Chapter 02 / The Professor
**This story contains adult themes, mature language and is meant for a mature audience.**
A boy around Ash's age and a taller man in a lab coat stood waiting for the elevator. Ash knew the boy's messy auburn hair and sick smirk better than anyone. He was Gary Oak, her childhood neighbor and bully. Ash followed Mimi off the elevator and the two lab assistants nodded to each other as they passed. As Gary entered the elevator he stopped and turned back toward Ash, shouting at her from down the hall.
"Good luck Ketchum." he called out in a way that seemed to mean the opposite. "See you on the outside."
Ash shrugged off Gary's veiled threat and kept walking, passing opaque glass doors with black lettering. Along the route, an assistant emerged from one of the laboratories and Ash caught a glimpse of a wall covered in clear-plastic containers, each housing a large purple rat with bulging red eyes. Another lab with long observation windows was filled with strange machines. Inside, numerous laboratory technicians sat behind desks, their faces illuminated by their computer screens. Others stood over the various machines, monitoring the progress of whatever experiment they'd been assigned to.
At the end of the hall was a door that read 'PRO Trainer Assignment Center'. Mimi pushed open the door and ushered Ash inside. The walls of the room were tinted glass from floor to ceiling, allowing Ash her first glimpse of the Pallet Town compound in its entirety. Approaching the windows, she could see the town center and into the gated elite district. She watched the laborers move cargo in the PRO manufacturing plant's shipping yard and the younger children playing among the docks. Far to the south, beyond the block houses of her home district, the green-grey sea curved into the horizon and to the north, beyond the barrier wall, sprawled a dense foreboding forest.
An older man with messed gray hair and dark circles under his eyes sat at a desk near the center of the room, pouring over a large leather bound tome. His lab coat was draped over the back of his chair and he muttered to himself, deep in thought. It wasn't until Mimi spoke-up that he even noticed their presence.
"Professor Oak," she said, gently placing the tablet onto his desk, "this is Ashley Ketchum, the last of the PRO trainers reporting for assignment." Looking up from his work, the professor first looked at the lab-tech and then at Ash.
"Another one?" he questioned flatly, pulling the tablet towards him. "Oh yes, Ketchum is it?"
Ash turned her attention away from the window and nodded to the older man behind the desk. The professor's continence was stern but his eyes seemed weary and almost sad. He waved for Ash to come closer as he stood from the desk and pulled on his lab coat. Approaching the desk, Ash caught sight of the information displayed on the tablet. It was an entire profile on her, packed with information and photographs, some of which she'd never even seen. The professor took notice and quickly pressed the screen with his finger, causing it to go black.
"Not for your eyes, Ketchum." he said reproachfully before turning his attention to Mimi.
"There was an incident with one of the starters." he said before pausing to think a moment. "Why not pull that erratic rodent off the power grid? I'll be happy to be rid of it." The tone in his voice was rather dire but Mimi, seemingly unphased by the seriousness of it all, bobbed her head in agreement.
"Right away Professor." she said through a smile before turning to walk out, closing the door behind her. Professor Oak took a long look at Ash before offering her a seat. Once both were seated at the desk, the professor took up the tablet and began to review Ash's file more closely.
"You're Delia Ketchum's daughter, eh?" Oak questioned with mild amusement. Ash folded her hands in her lap and simply nodded.
"You know, I knew your father way back when." Though it was no surprise to find out that someone with as much power and influence as Samuel Oak knew her father, Ash did her best to restrain herself from bombarding the professor with questions.
"He was a great trainer in his day." the old man added while paging through the profile.
"I wouldn't know." Ash replied, keeping her tone flat to mask the burning in her chest.
Professor Oak looked up from the tablet and stared at her intently, his beady eyes scanning Ash's face. "Does he never contact you or your mother?" he probed sympathetically.
Something about the question felt like a setup. Whatever the professor's motives, Ash had no information to offer and she shook head at the question. "Never."
Placing the tablet back on the desk and leaning back in his chair, Professor Oak nodded approvingly. "Never, eh? I suppose he wouldn't."
