When it comes to Volkner, it has always been a matter of who you ask.
Now that he's an adult, all the children love him; they spend time in his gym, marveling over moving walkways and laughing over the permanent static that leaves them with messy hair and charged clothing. The rest of the city cheers him and his inventions, and not one soul thinks to complain when his experiments leave them without power or the streets a mess.
Now that he's an adult, now that he's a gym leader, he can provide the means for everyone to be okay with everything he does.
When Volkner was younger, people always had to wonder.
He's such a small child, after all, and a quiet one at that. He doesn't laugh when he's supposed to, and refuses to look at people in the eye. He sits with a broken toy on the street outside his house and breaks it apart only to put it back together in a never-ending repetitive cycle.
For the adults around him, it's a familiar, unsettling sight. They see Volkner huddled over computer circuits he's supposed to be too young to understand, see him alone and closed off, and they can't help but remember another boy: one that is gray and dusty and too smart for his own good. They remember bruises and taunts and ask Volkner's mom if she has thought about getting him to a doctor that can get him to talk a bit more.
That is when the most obvious similarities stop, however: two boys with an interest in science and electronics with no amount of social ability to their names. The gray boy disappears from the city after he graduates high school and returns graduated summa cum laude from the best university Sinnoh has to offer. Volkner, on the other hand, drops out of school the second he has completed enough education to get a pokémon from the League and instead hovers over machinery too dangerous for him to be close to.
And there he is: a man with bitterness in place of skin and anger in his heart and hunger in his eyes.
And there he is: a boy of ten with ideas too advanced for their time and a runt of an elekid with an odd fear of heights and a face that refuses to show a smile.
Months later, when it becomes obvious Volkner is leaving on a journey, his neighbors quietly approach his mother.
"Are you sure?" they ask, "he's so distracted all the time."
And his mother is getting premature white hairs, her forehead has permanent creases from her constant worrying, but she still smiles, wanting to reassure them, "Oh. No, we went to the doctor, and she set Volk up with a therapy eevee to help him out."
(And how Volkner made an overprotective, overly aggressive jolteon out of that sweet eevee is anybody's guess.)
Volkner leaves, younger than the gray boy ever did, and the city braces itself for the trouble he will bring with him when he returns. They brace themselves for egotistical words and cold stares and ideas of a new, better world spat against them all. They brace themselves for Volkner to return only to leave again, this time for good.
But Volkner returns with a boy named Flint at his heels and an absent-minded smile on his face.
His mother cries when she sees him, and Volkner even asks her what's wrong, though he still wiggles away from her hug and looks at her shoes instead of her face. He still has trouble getting up from his bed some days, and he still refuses to eat, and he still looks like he never has enough energy to do anything more than sit there and tinker with his machines. Many things are the same, but if anything is clear is that Flint makes a difference.
Flint talks Volkner's ear off and encourages Volkner to talk back, even if the words are all mostly monotone and about engineering processes that fly over Flint's head. Sometimes, when Kid—now a powerful electabuzz—is helping Volkner get enough energy for his new invention, Flint pulls out a magmar and coaxes Volkner into having a battle instead.
As the boys grow older, Flint rarely leaves Sunyshore; when he does, it's to go to Stark Island for family matters or to challenge the League. Again. And again. And again. Volkner takes to smoking during those times, takes to barricade himself in his house or to walk around muttering to himself, a screwdriver held loosely between his lips.
Volkner seems to suddenly get a bunch of pokémon eggs—nobody really knows from where—and he starts spending as much time caring for them as he does among electrical circuits and trying to fix an old motorbike he found abandoned in an alley one day.
No one is exactly surprised when a baby shinx and pichu show up on his shoulders, though they do have to stare when this tiny little thing crawls around his hands until he explains that it's a joltik, a pokémon sent to him from Unova.
He raises his pokémon for what seems to be a single purpose: to defeat Flint's pokémon.
Flint becomes part of the Elite Four, eventually, and Volkner moves out of his mother's apartment. It's scary, for the people of Sunyshore, to see this particular turn of events. Volkner starts to become snappy and slightly aggressive when he's not being apathetic, and his time is spent with his small army of electric pokémon or frustrated over his cables and live wires.
Volkner becomes a gym leader because Flint won't stop pestering him until he does. Flint comes over for a few days every month and insists over and over that Volkner should at least try it—so Volkner does. He battles and loses against the Elite Four, and then he does it again, and again until he wins. Kid is an electivire by the time he submits an application and takes the test to become a Gym Leader.
He defeats the current Leader by a landslide.
Flint takes him out to celebrate, and if those boys didn't make sense before, they do now. Volkner talks to Flint, and he's brutally honest about everything he says but Flint doesn't seem to mind at all. He seems to rejoice in Volkner telling him he's irresponsible, and takes the fact that Volkner is specifically raising his pokémon to beat his as the biggest compliment there ever was.
(When people ask him why, Flint always shrugs. "He's my friend, ya know? If he's putting this much effort into it, he must think I'm strong, right?")
Of course, Flint can't stay. He's part of the Elite Four, and Volkner is a Gym Leader now, they both have responsibilities they need to attend to.
When Flint leaves, Volkner is not as bad as he was before, but he's still closed off unless it comes to something about electricity—either from machines or his pokémon—and Sunyshore is reminded of their fears when the small, bitter, angry gray boy appears on every single TV channel, and the man he has grown up to be is just as cold and belittling as he was after he left for the last time. They see how the man, Cyrus, talks about the world, they see the frightening intelligence resulting in hurt people, in hurt pokémon; they see that the only person who is trying to stop the end of the world is a child dressed all in pink and grime, and they turn to look at their own Volkner.
They see him smoking.
They see him and the bags under his eyes and the bored expression on his face—or worse, they don't see him for days on end—and they're afraid that they'll lead two children down the same path. That the geniuses of Sunyshore will always be destined for dangerous ideas and treacherous consequences.
They see Cyrus, with his degree and outstanding education. They see Volkner, a dropout that couldn't have taken anything out of traditional schooling. They can't wrap their heads around it, because everything should point to opposite results: Cyrus the Gym Leader, the engineer; and Volkner the dangerous mastermind behind world-ending plots.
Then they see Flint, pulling Volkner's focus and ideas into being, and they think, maybe, they understand.