A/N: This writing out of my ass thing is pretty fun, but also exhausting when I'm trying to write serious scenes. Also, I haven't played a Pokémon game ever since BW2, so my knowledge on any newfangled lore or monster will be spotty. Bulbapedia's been the straight man to my wannabe-funny man these last few days.

Chapter 2

Even after millions of years of cross-cultural relations with pokémon, battling was considered an esoteric art. When people or books spoke of bonds with pokémon, it was often meant quite literally.

The top one percent of the training world was filled with none but the cream of humanity's crop who had honed the ability to synchronise their minds with their bonded creatures. The trainers of the championship-tier were all human monsters themselves who barely needed a thought to direct their teams. It was a latent part of human and monster psychology that not even psychics, both human and pokémon, couldn't tamper with.

Aurea Juniper knew this. She had seen it for herself when she had first visited the Unovan League in function as the newly minted Head of Regional Science.

She had seen some of the children of Nuvema try to battle as well. Pokémon Studies was a mandatory curriculum course within the K-12 educational system on their last year of elementary school, and a battle tournament was the last assignment. Bianca was...less than average. Cheren was good at worming through weaknesses, but was rather inflexible. Hilda was good at seizing the initiative, but was too hot-headed to make anything of it.

She had stayed silent on the last twos dreams of reaching championship-class; most never became the less-than-one percent of world-class trainers. Particularly for Hilda, she had remained mum about that fact that over ninety percent of that less-than-one percent were men, mostly because they made up the majority of trainers who were simultaneously mad, hungry and bullheaded enough to risk reaching for the stars and actually meaning it, even decades down the line after throwing their youth, families and social life away.

Particularly for a sport considered to be a proxy for war.

As for Hilbert Black, she was in the dark. She'd been called to a League meeting on the day of his class's turn at battling, regarding the Summer of Rain incident in Hoenn that had rocked the world over a week before.

Which was why, even as her ruined laboratory was still smoking in areas, she was only now looking over Hilbert's sixth grade report.

It had been easy to obtain for a woman of her clout. After calling the League and law enforcement, she'd also popped in a request for the Emergency Draft Assessment of Hilbert Black. Men were obligated to sign up for the draft after their eighteenth birthday, but the alarmingly young age for the drafting of potential male trainers was an even more controversial topic in Unovan politics.

Her eyes arriving at his sixth grade Pokémon Studies evaluation, she smiled wryly, her heart squeezing at the oceanic gap between the three passionate children she had just sent off and the lackadaisical boy just outside, giving his testimony, who had none of their fire.

Life is cruel, her father had once said when she'd thrown a thinly-veiled tantrum at the embarrassing age of eighteen.

Now, years later, she could feel it in her bones for herself.

Yes, life was cruel.

Smoke and fire. That was all Hilbert could see. Smoke, fire and dust.

Struggling for breath, he tried to gain some mental purchase of what had happened. The ceiling had exploded, but from an angle around the pokémon containment cage, which had absorbed the brunt of the blast for him. The other aides hadn't been as lucky.

Hilbert was forced to look down to keep the dust out of his eyes, and he almost threw up at what he saw—what had once been talking, living people just a few moments ago—

In his sudden state of stress, his mind reached out. He tore his eyes off the mutilated corpses, desperate for something else to look at.

Monk. Where are you, Monk?

A suffocating, cold pressure pressed into the back of his mind, before normalising almost immediately. Flashes of foreign emotion burst by like flags in a festival: alarm, worry, fear. The familiar, perky beat of Monk's mind harmonising with his own adjusted to his heartbeat and breathing.

"Ah, no—wait!" he heard Professor Juniper cry out over the wreck of her lab.

"Daruma-maka!"

Monk the darumaka leapt and wriggled through the debris until he finally tackled into the back of Hilbert's leg, a comforting weight he had well grown used to over the years.

"Dei-deino!"

"Lar..."

Twisting around while coughing, Hilbert saw the deino and larvesta poking hesitantly out of their broken luxury suite, looking about worriedly. Taking off his jacket, he waved away as much smoke as he could, and extended it around the two little monsters. He brushed aside their startled cries as he wrapped and picked them up into his arms. Later. Everything later.

Monk climbed up onto his head, doing his best to shield Hilbert's face from the fiery, unstable environment around them with his stubby limbs.

