You know that feeling you get when you know you're being watched, but there's no one around? Yeah, me too. I've always thought of that as

the ultimate kind of fear. Turns out, that was only a sample of what was to come. It started the morning of the day I turned eleven. I woke up

in my bed and stretched. I immediately felt that something was off. For one thing, I don't have a bed. I have a sleeping bag. Another thing

that was wrong was that Pikachu wasn't with me. I got Pikachu a year ago and we've been together ever since. I decided to get up and look

around.

Once standing, I noticed that I wasn't in my pajamas. Instead, I was wearing a hospital gown. I looked at the room around me and spotted

Pikachu lying in a separate hospital bed. I walked over to him and gently shook him awake. Pikachu's eyes opened and he seemed as

shocked as I had been to discover that we weren't where we had gone to sleep. After we were both fully awake, I took a closer look at the

room around us. It was definitely a hospital room with various patients. They were all asleep, so I guessed that it was early in the morning.

As I continued to look I noticed an outfit that looked to be about my size hanging next to my bed. I took off my hospital gown and noticed that

I had a few new scars on my chest. I inspected them.

Some old-looking ones looked like they came from Pokémon attacks. Several newer ones looked like claw marks. I decided that something

was very, very wrong. As I finished getting dressed, Brock and Misty came into the room. With them was a brown-haired girl in a red jacket

and bandana and a black-haired girl in a black and pink skirt and a white beanie. They all looked happy to see me. "Misty, Brock! What's going

on? I woke up here and don't know how I got here." I told them. Misty slapped me, while the others exchanged worried glances. "That's not

funny Ash!" Misty shouted. As I was wondering what she meant, Brock started talking. "Ash, how old are you?" he asked in a serious tone.

"No joking." "I'm eleven of course. Today's my birthday." Brock's face turned grave. All traces of the familiar humor in his face were gone.

"Ash… your eleventh birthday was four years ago."