When it came to catching pokemon, Ash mused as he looked down at Dexter's latest incarnation, his pokedex was nothing special. Despite Professor Oak's original instructions, he had never been one to pay much heed to the idea of pokemon collecting; the professor had seldom complained about this, preferring to go to Ash's rival when he needed a pokemon for his lab. Ash was far more of a trainer than a collector - indeed, he seldom if ever caught any pokemon he couldn't see himself using in battle. Consequently, he typically went through region after region with about ten to twenty species subjected to Dexter's complete analysis.
More than being a trainer, however, Ash Ketchum was a traveler. As a trainer he was nothing short of phenomenal: from finishing sixteenth in the Kanto league at such a young age to his exploits in the Battle Frontier, his skill was nothing short of legendary. But if his dream was truly to be a pokemon master, he would have focused on a few strong pokemon and stayed on Victory Road, or in the Valley of Charizard, or somewhere else nourishing to his strength; had he done this, he might have become the champion of something more impressive than the Orange Islands.
Despite the many contrasts between him and his friend May, on this issue the two trainers were not that different: they both wanted to see the world. The difference was in why: while May found interest in many aspects of the Pokemon World, Ash was in it only for the wide and diverse array of Pokemon. And in terms of Pokemon seen, Dexter was amazing: he had caught sight of 484 species, from magikarp to each and every legend. Some believed in Arceus as a matter of faith, others questioned his existence. Ash? Ash had screamed at him about everything from mortality to Giratina's reign of destruction, and not only been answered, but sparked divine intervention.
484 of 486. The number was impressive, but two remained missing, and Ash wasn't sure if he was ready to add them just yet; not after what had happened with his first form. In fairness, despite their names, the creatures were more digimon than pokemon: they were creatures of data who journeyed through cyberspace, and Ash was seldom at home on a computer.
Ash, however, had not avoided them for so long by mere coincidence. It was true that he had remained aloof from computers as the pokemon world entered the internet age, but that was as much from fear of meeting them as it was ease of travel. The reason he had not encountered them in a trainer battle after all this time was not because of an enormously odd string of luck, but because he had personally gone out of his way to avoid any trainer with a pokemon of the porygon line, going so far as to withdraw from tournaments if necessary. If Team Rocket really wanted Pikachu, Ash mused, they should just send a porygon after him. But they wouldn't – and he knew they wouldn't, because Jesse, James, and Meowth had also been caught in that horrible explosion.
"Six months, ten days." Ash said sadly, reminiscing about his hospital stay after that awful, fateful encounter, the encounter which had left him too damaged to even look upon the Porygon line. The explosion had given him life-threatening injuries; Nurse Joy said he was incredibly lucky to make a full recovery. But the recovery was only physical, and the mental wounds were, if anything, worse.
In the midst of the explosion, the malfunctioning porygon had beamed image after image into his brain between red and blue lights, from traumatizing and grotesque pornography to unearthly horrors from a glitched-up world of darkness which still haunted his nightmares. Back in Johto, he had spotted a picture of porygon-2 in a book of local pokemon, and spent the next two days frozen in bed, not by a tri-attack, but simply because he was too scared to move.
It had been over nine years since that day. The two empty slots in his pokedex sat far apart from another, an artifact of technology's scattered pace. Staravia had informed him that a computer nerd who specialized in porygon was in town and looking for a battle.
Ash sighed. Much as he wished otherwise, there were some problems which couldn't be solved through a pokemon battle. Or maybe he just wasn't ready yet, and a decade or two later he'd be fine. Or maybe Pikachu crushing a porygon-Z in combat was exactly what he needed, and fighting this battle would finally let him move on, but that didn't mean he could do it. "I'm sorry, Pikachu. Even though I've tackled legendaries, I guess I'm still too much of a coward."
The yellow rodent looked sadly and knowingly at the ground, giving a long "Pikaaaaa" in response, and the pokedex remained two species away from completion.