"Next."

I walked forward, trying not to wring my hands together. The man sitting in front of me had thick, horn-rimmed glasses and was looking me over intently. He had a name-tag clipped to his shirt.

"Age?"

His words startled me out of trying to decipher what was written on the tag.

"Eleven-"

The man's arm shot forward in a blur of motion and before I knew it something cold was pressed to the back of my hand. I pulled my hand back quickly. There, slightly lopsided and blurry, was a circular stamp done with green ink. Gate three, it read, a thin circle surrounding the words.

"Next."

I was all but pushed away from the booth by the next one behind me. Gate three was written on my hand so I supposed that was where I had to go. I hoped. I craned my neck, rising up on the very tips of my toes to see over the other people that were assembled in the gymnasium alongside me. After a minute of searching I finally found it, gate three was just below a basketball hoop. I had to push and shove a bit to get there and was pushed and shoved and stepped on quite a bit myself. More than once I heard someone curse loudly.

Eventually though the line in front of gate three dwindled and it was my turn. The girl manning this booth was a little younger than the man with the glasses but she looked just as bored. She handed me a sheet of paper with pursed lips, telling me to fill it in. I narrowed my eyes and focused on the tiny words printed on the paper. The first bit was easy, writing down my name and date of birth but afterwards the words started less sense and no matter how hard I wrecked my brain I couldn't make heads or tails of what they said.

"What does this say?" I pushed the sheet a little more towards the girl and pointed at the offending word.

The girl looked at me for a bit, then blinked and very slowly said, "parental approval."

"Oh," I knew that one. I read on before stopping at another hard one. "And this one?"

"Exculpatory."

"What does it mean?" My parents had used weird words often and I've heard some on the news but this one I'd never heard of before.

"Just," the girl sighed, "look the whole thing that comes after exculpatory means that you won't hold the Unova League liable if something happens to you. Liable means responsible by the way, if you didn't know that. Just sign it if you want to become a trainer, okay?"

I did know that, but I ignored the girl and went right to the part where it told me to sign if I agreed. I did, writing down my name. I handed the paper back to the girl who gave me another stamp, a blue one this time, and pointed me to a long row of tables at the back of the gym. I fought my way through the people again, though there were a little less of them now and my toes didn't hurt as much when I got the tables. I settled to wait in line again. When it was my turn I had to sit in front of a big, grey screen in front of one of the three photographers. I smiled.

"No smiling."

I let my smile drop and forced my eyes to stay open when the camera flashed. I probably still closed them because the photographer grimaced and told me we had to go again. The second one was good though. Five minutes later I was standing outside the gymnasium with a freshly printed trainer license. It held my name, some information about me and it also featured my new picture. I looked weird, no, I looked really creepy. I'd tried to keep my eyes open a bit too much for the second try and it showed. My eyes looked huge and I kind of looked like I just saw something really scary.

But my most prized new possession was the shiny pokéball I held in my other hand. One of the guys who had manned the station that gave them away had looked a bit uncomfortable when he handed it to me. "Sorry kid but we ran out of the good ones," he'd said, "so we had some volunteers go out and catch some wild stock so it might be a little feisty, okay? But don't you worry, it'll be right as rain, you'll see."

I named my sandile Snapper and boarded the first ferry rather than taking the Skyarrow bridge, which was closed off again due to another thing being wrong or something. It didn't really matter, the bridge was out of order more often than not and the ferry was free thanks to my shiny new trainer card. The ferry dropped me off at the shore, a mile or so from Pinwheel Forest, and with me more than fifty others who were obviously as new to training as I was. Some of them I remembered from the gymnasium, others had I had seen at school and I waved at a boy who lived in the same building as I did.

Snapper wasn't really happy when I let him out of his pokéball on the dock. He hissed and shot away from the waves that gently lapped at the wooden beams surrounding the boardwalk.

"It's just a little water," I said, "don't worry about it. You'll be strong enough to take down actual water types in no time, you'll see. We are going to be awesome!"

My sandile merely blinked up at me, not making a sound.

