Water, you thought, implied beach.
You stand beneath a sign that warns against swimming and diving, wondering who would dare. Oil shimmers on the water's surface. Plastic bottles and Rage Candy wrappers mass beneath the pier. Your rain coat is zipped over your swimsuit, hiding your error. It's not raining hard, but it's enough to soften the city's electrical buzzings and distant sirens. You've been here for over an hour, half-waiting for someone to challenge and half-waiting for a better idea to come. It's only been raining for fifteen minutes, and you can't decide if it's worth waiting for it to stop again.
At the sight of a growlithe you straighten, but you quickly realize it's a pet, leashed to someone who looks like one of your mom's friends. An occasional jogger passes. Not as many now as there were earlier.
The city is perhaps ugliest at twilight, when the shadows writhe with unpleasant possibility. The odds of earning a quick buck from a battle are waning fast. But as the orange streetlights come on, you watch another trainer approach from across the street. You count six pokeballs on the studded belt that shows under his hooded guess he's in his mid-thirties or early forties—not the oldest trainer you've encountered but still outside the usual—and has a strange, asymmetrical hairstyle. He stares straight ahead at you.
You try to guess what type of trainer he might be based on his clothes and gait. Perhaps dark types? You palm your poliwrath's pokeball. Then again, what if he favors electric types and the rain drew him out to take advantage?
As the trainer draws closer, you realize what you mistook for his hair was actually a facial tattoo: a line of bones and barbed wire along his jaw and hairline. There's something unpleasant in his stare, something beyond communicating a challenge. It occurs to you that he might not be looking at your belt but at your body. If there were other people here it wouldn't feel so creepy, but there aren't and it does. He smiles, and it's not a friendly one.
It's the smile that does it. You jump up from the railing where you've been leaning and tug your raincoat down over your belt. You start speed walking away, head down. Your pulse is loud in your ears.
"Hey!" he calls after you.
You release your haunter. "Let's go, Keats!" you call to it, and you break into a run. You dash through a red light, grateful the rain has slowed the traffic.
Five blocks pass before you realize no one is following you, maybe never was.