"Come on, we have to get out of here," he rasped. Hacking and coughing to clear his airway, he then took as deep a breath as he could to shout, "Professor Junip—"

Danger.

Screaming knives pierced at the nerves on the back of his neck. Monk's instinct as a monster.

Hilbert deliberately tripped to the side, Monk leaping off his head, rolling as gracefully as he could while shielding the two little pokémon in his arms—

A blinding flash of red, black and silver shattered—no, sliced through where he had just been, barely moving the air around it in spite of its sheer velocity.

A primal, gut-wrenching scream ripped from Monk's belly as he stood between him and their sudden foe. A monster's battle cry, no matter how small he was.

Fear, anger and panic hammered into an agreement in their mental handshake. Hilbert felt rather than saw the first fires of bloodlust and adrenaline shake through Monk's tiny form. Then he saw the identity of their attacker as the dust cleared.

Golden, axe-like horn. Red and black body reminiscent of a knight. Sharp, silver blades protruding from its body and limbs. Steel body shining in the firelight.

A bisharp.

"Who are—"

There was no warning, no telegraphed movement, not even a glimmer of emotion in the bisharp's dull eyes before it turned into a gleaming blur growing larger—

Intercept, Hilbert barely needed to scream in his mind, before a searing comet of fire and fur streaked across his vision to clipped into the bisharp's side, sending the two tumbling off. Debris and equipment shattered and flew in the wake of Monk's Flame Charged frenzy.

Accelerate, he ordered, searing the concept of gears lurching into top speed through their mental wire. A brief burst of acknowledgement echoed back.

Monk was small and nimble, but a bisharp was all of that in a better proportioned package. Faster, too, but speed was relative.

Especially for a fire-type.

The bisharp quickly understood the meaning of Monk's rocketing around, a blazing, murderous ping-pong picking up speed with every Flame Charge. It's eyes followed his every movement and a second later, at Hilbert's dismay, so did its body.

Punch for punch. Kick for kick. The two blurs, one gleaming, the other ablaze, duelled like a pair of violent rubber balls, caught in the cage that was the broken lab.

Then the bisharp broke off to, once again, rocket towards Hilbert.

Hilbert wasn't anything special. He knew that. He had an ordinary birth and ordinary life. He had never been caught in any sort of funny business, other than some daring escapades with Cheren, who he suddenly missed terribly. He played basketball and pokémon battles with his older brother. The most special thing in his life was the limited edition Cynthia and Skyla bikini poster that his mother always threatened to take down if he didn't clean his room.

So, in that moment, he knew that it wasn't him.

It was the two, rare pokémon in his arms.

Instinct took over, and he huddled his body around them as securely as possible, attempting to roll away from the trajectory of the bisharp, now barely a few meters away—before something poked out from beneath his embrace.

Sharp heat exploded.

Nuvema was a seaside town, and Hilbert was no stranger to bonfires and barbecues on the beach. His favourite type of wood to burn was driftwood that he would find washed up on the sand, which, while toxic in fumes, burned—

—blue and purple.

Dragon Breath.

Deinos had no ocular senses to speak of. They were born blind and spent the rest of their lives blind unless they took the blood-hewn path to complete evolution. But what they lacked for in sight, they made up for in hearing, smell and taste.

And sheer power.

The Dragon Breath veered off inaccurately to the side, but it was large enough in size to count. The bisharp tumbled past Hilbert, a metallic edge slicing him painfully down the side of his back, and screamed as dragon fire seeped its paralysing toxins into its hide. As if on cue, the larvesta in Hilbert's arms took advantage of its vulnerability to spray down a String Shot.

It was now or never.

"Monk!" Hilbert barked hoarsely over the river of pain that was his backside, thoughts belting over their link. "Now!"

The darumaka catapulted towards the bisharp, repeated Flame Charges propelling him to meteoric speeds.

Speed meant mass.

But no one was foolish enough to rely on a single hit.

Consecutive Flame Punches.

Like a white-hot minigun, Monk's cruel fists drove repeatedly into the bisharp's shuddering body, unrelenting for a good several seconds, before a final, sickening uppercut sent the monster flying.

Hilbert knew it was over before the bisharp's charred and melted body even hit the floor.

He patted the two pokémon on his lap, letting out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.

