Thirteen years ago, he trades one pokemon for another.
"Three on three," the two trainers agree.
Anderson pats the phantump on his shoulder, tries to get it to pay attention. It obeys him okay but he's been having a bit of trouble getting it to understand battles, so he figures letting it watch other people's might make up for that.
The boy says, "Mareep, I choose you!"
"Go, Cottonee!" shouts the girl, the lilt of a foreign accent to her voice as she hurls the black and gold luxury ball out. It seems a little incongruous put next to her clothing: worn jeans fraying at the bottom, well broken-in sneakers, and a pink top that's stamped all over with flowers and glitter. It seems a little incongruous put next to her hair, straight and shoulder-length and ragged edged black, with a blue headband decorated with more flowers holding the bangs out of her face. It seems a little incongruous put next to her skin, no necklace around her neck, no earrings in her ears, no nail polish on any of her fingernails.
Anderson doesn't notice much about the boy besides the fact that he was on the other side of the battle, unremarkable and not worth even a full glance. The unremarkable boy says, "Start off with confuse ray, Mareep!" and the mareep bleats, the round ball on the tip of its tail starting to glow.
"Cottonee, use cotton spore!"
The cottonee puffs itself up and... Ah-hah! Closes its eyes as it shakes itself violently, knocking white fluff loose to drift in the air. Had she thought of that, or did she just get lucky?
"Uh," says the boy. His pokemon paws the ground with a foot, the pulsing glow remaining in its tail as it watches the cottonee.
"Now razor leaf!"
Her cottonee has to open its eyes for that, and the mareep lets out the blinding strobe-flash from its tail as soon as that happens, but there's no sign it hit its target's eyes. There's an awful lot of fluff between the two of them now. Then the cottonee blasts a gale of leaves toward the mareep, blowing the downy balls along with them, and the mareep is sliced and entangled at once. "Maaaa..." it complains, staggering a bit as it tries to loosen its legs. "Eeeeeeep."
"And stun spore!" she shouts.
"Thunderwave!" the boy retorts. "Two can play at this game!"
The cottonee puffs up suddenly, sending out a cloud of yellow dust. The mareep shouts, "Reep!" as electricity dances all over its puffy white wool and then jumps forward, arcing through the air into the cottonee's body. The cottonee squeaks and spasms. Meanwhile, the yellow dust drifts slowly, avoidably, toward the mareep, who begins to struggle against the fluff entangling it. For a moment it looks like the mareep might get clear, and then it overreaches and falls sideways, thick fur cushioning the blow but its little blue legs now waving helplessly in the air as the spores roll over it. It trembles and shakes.
So now they're both half paralyzed. Well, that was kind of a wash, wasn't it?
The girl's grinning, though, as if this is still going great for her. Does she know something he doesn't, or is she just really confident? Or, maybe she's just one of those people who likes battles whether they're winning or losing. "Leech seed," orders the girl.
The boy groans theatrically as the seeds hit and sprout. "Alright, Mareep, return. Go, Swinub!" The pokemon materializes and lets out a high-pitched grunt. "Ice shard!"
"In!" the swinub squeaks, and spits a sharp projectile that smacks point-first into the drifting cottonee, sending it flying with a squeal of pain.
"Sunny day, Cottonee!"
"Coooooneee!" The cottonee...ah, it's hard to describe, like he can almost see what's happening but there's a slight of hand, a discontinuity. The air or the light above the pokemon shifts, and the only thing he can think of is like watching broken glass played backward, like an infinity of crystal bits snapping into place into perfect and seamless clarity. The sunlight just rushes down, nothing getting in the way of it, and there's a blast of light and heat he has to squint against. The sun's no bigger in the sky but it's so much brighter.
The swinub squeaks again, sounding more distressed, and without an order begins to spit ice shard after ice shard. The cottonee yips and grunts, looking like it's attempting to get clear of the attacks but when it moves too sharply it ends up twitching and spasming in place, then pelted by chunks of ice one after another.
"Return, Cottonee. Exeggutor, go!" the girl shouts, and he has never seen an exeggutor like that, with the neck going up and up and up and up.
The swinub crams its face into the ground and digs, sending up a shower of dirt that hides it from view even before it actually manages to bury itself.
"What? No!" the boy cries. "Swinub! Get back up here, we need to use ice moves! Icy wind, use icy wind on it!"
"Power whip as soon as it pops up, Exeggutor!" The exeggutor lets out a bugling cry, so much richer than he expects, and when the swinub tries to obey its trainer's order, the poor thing's head is barely visible before the exeggutor's head crashes into the hole with all the force of a toppling tree.
The attack probably didn't connect, because when its head raises again with the creak of a bending bough, there's no sign of the swinub in the crater of dirt left behind. After a moment, the swinub pops up from a new hole nearby and the exeggutor's head topples again.
