A year back, someone else releases a pokemon.
It's the sort of thing generally described as unspoken but Tammy's discovering that if you wait long enough without taking the hint, unspoken things become spoken ones, and she doesn't think she wants to see how long it takes them to rise from whispers to shouts.
It's totally fine for girls to be trainers. Really it is.
"Really it is."
It's fine for them to be gym leaders too, and some places (not here) even have women running half the gyms.
But she's not a gym leader, so, isn't it time...?
"You're not a little kid anymore, after all. You need to be thinking about the future."
And it's all well and good to visit, to study in Erika's gym, it's perfectly respectable.
"I'd never say a word against Erika."
But at a certain point, people start to wonder. You know.
You know.
And her trevenant...certainly the flowers are rather unique, no one's seen ones quite like that elsewhere, but even if the pokemon flowered more than once in a blue moon, those long long tufts of tiny plain white flowers are at once rather overpowering in flower arrangements and rather underwhelming in appearance. Too much and too little. It really isn't any good for anything but battles, you know?
"Not like your sweet little whimsicott."
Too little and too much, not good for anything but battles and too good by half at them.
Tammy doesn't actually like battling too much, to be honest. It's more of a hobby, she doesn't live and breathe it, it isn't the entirety of her life. She wants other things too, a house and kids, money to live comfortably.
And pokemon are a lot of work and they deserve better than someone distracted by other things. Hadn't that been why she'd passed off the exeggutor to an Alolan friend before she'd gone back home, because the climate wasn't right for him here?
It's a very straightforward process. She deposits her trevenant and then clicks through the options on the computer terminal. Release. Are you sure? Yes. And then it's done. It'll be fine. Her trevenant is quite tough.
She's never thought much about where pokemon get released to. Do they send them back to where they were found? Is that how it is for the trevenant, a long journey, seeing so many new things and having so many new experiences, and finally ending up right where you'd first left.
She hopes her trevenant had fun.
She says, "Oh, it was just too much trouble keeping such a big pokemon, and anyway, it was really only any good for battling," because it isn't like anyone made her, and if anyone had made her, well, then it'd have hardly mattered she'd gotten rid of the trevenant.
(She ends up marrying a gym leader, in the end, one who specializes in poison and got two region's worth of badges. She shows him the two cases she has of the same and never mentions the other three, and the bracelet with all its crystals stays buried in a box. Everyone's impressed by a girl with battling talent, but fewer want to keep one around. She's really lucky. It's a good fit for them both. It's hard work being a gym leader, and you really need someone else helping out to stay afloat. They end up splitting duties quite equitably - she trains them, he battles with them, he goes to conferences, she raises them while he's gone.)