"Thanks for that. Dunno where Monk and I would be without you guys."

The deino gave a laugh that sounded like small stones against gravel, while the larvesta simply peered up at him with large, curious blue eyes.

Then a beam of red light arched down, dissolving the prone bisharp into a crimson radiance that rushed up into the air—into the brandished poké ball of a darkly dressed man.

Hilbert looked up at him, a move imitated by Monk and the two monsters.

Standing slouched on the freshly shattered edge of the second floor, the strange trainer gazed back down at him with a catatonic look – his face below the eyes was covered by a mask; long, unkempt, bone-white hair kept at bay with a headband.

By no measurement he knew did the man look like a lab aid, or someone Juniper would hire.

"Who the hell are you?" Hilbert shouted over the crackling flames.

A pause, then, barely loud enough for him to hear, "I thought things were taking too long over here."

Two more men, identical to the first, seemingly melted out of the shadows, miniaturised warp-crates dotting their belts. The weight of their icy stares made Hilbert flinch, but he stood firm, grinding his heels into the broken floor. If they were the ones responsible for the explosion, he wasn't about to let them go easily. He didn't have the greatest sense of justice, but here, in this moment, he felt resolute.

"The pokémon are unnegotiable," one of them uttered. "One skilled trainer capable of linking minds is still just one."

"No, not even a trainer," the middle one sneered.

Another raised his head, as if tasting the air.

"Too late. The rangers are here. We must leave."

Almost immediately after he spoke, a deep, guttural roar shook the foundations of the building. A shock of relief and victory shot through Hilbert's nerves.

Quartz the tyranitar. A monster within the Demon 500 rankings honed through decades in the championship circuit.

Took Jay long enough, although he took a stab at rationalising that not much time had passed in the heat of battle and mind-drifting.

By the time the rangers and police swarmed into the scene, however, the triplets had vanished without a noise or trace, and Hilbert, covered with soot, grime and blood, was left with a distinct feeling of surrealness.

He only realised a second later as the adrenaline wore off that, just maybe, it had to do with the warm, sticky feeling on his back, and the sudden chill over his body.

The last thing he saw was Professor Juniper, shouting something he couldn't make out.

Hilbert awoke to an audino staring at him.

He stared back.

The audino stared back harder.

"Huh, so humans and pokémon do go to the same afterlife," he remarked.

"You're quite alive, Mr Black," an old, professional voice clarified, and the audino giggled. A clean, wrinkled hand reached over to his face, checking his temperature and also pinching his cheek for some reason. "Oh, good, the colour's returning to you. You lost quite a bit of blood back there, although I think it might have been shock, too. Do you feel fine? In any pain?"

"Um, I don't think so..."

Wriggling about, Hilbert attempted to feel his back. His shirt and jacket lay in folded tatters beside him and he was wearing a hospital-issued shirt. The audino giggled harder at his imitation of a stunfisk, and he sent a dirty look back.

"Oh, no, that's been healed. The wound wasn't too deep, fortunately, and your spinal cord and muscles are fine. I dare say you should be thankful you weren't born in the Warring Ages; that looked like the work of a steel-type, and they were notorious for being lathered in poison by their trainers before a battle. Fortunately, it's fallen out of style among criminals nowadays."

Hilbert didn't clarify that poison on its body would've probably been detrimental for kidnapping rare pokémon alive and unspoiled. He wasn't really sure, after all. Just speculation.

With a hum, he settled down on the spartan bed and looked around the clean, sterile hospital tent, suddenly very aware of his dry mouth and throat.

"I want ice-cream," he uttered, eyes half-lidded.

"Very healthy, then," the old doctor said lightly, pushing a disposable cup of water into his hand. "Rescue operations are still ongoing, so you'll have to vacate that bed, unfortunately. The rangers and law enforcement, however, will want your testimony before you leave. There were signs of a battle, after all."

"Yeah, I…," Hilbert trailed off, looking around once again. "Oh, Monk."

"All the pokémon are with Professor Juniper, lad."

"Ah."

Thanking the doctor and his giggly audino, Hilbert downed the cup of water in one shot, feeling oddly refreshed as he slouched out of the tent a minute later with his ruined clothes tucked under one arm. It was the first time he'd ever lost consciousness or been majorly injured, but he'd heard that powerful, veteran audinos could heal gaping wounds in mere hours and bring back even the most tired man to peak condition.

