Call me Cubone. Some time ago — never mind how long exactly — having found myself with no marowak for a mother and no comfort of companionship nor general purpose in my bestial life, I decided I would get captured by some trainer and thereby travel with this trainer and their fellow pokemon on a pokemon journey. It is the way of our kind. When we pokemon tire of dark caves and tall grasses, when jumping out at every passing trainer has ceased to bring us joy, and when we have nearly succumbed to being swallowed by that dark hole in our heart which only the warmth of friendship can fill, we cease our futile struggle against a thrown pokeball. We let the capsule encapsulate us heart and soul and body. Thus, we begin to forge our bonds of friendship. As the arms of prisoners are held by bonds of cold steel, and the avaricious poke-bankers by financial bonds, and each human by the bonds of their mortal coil, so too, have we our bonds. Our bonds are those of friendship, both as durable and inescapable as cold steel, as requisite and poisonous to our well-being as gold to the greedy man's, and as a part of ourselves as the body is a part of man.
There is a need in all men and all pokemon to have companions. We hold it of equal necessity to the need for a warm shelter. Shall we not travel countless miles on rainy days through sludge and grimers and muk to fall into either the waiting arms of a friend or atop the steadfast legs of a bed near a warm fire? And do we not experience that same warmth in our heart when we stand among friends as we do when we stand near a fire?
But which is the more important? Which is the more dear? The warmth of friendship or the warmth of a fire? And do we feel that warmth in our heart from companionship because it reminds us of a fire or do we feel the warmth from a fire because of the companions we share it with? Perhaps, you find my last question extravagant, but perpend.
Picture the campfire. There is something magically disarming about that campfire that makes complete strangers circle round and there remain long into the night disclosing innumerable personal tales to those other fellow venomoth all drawn to that same flame. Is it that warm fire or those warm hearts of all around the fire that creates this moment?
Is fire, indeed, the mother of civilization and invention? Or did people coming together as a civilization create the fire?
Man's fascination with fire is no wondrous revelation. It has forever been a central part of man's life. Their ancestors strove to keep a constant fire burning in their hearths. The Greeks placed the goddess Hera, the goddess of the hearth, among the holy pantheon as both sister and wife of almighty Zeus, and they named fire as the quintessential substance, which once stolen from the gods, enabled the birth of mankind. Indeed, even the great first of philosophers, Heraclitus, insisted that it was fire from which all things took form and that all elements, all people, and all pokemon are merely variants of that single type and power.
But, you say, fire does not belong solely to man. Does not the wild, fearsome charizard exhume fires hotter than any a normal man could make? And does not heatran's blood boil like burning magma as it circulates through its own body? Isn't fire one of the recognized eighteen types of pokemon and as much a part of pokemon as an object of man? Then, of course, fire must be something that we share, something that is both of man and of pokemon.
As it is, both fire and friendship belong not solely to man nor to pokemon, but to both.
Friendship is that eternal flame, moltres, ranked highest among those three legendary birds that fills all our lives with meaning and drives us to greater heights, supported by the crescendoing updrafts of our ardent friends. Indeed, friendship between a pokemon and a person is no covalent bond, but a fierce, unbreakable ionic bond and a great fire. Will eevee not respond equally to the acquisition of friendship as to the application of a fire stone? In both cases will eevee not evolve? Yet, friendship and fire are even more inseparable than that. In a chemical reaction, it is a required heat that forces the reagents over the reaction point and thus triggers all things necessary for life. And for that eevee or a togepi or an onix or any myriad of others, it is the great heat of friendship that forces them to react and completely changes their structure in an evolution. It is the fire and the friendship. It is both as one.
Fire is friendship, and friendship is fire. They are and have been inseparable ideas, throughout our histories.
And thus, dreaming of fires and friends, did I, in my tower of east Lavender Town, set out to find warmth as so many others had before me and so many more shall after me. I admit that in my dark tower, cold and lonely, I knew little of how bright a fire could blaze and little of the perils that awaited me. Yet ignorant or not, as I then exited the tower, my terrible fate hung in the ominous stars above me, and my fate was akin to those great burning stars, too hot to withstand up close, but soft and tempting to gaze upon from the shelter of distance. Both fire and friendship will burn you, if you let yourself get too close, and no fire is fiercer than the fire of dragons.