Snapper was right to question my promise to him. He was not strong enough to take down water types in 'no time'. In fact, we lost all of our first real battles that day. Pinwheel Forest, it seemed, was filled with people that had either water types, or grass types, or some unholy mix of the two because wherever we went someone had at least one pokémon that could take mine out in one shot. The worst part, one of those trainers was a girl, a ten-year-old girl. I was beaten by someone a whole year younger than me who still wore pigtails.

When we weren't losing battles I had to keep Snapper in his pokéball. The forest itself was filled with grass and bug pokémon and I even heard one of the trainers I'd lost to saying she had seen a few fighting types around. In short, the forest was my own personal hell.

Snapper didn't make it any easier. The last time I let him out he had taken a bite out of my pants and I had to get him back in before he could go for my actual legs instead. When I finally made it to the pokémon centre at the onset of dusk I almost told the nurse she could keep him when I handed her his pokéball.

I didn't.

Maybe I should have.

I spent more than a month in and around Nacrene City. I stayed clear of Pinwheel Forest, instead exploring Route 3. It was filled with weaker pokémon and Snapper and I had our first victory against a wild pidove. It did not go down without a fight but the moment it did I couldn't help pumping my fist in the air excitedly. I even lifted Snapper up in the air, heavy as he was, and quickly put him down when his beady little eyes got a bit too narrow for my tastes.

We'd won. I was finally starting to become an actual trainer.

It was on what I had decided would be my last day in the city that it happened. I was looking up information on the first gym and how to get there. Snapper and I had started beating more and more of the local pokémon and I just knew we could beat Cheren. He had normal types and for once that wasn't a type Snapper was particularly bad against. We could win that badge in one go, for sure. In the middle of looking at when the next ferry would go back to Castelia City from where I could travel on to Aspertia City I got the feeling someone was looking at me.

When I looked up from the computer screen I saw that I was right: someone was looking at me. That someone was a girl, a good few years older and really, really crazy tall. She was looking down at me. Not just literally but also in that adult, I-am-better-than-you way that some really stuffy grownups did sometimes just to make you feel like a little kid. I wasn't a little kid anymore, I was a trainer, so I bravely tried to meet her stare.

"Good grief," she sighed, "I was right. You're just a little kid. Go home, little boy, and play with your blocks for a few years before trying to play at being a trainer. I'm not trying to be mean but this is dangerous for someone who's so young. You can't be older than, say, ten years old?"

Eleven, I wanted to say, I was eleven.

"Just go home, okay? Trust me on this, you're very brave but this isn't some game that little kids can play. Your parents must be worried sick. If you're scared of going back home alone I'll even come with and make sure the wild pokémon don't hurt you. You must be so scared after everything that has been on the news lately. What's your name, little boy?"

My mouth already opened to tell her my name out of reflex, but someone else's voice interrupted me.

"Oh get lost, saint Dana. Let the kid be, you can't save every itty-bitty baby trainer you meet. They don't want it, they don't like it and –most importantly- you come across as just the kind of creep the news warns them to stay away from. You'd better scram, kid, before she tries to change your nappy and adds you to the collection of lost little souls she keeps locked up in her basement."

The boy that had said it directed the last part at me, giving me a long, hard look. I took his advice and dashed away to the stairs. Once I was safely inside the centre's room that I had claimed as my own I thought of the encounter. The boy had been right, the girl (Denise? Darla?) had been creepy. I hadn't really watched the news but I supposed that if there was some kind of kidnapping creeper about it could be her.

I didn't read the newspaper the next day, or ever, for that matter. I never read newspapers because they were boring. Beyond boring, even. But if I did I would have taken that girl up on her offer to take me home right away.

Two pages of the paper were filled with tiny little pictures. They had even gone as far as to leave them in colour. Dozens of faces would have stared up at me, faces like mine. Boys and girls my age, a little younger and some of them even a bit older. All of them had the same wide-eyed look, their lips itching to curve into a smile they too had been told they should smother. Some of them looked just as ridiculous in their official trainer identification pictures as I did in mine.

The only difference between me and them that morning was that I was eating breakfast at the pokémon centre and resolutely not reading the newspaper while they were all missing.