Yay for monster healthcare.

...It was free, right?

Sweating nervously, Hilbert decided to make a quick beeline for the tent that looked vaguely like it belonged to Professor Juniper, her laboratory still smoking over them.

The image of dead, broken bodies resurging in his mind, he quickly sobered up.

Not even the strongest pokémon medic could save someone from death.

He found Monk narrating something smugly in front of a curious audience of laboratory pokémon, no doubt regaling them with wildly exaggerated tales of his epic clash of wills with the dastardly bisharp bandit. Hilbert tried not to deadpan too hard at the small, bragging ball of fur; Professor Juniper was waving him over anyway.

"Are you alright?" she asked when he shuffled over. There was a glint in her eye that reminded him far too much of his mother, even though she looked far too exhausted to still be working.

Hilbert tugged at his hospital-issued shirt nervously, regretting not just taking Monk and high-tailing it out of the lab compound. The police could take his testimony later for all he cared.

"Oh, yes. I, uh, got healed by an audino. I think. Feel good as new." And hopefully my parents' bank account won't be. It isn't the sort of thing I can get jailed for, right? If there's no receipt, there's no payment!

He was never really comfortable around authority figures. They asked too many questions that he didn't want to think about the reasons to ask.

"Well, first off," she huffed. "The police want your testimony. Rather quickly, in fact. A terrorist robbery of this scale on a government-affiliated facility is no laughing matter."

Hilbert winced, wondering how deep the pool he had gotten himself into went, and also suddenly relieved he hadn't just ran off with Monk.

Safe! All skill, no luck!

"And you should contact your family. I told them that you were fine, just knocked out, but the League and law enforcement have cordoned off the entire area to keep non-affiliated civilians out. Your mother's been very...vocal in her objections."

Hilbert winced harder.

"I may have also mentioned the blood loss, I'm very sorry."

Why? Why would you do that? Does the concept of patient confidentiality not exist to you?

Hilbert suspected he wasn't going to be seeing the outside of his house for a while. Maybe Mrs White next door would sympathise and lobby for his freedom. He recalled that she'd been an accomplished trainer like Mr White in her youth. Also being an unusually attractive housewife never hurt.

"Um, I'll just give my testimony and be on my way, then," he said, feeling resigned to his looming fate. "Thank you, professor." Not.

"Ah, wait a moment. I have a couple of questions for you myself," she sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

Hilbert twitched.

"You see, I actually caught the latter half of your battle myself, so the police aren't exactly in the dark about what happened, including those three men. But what I didn't mention to them was that you weren't exactly commanding Monk with vocal commands." She fixed him with a heavy, searching gaze. "It's not a crime to keep it a secret, but since when could you synergise with pokémon?"

"Um," said Hilbert again dumbly, wiping his sweaty hands on his grimy trousers. "Since I was around seven, I think...ma'am," he belatedly tacked on, trying not to sound too high-pitched.

Which was a lie. He honestly couldn't remember.

"Level?"

"Second, almost on the way to third."

"And who else knows you can do this?"

"My older brother. We battle with pokémon sometimes. And my parents."

"And they never pushed you into the trainer occupation?"

Hilbert's eyes screwed up in an effort to recall. He couldn't ever remember his parents trying to push him into anything. Actually, wait, he could, a lot, but he couldn't ever remember being interested for long, and they quickly gave up. He wasn't very talented like his older brother. Somewhere inside him, he knew it wasn't a very good way to live.

"...Not really? They just told me to do what I wanted." And to take things a bit more seriously—hey, wait, I totally take things seriously! Just a minute ago I was worrying about healthcare debt! Totally adult things, right?

Juniper just sighed.

"Well..."

"No, sorry, I was just curious. You'll find the League investigators in the tent next over. They've got pokémon guards around: you can't miss it."

Nodding, Hilbert swung on his heel, and made another beeline out of the tent, siezing Monk mid-narration on the way.

When in doubt, run away!

Predictably, Hilbert didn't see much of the outside for the next week. His mother, emboldened by his own father's worried phone call, had all but locked him into his room, and even his older brother had stolen his favourite basketball to prevent him from injuring himself out of sheer boredom in his room. The last time he'd gone out was for a funeral for Professor Juniper's deceased lab aides, and even then his family had watched him like a braviary.

