Chapter 4: First Impressions

It was five in the morning when the doors to the Santalune City Pokemon Center swished open. The attending nurse looked up from some paperwork on her desk to greet the approaching newcomer—a lean young man with black hair and violet eyes. Accompanying him was a slowking, a large pink creature with the features of a hippo and an otter, with a gray shellder "crown" sitting atop its head.

"Good morning! Welcome to the Pokemon Center. We restore your tired pokemon to full health. Would you like to rest your pokemon?"

"Please," he said, handing over a red-and-white pokeball to the pink-clad nurse. "She's a recent capture, and I'd appreciate it if you could give her a checkup. Preferably without letting her out of her pokeball."

The nurse raised an eyebrow, but nonetheless complied and left to tend to his new pokemon. Hayden let out a heavy sigh, running a hand through his hair as he did so. He looked down at his clothes—a white jacket left unbuttoned over a purple shirt, with black jeans and boots—and groaned at their condition.

"I guess that's what happens when you go camping in the woods for three weeks," he said to himself, resolving to wash his clothes in the near future.

"To be fair, white isn't really a good 'camping in the woods' color," said the slowking, arms folded behind him as he watched his trainer.

"Yeah, well, thankfully it doesn't look like we'll have to go back anytime soon," Hayden replied. He noticed that his first and only pokemon looked troubled. "Why the sour look Regi? You should be excited—we finally have another pokemon to add to our team!"

Regi unfolded his arms only to cross them in front of his chest. "I don't think that she'll share your enthusiasm," he said dully. "She attacked us Hayden, seemingly for no reason. And you should have felt how angry she was."

Before he could reply, the nurse came back with his pokeball on a tray and sat it on the counter. "I've restored your braixen to full health," she started, "however, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for her visual impairment."

Hayden and Regi looked at each other before turning back to the nurse. "She's visually impaired?" Hayden asked.

"I would have thought that you'd already know," the nurse said suspiciously. "There's a group of scars over her right eye—judging by the markings, something clawed it out—and her left retina appears to have sustained heavy damage. I doubt she can see much of anything, and what she can is probably very blurred and distorted."

Hayden flinched, both at the described injury and the nurse's scrutiny. "It was dark ma'am, and I haven't let her out of her pokeball yet. She attacked us while we were camping, and we just now got back into town."

"I see then," the nurse said a little less critically. "If you don't mind my asking, what do you plan to do with her?"

"I'm…not sure," Hayden admitted as he put a hand to his forehead. "I can't just dump her back out in the forest—hell, it's amazing she's been able to survive out there to begin with!"

"Pokemon are amazing creatures. Never underestimate what they can do."

Hayden looked at Regi and smiled. "Believe me, I know what you mean." Letting out a sigh, he took the pokeball from the counter and said, "Then I guess I'm sticking to my original plan. Thanks for your help; I'm going to let her out in the corner over there and have a talk with her."

She seemed to find his wording odd, but nonetheless said, "Take care, and we hope to see you again!"

Hayden nodded and then walked over to the black couches in the corner of the room, his partner following behind him. "Are you sure this is wise?" Regi asked. "She might maul you the moment she's let out."

"I think that if she wanted to, she would have done so already," Hayden said knowingly.

"You didn't put her into stasis? You should have told me that," Regi said critically. "What if she'd popped out of her pokeball and tried to attack you? I wouldn't have been prepared."

"And that paranoia is why I didn't tell you," Hayden replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Besides, I wanted to give her a chance to rest."

"Hayden…"

"You worry too much," Hayden said, even though as he held the pokeball in his hand he was starting to get nervous himself. "Just you wait—by the time we're done, she'll already feel like a part of the family!" He started to throw the pokeball, but stopped to add, "You remember what we talked about earlier, right? About the 'surprise?' "

Regi let out a tired sigh, but smiled all the same. "Don't worry Hayden, I remember," he assured his trainer.

With that out of the way, Hayden lobbed the pokeball into the air and waited for the emergence of his newest catch. The ball bounced off the floor, hung in midair for a second, and with an audible click split open.

A flood of light erupted from the pokeball, morphing and shifting before coalescing into Braixen. The Fox pokemon shook herself—she did not like being inside a pokeball at all—before taking a moment to examine her new surroundings. There was a lot of white and red, and the ground felt like stone except that it was unnaturally smooth. The air was different too—gone were all the familiar scents of wood, mud, and grass. In its place was the smell of a lot of pokemon; some she recognized, most she didn't.

A polite cough prompted Braixen to turn around, and when she did she found two familiar blobs of white and pink. The two humans—rather, the human and the pokemon that could talk like a human—were standing there, apparently waiting for her to acknowledge their presence.

"Good morning," Hayden said warmly. "Did you sleep well?"

