I don't know why I am here.

This is the thought that has been filling my mind for the passage of time I have spent in this place. My thoughts flow like a whirlpool, dancing around each other and skipping to different subjects but always returning to one, puzzling enigma: the reason why I am sitting in this spacious gray room with ceilings reaching impressive heights and windows that taunt me with prospects of freedom, high above my head. I can't wrap my head around it.

All I know is what I have. An impressive array of food, ranging from simple biscuits to dried meats and fruits to pretty little desserts (chocolate- yum) wrapped in plastic. A water faucet and a cup, too. Obviously they don't want me to starve.

I have this impressively large book of blank pages, coupled with an array of pencils and a few sharpeners. I'd like some colored pencils as well, but I guess beggars can't be choosers. My pokedex was left in my pocket when they stole my things, whether deliberately or accidentally, I don't know.

I have a nice little bed in the corner with a few blankets and a pillow. Not as comfortable as my own bed at home, of course. But then again, it's been so long since I've returned there that I barely remember what it feels like anymore. There's also, of course, a toilet, surrounded by a curtain.

On top of all this, they gave me a single pokeball.

It isn't one of mine- they took those. I feel their absence on my belt with an ache in my heart, like a war veteran feels a pain in their missing limbs. No, it's one of the simple blue variety, a Great Ball. An empty vessel waiting to be filled.

Because of these things that I have, I can infer two things.

One is that the door planted at the far end of the room isn't going to open for a long time.

The other is that they want me to do something. I don't know what it is yet.

Last night I dreamed of a monster in the shadows above me. It watched me as I slept, assessing my movements, waiting for the best time to strike.

I've spent hours thinking over it, and I still haven't figured out what I'm supposed to do. Maybe if I start from the beginning, my thoughts will fall together in the right places.

I started out as a simple girl living in the country. I was born and raised in a decently large agricultural town in Kalos, where the people liked to party late into evenings. There the world was always full of fireflies buzzing in the night while people danced around the firelight and rolling green hills of bountiful food that filled the horizon each morning. In the more populated part of town was an old dirt track used for Rhyhorn racing, which attracted people from all over Kalos like flies to flypaper. My mom was a Rhyhorn racer there, and with her small but quick Rhyhorn Bruce she swept competition.

A few years ago, my mom claimed she was getting too old for racing, for the parties held late into the night. She wanted to grow up, stake her claim, build up a new life for the two of us. Bruce was no spring chicken either. With every passing day his joints creaked more often and his breathing became shallower. She could have retired him and chosen another Rhyhorn to take his place, but her partnership with him was too deep to be replaced.

So away we moved. I still clearly remember studying the house of my childhood as we rode off, committing every detail to memory. The kitchen window that was almost always open, the broken screen door, the small little vegetable garden that Bruce trampled every spring. I stared at it until the rising sun behind it hurt my eyes, and soon we crossed the crest of a hill and it was gone. I haven't seen it since.

The new town, dubbed Vaniville Town by some long-ago authority, was small and cramped, full of concrete and fences. In the area we lived in, the houses were so smushed together there wasn't even an inch of space in between them. Poor, old Bruce didn't even have an area to trot around in. Needless to say, I had an instant dislike of the place. I wanted to leave.

I heard talk of towns even more mystical and exciting than the one I had grown up in. Towns where fairies darted at the corners of your eyes, where ancient artifacts and forgotten histories waited to be found, where crystal towers spread the sun across a glittering river. Towns nestled on ocean cliffs and placed near flourishing riversides. But what I was most interested in was the pokemon.

I was always fascinated by the idea of pokemon as a young kid. In my hometown they were often seen simply as pests, trampling crops and kicking up soil in the fields, plaguing households in the summertime. But to me, they were friendships waiting to happen, a story waiting to be unlocked, a battle waiting to be won. Yes, it sounds sappy. I was an imaginative kid and my fantasies often got away from me.

So when I was caged into four walls of brick and a plaza of concrete, of course I wanted to go find my own adventure. In fact, a week after we had moved I was packed and ready to move again, convinced that I was ready to face the elements and fight my way to the top. Besides, if the famous Ash Ketchum could become the Kanto champion at age ten, surely I could make across the northern forest at age thirteen.

My mother thought otherwise. She kept me in that house for two full years until, at age fifteen, she deemed that I was ready. I'd like to say that I used those years to prepare and study what I could about pokemon, but I mostly filled my time with staring at the colorful pokeballs in the store and wistfully looking at maps of the region. In those years, after being separated from my dream city of long summers and endless sky and thrown into the world's reality, I felt like I grew up. Now I realize that I still have a lot to learn.

This story is turning out to be longer than I thought. For now, I'm going to go exercise a little. You don't mind cliffhangers, do you?