But Hilbert had a plan.

"You know, young man, this does count as breaking and entering."

In the middle of a humming a spy film theme song as he made his through the Whites' garden, Hilbert froze.

Then he carried on as if nothing had happened.

"Do you want me to call an ambulance?" said Mrs White in a silky sweet voice, sighing dramatically as she cradled a cheek in her hand. "If I recall from what your mother was telling me, you were still recuperating—"

"P-please, anything but that!" Hilbert croaked, twisting around to show his bloodshot eyes. "Any longer and I'll go crazy inside there!"

In his charter of relationships, Mrs White occupied a strange spot between a surrogate aunt and a friend. He was familiar with her due to being neighbours, also because Cheren often shanghaied him into something or the other when he was over to visit Hilda, who he was virtually strangers with. Mrs White often treated him and Cheren like the sons she never had, while Hilda simply ignored him.

He knew he wasn't the most impressive guy around, hardly as smart as Cheren, but her disregard for him had honestly hurt a bit. At least she wasn't around anymore.

Eh, maybe she's super into intelligent guys.

"B-besides, calling an ambulance when I'm perfectly healthy could get you fined, you know?" he laughed nervously.

"I misspoke. I meant to just call your mother."

"That's even worse! She'll actually lock me in my room! Really! I swear, she thinks controlling is caring!"

Mrs White exhaled, eyelids fluttering shut.

"One day, you'll regret complaining about a woman to another woman."

"She's my mum, she doesn't count."

"She's your mother, she counts more."

"No she doesn't."

"Don't get uppity with me, young man, I'm your only ally around here," she warned, heading back into her home. "Now come on, get in. I'll tell her I wanted to see where you were injured or something. Honestly, non-trainers have no sense for how pokémon work. I've patched up countless injuries Miles got from training with healer monsters."

Hilbert blinked owlishly as he scurried into the Whites' residence. It was a little messier, having far more pokémon, but was much warmer and smelled nice.

"Mr White isn't in? Today's Sunday, right?"

Mrs White waved a hand.

"He's out. That attack on Aurea's lab made quite a mess all around."

"Ah."

"I heard you were in the thick of it," she called from the kitchen, the sound of boiling water accompanying her voice. "Aurea told me you held off a rogue pokémon."

"Just one," he called back. "A bisharp. Monk had the type advantage, and he's not exactly new to battling."

Something batted lightly at his leg. Looking down, he then knelt down to keep eye contact with the Whites' liepard, breathing slowly, before she blinked her brilliant, unnervingly sharp eyes before he did and allowed him to scratch behind her ears. Most of the Whites' pokémon were out in town with the other families' pokémon. It was nature to always leave one behind during the day to keep watch over the house. The pokémon in his own were much the same way.

"Still," she declared. Clinks of china and metal spoons rang through the house. "There's a clear difference between play battling and fighting for your life. And type match-ups aren't exactly the most reliable thing. Ten years ago we didn't even know the full types of some common pokémon, and the effectiveness can vary from monster to monster, depending on their diet and the environment they were raised in."

"Sounds complicated," he grumbled as he took a seat on one of the sofas. The liepard sauntered off into the depths of the colourful house.

"It's the reality of training," he heard her say, voice clearer as she entered the living room with a tray bustling with refreshments. "Non-trainers put far too much stock on types."

"I'm not a trainer."

"You are if you're battling for your life with monsters," she huffed. "Especially if you can synergise with them. In some cultures you'd already be on your journey. The hard way."

She laid the tray down onto the coffee table, and perched down on the adjacent sofa.

Hilbert frowned.

"Professor Juniper told you that about me?"

"No. I always saw you battling with the other kids, remember?"

"...Oh, yeah, you did," he related, blinking. He'd never really thought about the implications of Mrs White having been a trainer before – a travelling trainer, at that. It was how she'd met Mr White.

"It's a rare thing, being a natural synergist," she explained, crossing her arms. "Most trainers have to work for years before they can even send a thought over to their starter. Even I can barely direct my own pokémon with my mind alone. My husband does a little better, but he's a little fuzzier when it comes to clarifying words and their meanings. You're a little over sixteen, and I can tell you're better than both of us put together."

