Welcome to Medio City, a city within a region just north of Hoenn. This city unites pokémon fans of all sorts. For trainers, the normal type gym leader, Lyle, awaits them. For pokémon fans trying to earn their ribbons, there's also a center for pokémon contests. Due to the fact that Lyle is also the mayor of Medio City, their pokécenters have the finest equipment in the area, and the pokémon daycare center just outside of the city is a huge success. This city is as pokémon crazy as they get.
The hottest spot of them all is at the hub of the city, just south of the gym. Here exists a poképark wildlife preserve, where pokémon live in their natural habitat and people are free to observe and appreciate them. Because of this, the poképark receives a lot of endangered pokémon, such as feebas, surskit, and pikachu. For the most part, people and pokémon coexist in the poképark just fine; but every so often, something upsets the balance and a pokémon starts running amok. This is where rangers, such as me, come in.
"Where did that little butthead go?" I said loud enough for my partner pokémon to hear me. I looked under some shrubs. "No butthead here," I said aloud. I looked under some rocks. "Still no butthead," I thought out loud. I stood up, scratched my head, and asked at a reasonable volume, "Where oh where has my butthead gone?" All of a sudden, a cold jet of water hit me on the head. Although the cool of the water felt pretty damn good on this hot summer day, the pressure of the water jet and the sudden scare I got from it weren't too refreshing. I turned around to find the culprit, a male wooper with a V-shaped mark on its chest. "Upa!" it let out with a vague smile on its face. "There you are, you little butthead," I smirked back, picking it up with a gloved hand and giving it a noogie with my free knuckle. The wooper let out a sound similar to a giggle and gave me another squirt on the cheek.
It was break time at the poképark, and my wooper (named Trooper, not butthead) and I were spending our free time playing a game of hide-n-seek. It wasn't long afterwards that our fun ended with a nearby scream of a woman. Since the scream sounded close enough to be in my area, I put down Trooper and we ran to where the call for help was. When I arrived at the scene, a girl who looked to be about sixteen was backed up against a tree. In the lake beside their now-ruined picnic, a gyarados was thrashing around; in its tail, it had an adolescent boy. I groaned a little because hostage situations require more fuss during a pokémon capture than they really need.
I whipped out my capture styler and pressed a button on the side. "This is Koizumi. We have a 450 in area D3. I repeat, we have a 450 in area D3, over," I warned everyone else via the walkie-talkie feature on my styler. "Trooper, you focus on keeping that girl calm. I'll see if I can calm this beast down a little." I ordered my wooper as I set the styler settings to gyarados. Then, I turned on my baton and went straight to work. The top shot out of the bottom compartment and made its way toward the upset gyarados. I rotated my wrist and formed a circle in the air in front of me, the top spinning in sync with my movements. As the top made its way around the gyarados, a glowing blue light trailed from it. From the rings, a frequency resonated. These frequencies, Professor Hastings claimed, matched the kind that pacified certain types of pokémon. When the vibrations that surrounded the gyarados reached its ears, the rampaging pokémon started to calm down a little. By about fifteen more rotations, the gyarados dropped the boy back into the water and swam away. I was close enough to reach the boy, so I fussed about him while Trooper worked on calming down the still-shaken girl.
After checking the boy for any broken limbs or bad cuts, I used the styler to relay a message back to my team, "This is Koizumi. All clear in area D3. I repeat, all clear on D3, over." Not more than a minute later, another girl dressed in the ranger uniform arrived on the scene. With her, she had a basket of sugar-free cookies and lemonade, which she usually offered to any troubled visitors and rangers on the scene. "Hey, Haruka, you're just in time! I'm starving!" I shouted, excited to taste her cooking again. Slightly startled by my scream, she ran faster until she met with us.
"Hey, Koizumi," she replied after catching her breath. "I heard there was a code 450 over here." She looked around and focused her attention on the couple as they held each other. "Are they all right?"
"I just checked their vitals, and both are doing ok," I reassured her. "Besides," I turned around to see Trooper dancing while the couple laughed, "I think butthead is doing a great job calming them down."
Haruka giggled and answered, "Koizumi, you're so mean, calling your poor widdle wooper a butthead." She soon joined the trio and offered cookies and lemonade. The young couple each grabbed a couple cookies and a glass each while Haruka poured some lemonade from her pitcher. I took the liberty of taking her basket and keeping it out of Trooper's reach. Since he wasn't quite to my knee, all I really had to do was hold the basket up to my stomach to keep him from doing so. After about a few minutes, we all sat down and got right back to business. "Ok, Mr. Takada and Ms. Watanabe. Would you please describe to us what happened over here?"
The boy sighed and told us the story. "We were enjoying a nice little picnic in the poképark next to this lake. While we were talking, I decided to skip some rocks. At first things were ok, but then one of my rocks hit a magikarp that had just popped out of the water right in the eye. And then it swam away, so we thought things were good, but then this gyarados came up and grabbed me. I think I hit one of its babies or something. I'm so sorry. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong." The boy began to cry a little, and the girl held him tighter.
Haruka hushed the boy. "It's ok, dears. You didn't mean to. Sometimes bad things happen." She asked me for the basket back, grimacing at me as she watched me take five for myself, and offered the boy a cookie. After a few more minutes, we helped them pick up the mess that was left from the destroyed picnic and I left them with Haruka.
"Thank you very much, sir, for rescuing us," I heard from the distance. Though I do love a good thank you for doing my civil service to people, I was a bit bothered by her statement. Instead of bothering to correct her, I just sighed and left the thought to brood in my head.
The other rangers were right. I really do look like a boy in this uniform.