"Tor!" it cries when it unbends, and he watches it hop back and forth on stubby legs, watches the strange tail this one has wag rapidly.
"Behind you!" the girl warns, having noticed some sign in the ground he missed just before the swinub quite pops out, but it's probably not needed because the exeggutor is already bending backward with as much ease and speed as the times before.
By all appearances, the swinub wasn't expecting to be noticed half so quickly. It's just puffing up to try to blow an icy wind and the tiny delay of that means this time, the blow lands. The back of the exeggutor's head is frosted when it comes back up but the sun is still blazing above and it only shakes itself once before the thin crust melts back into water. Meanwhile, the swinub remains stunned and barely twitching in the dirt.
"Ugh, Swinub," the boy whines. He sighs and recalls his pokemon, then throws out the last one. The pokeball spins through the air and splits apart to release a puddle of lava. "Alright, it's all on you, Slugma! Start off with flame burst!"
The slugma gamely spits a burst of flame into the exeggutor's thicker lower body. It rolls over the smooth sides, leaving behind a smokey mark but not much sign it actually harmed the slugma's opponent.
"Ha!" shouts the girl. "Exeggutor, they think you can't handle a little heat! Show them how outraged that makes you!"
"Ex egg gu tor!" the exeggutor bellows, stomping its feet.
"Rapidfire ember!" The boy sounds frantic.
The slugma shoots balls of fire at the charging pokemon, all of them bouncing off the exeggutor with little effect. He's confused for a moment, expecting it to slam its head down again, by how the exeggutor keeps getting closer and closer, and then it actually jumps and stomps down on top of the slugma, squishing it almost flat.
"Show them we mean business! Use overheat, Slugma, burn it up!"
The slugma under the exeggutor's feet turns from orange to a blue-white that leaves an afterimage on his eyes, and the entire area goes up in flame. The exeggutor cries out, through it sounds at least as much in surprise as in pain, and totters backward. As the flames fade he can see its legs are blackened and still smoking, with a line of embers glowing faintly along the side of one foot.
The slugma doesn't look that great either. It pulls itself together a bit, raising a goopy head, though the rest of its body remains puddled on the burnt and blackened ground.
He thinks it seems hard to say how the battle will go, but the girl grins as wide and predatory as a sharpedo. "Great job, Exeggutor!" she cheers. "You've got this! Now, use facade!"
She checks her pokemon over after the battle, then recalls it and looks around as if she's only just registered their audience. Her eyes catch on him.
"Oh. My. God!" shouts the girl, rushing over. "A phantump!"
To be honest? It's because he thinks she's cute and because he's a little in awe of her after seeing her battle. It isn't a coherent thought, there's no particular benefit for him to giving her the pokemon. He's too inexperienced to try to transition into asking her to hang out afterward and he's far too inexperienced to even want to use it as a bargaining chip, let alone try to. But he's not particularly attached to the phantump and anyway, she actually offers quite a good trade for it, a sweet leafeon that's stronger than the phantump or any of his other pokemon, who ends up carrying him through to his fifth badge.
"It won't, uh, sorry to say but it won't stay a cute phantump if it's traded," he warns her, and gets a roll of her eyes in return.
"I know," she tells him, and then in an excited burst, "A trevenant is possibly the only thing better than a phantump. Who wouldn't want a trevenant?" She gets a little starry-eyed and continues, "They're the coolest of all the grass types!" with the obvious rider that grass types are, in her unhumble opinion, already the very best kind of pokemon you can possibly get. "You know, the tree the spirit's attached to doesn't just look green, it's actually living and growing, able to keep going just fine even though it's all in pieces. They say a trevenant isn't the ghost of a dead tree, it's the reincarnation of one."
He does not actually know that, and he says, "It's funny you'd say that. I caught this near where I live, but the leaves don't look like any of the species of tree I've seen around there. And my dad's a lumberjack and he took me out logging a bunch of times already, so I know a lot about the trees that live around there. Maybe it's some ancient fossil."
"Maybe!" She peers at it. Her hand runs gently along the underside of its strange, many-toothed leaves, then across the craggy bark. "The leaves look like almost a chestnut, but those have smooth bark. Who's a little itsy-bitsy mystery?" she coos, twirling a finger along one stubby limb. "Who is? It's you!" And she laughs and says, "Can you imagine, this actually being some prehistoric tree from long before the dawn of man, brought back to life by the power of this teeny little thing for us to see for the first time?"
"Yeah," he says, but he's not, really, doesn't quite understand where her enthusiasm comes from. She's got eyes for his pokemon in a way he's never felt about any of them, while he's got eyes for her.