Hilbert turned to fidgeting again, unused to the concepts being applied to him. It had been a strange week so far, with deaths, funerals, a battle almost leading to one, being forced to stay in his room, and now Mrs White was talking to him like a senior trainer instead of an aunt who humoured his bad jokes.

"Never really thought about it," he retorted.

"Of course you didn't." Another sigh. "You don't even know why Hilda hates you so much."

"Wait, she hates me?" Hilbert spluttered over his tea.

"Figure that one out yourself. She's still my daughter, no matter how much she exasperates me." Sighing, Mrs White relaxed back into the plush embrace of her sofa. "Bianca ran away, you know?"

Hilbert stared down into the depths of his tea, thoughts swirling along with the lazy currents.

"You're not surprised."

"Honestly, she kinda made me nauseous with how pure and nice she was."

"You're such a twisted kid. I'm glad my daughter hates you."

"Whoa, hey, I'm just being realistic. And her dad is pretty scary as well. I'd run away too, I think," he retaliated, lips twisting in displeasure as he pointed at himself.

"Being unable to appreciate such a pure person for who they are makes you pretty twisted," Mrs White proclaimed with a light yawn. "But I agree. Her father is far too overbearing, although I'm quite sure Hilda had a hand in it. With his connections in the League, though, I'm not sure how far she'll go. I'd give until Castelia. Nimbasa at most. Or Undella. If she goes north, but the routes there are impossible for novices, and it's mostly monster territory."

"Isn't the League better than that? They've got eyes and ears everywhere, right?"

"Not as invasive as you think, and there are laws protecting trainers. Especially travelling trainers. Laws that her father helped place himself and probably taught her to shoo her away from the occupation. He's a hard man, but a lawful one. Strict on himself before others."

"Yeah, I met him before. He even came to the funeral a couple of days ago."

Mrs White nodded.

"He knows everybody around Unova and then some. Like I said, I don't think Bianca will get too far in her journey, even if she travels by foot instead of public transport."

The doorbell rang. Setting her teacup down, Mrs White rose.

"Let me get that."

Nodding, Hilbert reached for a handful of snacks. He paused while munching on one when he heard a familiar voice echo throughout the house.

Professor Juniper?

Rising to his feet instinctively, Hilbert leaned over to peer into the corridor leading to the front door. He had his answer a moment later, as the two women giggled and chattered their way into the living room.

Stopping at the doorway, Juniper stared at him, bright eyes blinking as they made their way between him and Mrs White.

"Oh my, you two knew each other?"

"We live next door to each other. You think we didn't?" Mrs White replied in disbelief.

"No offence," huffed Juniper (None taken, Hilbert automatically replied darkly in his mind), "but there's a bit of an age gap."

With Mrs White around, she seemed to show a far less professional face that Hilbert had never seen before. He decided he liked her professional side far more, if only because it was less weird to see.

Mrs White shook her head.

"It's a trainer thing."

He twisted a candy wrapping between his fingers.

So it's a given that I'm a bonafide trainer, now? Not that I don't fit into the definition anyway, but there's a clear difference between a hobbyist and a lifer…

Staring at the both of them for a beat longer, Juniper than sidled up to Mrs White to whisper something into her ear. Hilbert narrowed his eyes in suspicion. Nothing good ever came out of people whispering in front of company, especially gossipy old women. Not that he'd ever say 'old' to the two women in front of him in particular, although Juniper was the only one who looked like she was getting on in years.

Then Mrs White shrieked, turning a brilliant shade of cheri berry-red.

"REA! NO—h-he's like my nephew—!" Her hand shot up to clamp over her mouth, eyes wide. Juniper turned her head away from him so fast he could hear her neck crick.

After a dumb moment, Hilbert felt warmth creep up his neck and cheeks. He choked on his tea.

"U-um, I mean, not that she's not really beautiful, but...err…," Hilbert blurted out, instantly regretting it. He looked away and hoped his burning ears weren't too conspicuous, suddenly gripped by the overwhelming desire to make a tactical retreat as fast as he could.

The awkwardness could've suffocated a gigalith.

"But what?" Mrs White's demeanour suddenly turned icy, a harsh light of a woman somehow scorned emanating from her eyes.

"Er, the age gap...marital status…," he mumbled, fingers tightening around his teacup.