Braixen glared at him.

"…Yeah, okay, dumb question. I should've know better," Hayden admitted.

Braixen continued to glare at him.

"I, um…get the impression you're rather angry…and that most of it is directed at me."

That was an understatement.

"You know, you're the one that attacked us," Hayden pointed out. "All things considered, I'm not sure you have the right to be—"

"Hayden, that's not helping," Regi interjected.

Hayden started to say something, but apparently reconsidered. "Right. Right…yeah, sorry." He cleared his throat and said, "Look, I think we've just gotten off on the wrong foot. My name is Hayden, and this is my friend Regi. I'm a pokemon trainer—specifically a psychic type specialist—and we'd like it if you would join us. We know you're upset—if it wasn't obvious before, it kind of is now—but I think that if you'll just give us a chance you'll find there's a lot to like about being a part of our team. So what do you say?"

Braixen pretended to consider his proposition. "I'm surprised he listened to you," she said, deciding to ignore Hayden entirely and focus on his friend. "Your name's Regi, right? Are you actually a pokemon?"

"I am," Regi answered. "I'm a slowking—part water type, part psychic type."

Braixen nodded. "Do slowking normally talk like humans, or is that something you learned how to do?"

"It was learned. I supposed you've never seen a slowking before?" A quick nod "no". "I'm not surprised—my species is not very common."

Braixen scoffed. "What, did the human take you from your home too?"

Regi snorted laughter. "No, I've known Hayden since I was just a humble little slowpoke."

"I see then…so you've grown up with humans. No wonder you don't have any problems betraying your own kind."

Regi started chuckling. "Your attempts at psychological manipulation are endearing, but ineffective," he replied matter-of-factly. "You don't seem to like humans very much. Is that why you attacked us in the forest?"

Braixen's ears drooped. "I overheard you say that you were looking for delphox," she answered. "Both of my parents are delphox, and a little less than three weeks ago we were attacked by a group of humans trying to capture us. You said you'd been in the forest for roughly the same amount of time, so I thought maybe one of them was with you."

"Is that so…? It's little wonder you're upset then." Regi took a breath and added, "I'm sorry—we're both sorry—about what happened to you and your family, but we didn't have any part in it nor have we seen your parents. It sounds to me like they were attacked by poachers, and if that's the case they're probably long gone."

So that was it then. Any hope she had of ever finding them… Braixen's paws balled into fists, clawed digits burying into her flesh. "How…did you find out about us in the first place? How did the other humans find out?"

"Several months ago, a hiker spotted a family of delphox fighting with a pyroar," Regi explained. "Since then, the 'Delphox of Santalune Forest' have become pretty well-known across the entire region."

Braixen's eyes widened, horrified. The entire region had known about them…? "How many humans were trying to find us?"

"I wouldn't know," Regi admitted. "I'm unsure how much you know about humans, but they have laws—a long list of rules—against disturbing pokemon far away from civilization."

"Then why were you two out there trying to find them?" Braixen asked pointedly. "In fact, what's this all about anyway? Do you think talking to me is going to somehow make me warm up to you—make me feel better about being captured?"

"Please calm down," Hayden said, speaking for the first time since the beginning of the conversation. "I…look, I shouldn't have caught you the way I did, I'll admit it, but you attacked, and I reacted, and we'd spent three weeks looking and I thought maybe I should just—"

Braixen turned on Hayden, and she swore she heard a small yipe come from his direction. "Listen up human—or rather, listen to your stupid pet, since you can't even understand me. I don't like you. I never will like you. I don't even know why you want to keep me—you must have noticed my eyes by now!"

"The nurse did notify us of your condition, yes," Regi replied nonchalantly.

"Then why!? Is this some kind of sick game to you, human? Am I part of some sort of weird collection? No, no, wait, I get it now—you wanted to use me to find my parents!"

"Wait, what?" said Hayden. "No, hold on, that's not—"

"That's what this is about, isn't it? Trying to manipulate me…make me drop my guard by telling me how 'sorry' you are or that you 'didn't mean to capture me'. Ha! Well jokes on you, because those other humans beat you to it!"

"Wait, please, that's not why we—"

"And even if I did know where my parents were, I'd never tell you!" Braixen declared tearfully. "In fact, you might as well get rid of me now, because there is no way that I'm ever going to—"

Will you please stop talking and listen to me for a moment!?

Braixen yelped, so startled by the mental voice that she actually fell over backwards. She lay there for several minutes, staring at the ceiling, contemplating what she'd just heard. "That was telepathy," she said, more to herself than to anyone else. She sat up, looked at Hayden, and said, "That was telepathy. You used telepathy!"

I did, Hayden confirmed in mental deadpan.

"But…but you're a human! He's a human right? Humans can't use telepathy!"

