Hey, everybody. While I am still working on Transatlanticism, I just had this idea that's been swimming around in my head for the past few weeks. I HAD to do a nuzlocke of Pokemon Red! So, as has become normal for me, I decided to write the experience out. This is the prologue, and the first chapter will be coming up shortly. Enjoy!

I woke up.

This, in itself, is a very much unsuccessful description of the event. However, there are few other ways to put it, and none of them are - strictly speaking - qualified. A more detailed, and truthful, way of putting it would be this:

I was sleeping, just like I usually do at any usual night, and my usual dreams – solid blackness, like the one you get by having your eyes closed in a room without light – was the only thing showing in the cinema of my mind.

Then, suddenly, the nothingness unfurled, and I felt as though I had somehow sat up, dressed, gone to the bathroom, eaten breakfast, and then gone into and sat down in a crowded hall full of people, in one single, unnoticeable and deceptively swift movement. It was as if my whole sensory apparatus had turned itself on without a single warning.

It was still dark, however – or my eyes simply didn't work; I could not tell – and I couldn't see even as much as an inch into the unyielding murk, but there was the pressure of a cloth-draped flip chair on my backsides. There was also a gentle susurration of voices that suggested the presence of a lot of other people in the room, or possibly just the remnants of them. Yet I was still unable to perceive anything with my eyes.

A slow, but certain, feeling of dread started to drape itself over me, but it did not have much time to develop. Suddenly, there was a brilliant cone of yellow light ahead of me; I could see nothing beyond it, suggesting a rather unnatural kind of incandescence. It was but ten metres away from me, but also at a lower level. At that very moment it struck me that I must be in some sort of amphitheatre.

While I considered this, a man walked, or possibly faded, into the illuminated area. He was old, but not alarmingly so; probably he was approaching the age of retirement but not too rapidly. On his legs were khaki trousers, and on his upper body a shirt of a worn red colour, covered by a white lab coat that reached his knees. The man was holding a book in his right hand, thumb firmly pressed on the middle page and holding it open.

In his left hand, he held a microphone.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," he said, in a cheery sort of voice. "I just flew in from San Francisco, and boy, are my arms tired!"

I stared. Never before had horrible stand-up comedians been any sort of feature in my nightly visions.

Strangely, there seemed to be a lot of laughter. I did not hear it, nor did I see anything but the man and his floored halo of yellow light, but I perceived the chuckling as though I was recalling it ten years after it had happened, inside my mind. It had faded into a vague memory, and was nowhere near as real as what I was seeing within the cone. That was not the strangest thing, though. The strangest thing was that anything, real or not, could consider that joke to be funny.*

"Now I, as I'm sure you know, am a professor," the man continued. "We're taught a lot of things in schools, and we get educated, and we end up being able to make much more difficult mistakes than what stupid people do."

Again, people laughed genuinely in my recollection. I did not, mainly because I'd had to ignore such cracks many times before. But also because I was slowly sensing that my mind wanted me to already know this man. He had never before existed to me, but the sight of him sparked some recumbent impulses that wanted to tell me his name. Something with S, or O...

"Shows how human we are, doesn't it," I heard him say through my struggling brain, to a smattering of agreeing sounds from the ghostly audience. "You know, something strange happened to me on my way to the lab this morning..."

Words kept washing over me as I battled the synapses that told me how common all of this was. He told 'amusing' anecdotes regarding something I construed as veterinary work, he pulled a tiny, strange-looking animal up with him on stage, and he even did the what's-the-deal-with-airline-food routine. Only he didn't talk about airline food, but some other sort of comestible.

For some reason I was unable to concentrate on the words he used, except in a very few cases. I got the gist of his meaning, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he had put it.

And all the way through, there was that suggestion of bright laughter and good humour past. It was a fitting response: Old laughs for old jokes.

Eventually, the professor turned his face to somebody in the front row. I thought it was the front row, at least, if there even was such a thing as rows in here, but I still could not see anything except that one man. He parted his lips and asked some person there: "Now, what's your name, child?"

I barely noticed the response. It was likely a stupid idea, born from a split second of emptiness and a desire to get out of here, but I had a sudden urge to say my own name to myself in case it could assist my escape.

So I quietly murmured it under my breath, taking care that none of the memories in the room heard me. My hands found armrests and gripped them.

Suddenly, there was another person on stage. He couldn't possibly be very old at all; at first sight I would have placed him to be in the range of fifteen to seventeen, but his voice as he greeted the memories and I carried a distinct lack of puberty.

The professor asked the boy, who was wearing a tasteless purple sweater and sporting a hairdo that would have to have taken hours with a slightly insane dresser, what his name was, in an obvious 'pretend-to-be-ignorant' act.

I found myself silently mumbling "He looks like a Kevin."

Down on stage, the two men feigned surprise that he was, in fact, a Kevin. Then, they talked a little more, to general amusement, except not for me. After a few minutes, they wrapped up their show, and went away while wreathing words of farewell. The light was suddenly turned off, plunging even the stage into complete darkness. And in my head, I found that I had to fight the notion that I didn'tknow the professor.

And then, I woke up, properly this time.

* Or if it came to that, a joke.