"But. What?"

No, I mean, how much pride do you have in your appearance, woman? I want a refund for my sympathy! I guess Hilda had to have gotten that haughtiness somewhere, though…

Looking at Juniper, who now met his eyes with an apologetic look, he could tell he wasn't alone in his thoughts.

Put yourself in your daughter's shoes, Mrs White; think of how super gross she would find this moment. Really. Please.

"Mother and daughter alike, both so solipsistic," Juniper sighed once they were kicked outside, well out of earshot once they were down the street. "Whenever I think I'm being sensitive about my age, I just look at her and..."

"Solipsistic?" Hilbert repeated, looking up at the tree branches rocking gently in the spring breeze.

It was almost evening.

"Self-absorbed."

"Oh."

"Oh, indeed. She must be fond of you if she let you into her home. She's incredibly picky about her company. Least she's better than her daughter—but I'm gossiping again," Juniper interrupted herself, pinching the bridge of her nose habitually. Hilbert had the feeling that she was venting more than gossiping. "At any rate, I'm glad I got to meet you there, Hilbert. Saves me the trouble of finding you."

"We met at the funeral," Hilbert pointed out. "Just a couple of days ago."

Juniper gave a sad smile.

"Well, yes, but I have a request for you that wasn't quite appropriate for the occasion."

He paused in his steps and met her eyes, curious.

"Oh, OK."

She stopped as well, and—

Hilbert could feel the world pause around him, taking in a deep, quiet breath. For a moment, everything in the evening sun seemed so vivid it almost hurt.

"How would you feel about working for me?"

Her words shook around in his brain.

"Like...an intern?" He cocked his head, brow hunching. "I'm not really a wiz-kid in the sciences. I'm thinking of taking the humanities course next year."

Professor Juniper laughed, "No, no, nothing like that. I'm talking about as a field aide. You'll be granted a temporary trainer's license and a leave of absence from school for fifty business days."

His heart tripped.

"Leave of absence..."

"You'll be out there, with research kits. Easy to use, for field aides deployed by researchers like me. I'll be honest, you won't be doing anything too different than what your friend Cheren is doing. And if you want, by the end of those fifty business days – counting from after this spring break and discounting subsequent school breaks – you can carry on being a trainer. Think of it as a trial run."

"Won't there be a problem, since I've never taken the qualification test?"

Juniper's eyes fixed into a look that he'd grown used to seeing on adults this past week.

"Well...no," she murmured privately, before speaking up again. "Do you know what the main criteria of those tests are?"

Hilbert scratched his head. He'd never actually bothered to find out. Simply assumed.

"...Survival? Knowledge?"

"For millions of years, humans have been trying to do one thing, Hilbert: understand. And you," she pointed a finger at his head, "who is capable of melding minds with monsters from birth, stand head and shoulders above the masses. It's simple, undeniable fact. Believe me when I say not even the League would deny you a license even as you are now."

Hilbert gaped slightly. His older brother's words echoed in the strands of his memory.

Don't go thinking the world makes sense. How arrogant would you be to think that?

"...I...but..."

"There are plenty of trainers out there," she articulated. An almost sad smile adorned her lips as her eyes drifted off. "There are thousands more of them every day, and thousands less as they die to one thing or another. At any given time, there are millions of them in this world of ours, and I won't deny that your potential is anything but a blip in the grand scheme of things."

He nodded, transfixed.

"But you're here right now, aren't you?"

He wondered if he imagined the breeze passing through, both warm and cold against his skin.

"And that's enough; to light the way."

Hilbert recalled the motto of the World League Association, which he'd once asked his father to translate for him when he was ten and ignorant. Ignorant as he still felt now.

Ego accipere metus a ignota.

I take fear from the unknown.

"Bianca ran away, you know?"

Juniper's lab was burning.

It was a sight he would never forget so long as he lived.

"No, not even a trainer," the thief sneered.

"Well, just think on it for now. I know it'll be a big change in lifestyle—"

"I can do it."

Juniper turned to look back at him, surprise clear in her eyes.

Hilbert stood resolute.

"I'll do it."

A/N: I know nothing about Latin. Just tinkered about with online translation machines, reverse-checking and everything. Tried it as a stand-in for some random ancient pokémon world language.