Pressing the tips of his pointer finger and thumb into the inner corner of his eyes, Oak sighed. It was clear to Ash then that the callous labor of these PRO 'assignments' had taken its tole on the aged professor and for a moment she could see a flicker of pain on his face.
"It's best not dwell on the past while the future is barreling towards you." Oak continued, switching gears as if he were rehearsing lines from a script. "Today is a new day and the beginning of a new life for you Ketchum."
With a wave of his hand over the desk console, the view through the tinted glass wall directly behind Oak became magnified, giving Ash a closer look at the barrier wall to the north and the forest beyond. For the first time, she could see the armed PRO agents who manned the turret towers, female soldiers clad in white with black rifles and shocking blue hair. Military grade JENNY officers charged with keeping danger out and people in.
Clearing his throat, the professor pressed on. "As you know, the world outside of our walls is filled with dangerous monsters. Wild beasts known as Pokémon."
"We're not talking about a harmless Pidgey or common Rattata." Oak explained in a grave tone. "There are far worse creatures out there and it is your duty as a PRO trainer to seek them out. You'll collect important data on them and, if possible, capture them for more indepth study."
Ash could feel the blood rise in her face as her heart began beating against her chest. Most of her adolescent life had been spent training and drilling to prepare her for this work but no amount of conditioning could assuage her fears of being thrust alone into the unknown. To abandoned a child in the wild world beyond the wall seemed, in Ash's young mind, to be little more than a death sentence.
Despite countless PSAs and the ever-present PRO propaganda, one question had never been adequately answered and as Ash stood on the brink of losing all that she had known in her short life, she managed to find the courage to ask.
"If Pokémon are so dangerous, why do you send children to face them instead of going yourself?" she questioned angrily as tears coated her eyes.
Though clearly taken aback by the sudden outburst, the professor managed to maintain his composure. "Many wild Pokémon will attack and kill an adult human but will not take the life of a child. As you are still a youth, your life will be in no great danger." he assured her, despite sounding somewhat defeated. "It is a strange phenomenon we're still trying to understand."
A lump had formed in Ash's throat and she swallowed hard, blinking away her tears, as she wrapped her head around what she'd heard. This new information explained so much and yet bred so many new questions. It was more than she was ready for and it left her feeling numb.
Leaning back in his chair, professor Oak gestured to the worn volume he'd been examining when Ash had arrived. "Our histories suggest that Pokémon and humans once lived together in relative peace. It would seem that sometime after the great war of our past, a rift was formed between man and beast resulting in an irreversible shift in Pokémon consciousness."
The professor tapped his desk console again, returning the view through the northern glass wall to its original state. "It is our mission, aided by the work of PRO trainers like yourself, to discover some way to reverse the shift and restore order." Pausing for a moment, the professor folded his hands and eyed Ash with a scrutinizing stare. "You, like your father before you, will be a part of this critically important work."
Just then the door to the laboratory opened and Mimi reemerged, wearing a pair of thick rubber gloves between which she carried a large cylindrical capsule. She approached the pair and placed the device on the desk, addressing Oak through a pinned smile. "We were able to wrangle this one from the power grid as you requested professor."
"Ah, thank you Mimi" the professor responded, sliding the capsule across the desk toward him. The professor then depressed a mechanism on the top of the device which caused the sides to flay open like the petals of a flower. This revealed a fist sized metallic ball, girdled around the middle by a golden band, resting at the cylinder's core.
Without remove his gaze from the ball, the professor asked "I assume you know what this is Ketchum?"
Fixated on the small sphere, Ash stared at the ball with wonder. Though she had seen and used demo devices similar to this, there was something noticeably different about the real thing. It seemed to be charge with an electric current, subtly vibrating with life. "It's a capsule ball." her years of training rehearsed. "Devices like this house captive Pokémon."
For the first time since entering the lab, Ash saw the professor smile. "That's correct." he confirmed, nodding with approval. "And this beast is your first Pokémon."