Some of us can, Hayden projected, with a mental voice that perfectly matched his speaking voice. There are people out there who are born with limited psychic ability. We're called 'psychics'—

"An imaginative name, as you can tell," Regi snarked.

—and with proper training we can learn to use our abilities the same way that a psychic type pokemon would.

"I…um…okay, wow. I don't know how to respond to that," Braixen said as she got back to her feet. "Wait, does that mean you could understand me before—that you can understand me now?"

Every wor—

"Stop that," Braixen growled. "That's…I don't like that, your voice inside my head. It's weird."

Huh? Oh, sorry about that. Hayden cleared his throat and continued, "Like I was saying, yeah, I could understand you the whole time. I kind of wanted it to be a surprise, to impress you, but that didn't exactly go as planned."

"As Hayden said earlier, he's a psychic type specialist," Regi added. "The reason we were looking for your parents is because he wanted to ask if one of them would join us. I personally opposed the idea, but he didn't want to listen to me."

Braixen's ears twitched. "You disagreed with your human? Why?"

"Many reasons, but mostly because I knew they would say no," Regi said matter-of-factly. "You're their daughter, so you tell me; am I wrong?"

Braixen thought of her father, and his outspoken hatred for humans. She then thought of her mother, who despite having a gentler impression was still leery of them. Add in the fact they were looking after her, and… "Yeah, there was basically no chance of that ever happening."

"Told you," Regi said smugly, earning an annoyed grunt from his master.

"Yeah, well…they would have said yes had I actually met them," Hayden insisted. "You of all people should know just how persuasive I can be."

"Oh really?" Braixen replied, curious in spite of herself. "Okay, I'll bite—how would you have done it? How would you have convinced either of my parents to leave their only daughter behind and willingly submit themselves to a life of servitude?"

"It's not servitu—ergh!" Hayden recomposed himself and said, "The same way I'm going to convince you to stick with me and Regi—I'm going to teach you how to see again!"

Braixen blinked slowly. "What."

"I'll second that 'what,' " Regi added.

"Like I said, I'm a psychic type specialist," Hayden started. "There are all sorts of moves and abilities that deal with extrasensory perception. What kind of lousy psychic would I be if I couldn't teach you to use your abilities to do the same?"

"Okay, but…how would that have convinced my parents?"

There was a brief moment of silence.

"Well…the idea was that they'd be so impressed that they'd want to join me," Hayden said. "Why, would that not do the trick?"

"I think my dad would have roasted you before you had the chance," Braixen said deadpan. "But either way, I think you're full of it."

"I am not full of it!" Hayden insisted.

"I'm not even a psychic type yet," Braixen rebutted. "I can use Psybeam, but that's about the extent of my 'psychic powers'. Even if you are telling the truth and you did know some super-special technique for seeing things with my mind, there's no way I could do it!"

"Oh really? Well then, let me ask you a question; have you ever done something that, when you stopped and thought about it, made you say, 'Wait a minute, how did I do that? That shouldn't have been possible!' "

She started to say no, but then the incident with the diggersby jumped into her mind. And even before that, the very fact she'd managed to escape the poachers was a minor miracle in and of itself. "I might have," Braixen answered with crossed arms.

"Then there you go! There are a lot of living things that have psychic potential, both human and pokemon. Your species in particular has a lot of it, because your final evolution is a psychic type. You have the ability—you just have to learn how to use it."

Lacking a response, Braixen considered Hayden's offer. Did she really have the ability though? Could the human actually teach her? He seemed confident that he could, and Hayden's demonstration left no room for doubt of his psychic abilities. So what was stopping her from saying yes?

It started with a groan, which transitioned into a growl, was then accompanied by Braixen pulling at the fur on her head, and finally ended with a long, tired, and defeated sigh. "I just want to get this out of the way; I still don't like you," Braixen said to Hayden. "I don't buy for a minute that you're doing this solely out of the goodness of your heart."

"Glad to know you think so highly of me," Hayden quipped.

"However," Braixen continued, "If you really can do what you say you can do…then, fine…I'll join you."

"I'm glad to hear it!" Hayden said, his smile practically audible. The human took a step forward, bent down, and held something out to her—his hand probably. "Welcome to the team!"

Braixen looked at the outstretched limb for a minute, and then slowly held out her paw and allowed the handshake.

"Right then," Braixen began as she broke off the handshake and crossed her arms, "so when do we get started?"

"Well," Hayden began, but paused to let out a long, deep yawn, "I'd like to start right now, but Regi and I were kind of up all night getting back to the Pokemon Center, so...we're going to take a nap first. See you in a few hours."

Before she could ask what Hayden meant by that, there was a flash of red light and Braixen found herself back inside the pokeball.