressure all of Devon Corps. put on me, or the way she'd trim her Skitty's quick-growing claws and fur once a week, She never complained, not once, despite the time-consuming nature of the task. Maybe it was her eyes, and how they'd light up with each new discovery, be it Pokèmon-related or something else entirely.
Once, I'd given her a moon stone. She had said she'd wanted one for a long time, but didn't have the first clue where to look. All it took was a simple trip to Meteor Falls to grab one, but with the look on her face it was like I'd given her a shiny Treecko. To think, a small, gray, sparkly rock could make someone that wasn't me smile that wide.
"Ho-oh's fire feathers," she had whispered. "It's beautiful."
She doesn't cling to Arceus like the peoples of Sinnoh and Hoenn do. Johto has a plethora of Legendary Pokèmon, and she uses the names of each and every one of them. Suicune's frozen blood was always my favorite. She only ever used it when she got mad. Not the normal mad, the kind that happens when you lose a gym battle for the seventh time and the Gym Leader gets this smug smile on their face because they know they'll win again. No, the first time I heard May swear like that, she punched Maxie, leader of Team Magma, in the face.
I'm pretty sure that's the moment I started to admit I love her. I mean, what kind of trainer disregards their Pokèmon, and all the powers at their disposal, just to get a shot at someone twice their age, and bruise their knuckles various shades of green, blue and black for two weeks? It's that unpredictability of Johto, that low-fire, slow-kindled passion in her that made her do it. She wore her bruises proudly, and was sad to see them go.
It's the emotional, quick-changing Hoenn in me that made me give her the Mega Bracelet, the Eon Flute. I would like to say the Championship too, but she took that all on her own, apologizing to me the whole while, eyes shining with tears. She thought she ruined my life. The difference between beating me and punching Maxie, she explained (more than once), was that I was her friend, and deserving of everything she could give. Maxie, on the other hand, could do some very graphic things to a Wailord for all she cared.
Here, now, far from the stormy Hoenn I call home, I look out on the choppy, gray waters of Johto's Olivine City, and think of May, and how she smiled when I bid her goodbye. I think of how she laughed, how her hair blew into her face in the Fortree breeze, how her eyes narrowed at me during our battle for the Championship. I look at the waters that carved May Maple, and I want to go home.