I had only a few seconds to worry about the man's ability to pass through solid materials, however. Before I knew it, there was a shadow looming heavily over me, and I turned to look right into the eyes of the balding butler I'd seen on the balcony.

No, that wasn't right. I looked right into his nostrils. The nostrils covered his whole face from my view - the man had an enormous snout that seemed to take up half his face, and since he was also three feet taller than me, it was all I could see excepting a slight suggestion of lips above the neck.

"The master hwill see hyou now," he droned, in the most boring tone I had ever heard in my life. It made me want to look around for a cuddly pillow and teddy bear and ask Mum to read me a bedtime story.

"But I don' want to-" I tried, but again I found my wrist was under the control of a complete stranger. He pulled me down the path towards the small house, and towards the young man in a tweed suit and top hat, who was standing at the bottom of the marble steps outside.

I was deposited right in front of him, and he beamed kindly at me, clasping a cane in his right hand and tipping his hat with the pipe he held in the other; the monocle had been put into a chest pocket.

"A good morning to you," he said. "Most grateful, Clifford. If you'd be so kind as to prepare the gatherspace?"

It would be nice to say that he looked at the butler as he said this, but unless he could see through his eyelids, he didn't. He had the strangest squint I had ever met upon - he could stare with his eyelashes and glance with his brows.

"Certainly, sire," clipped the butler, and he bowed deeply then headed inside.

The young man turned to me again, and gave a bow of his own, flourishing his hat. "I do so apologise for his methods. He used to be a security guard at one of these 'pop concerts' I hear are so much in vogue at the moment, and I fear it may have affected him badly."

His politeness took me completely by surprise, and I shrunk back. "Um... No trouble, mist'r..."

"Oh dear, where are my manners? My name is Brock, Brock Sturgeon," he said, stretching out a hand, "and I'm the gym leader. It's a genuine pleasure to make your acquaintance."

I hesitated, because I didn't quite catch the last words he had said and wondered whether he had made fun of me, but sent my own hand forward. He grasped it immensely tight; my knuckles ground against each other and I felt a tear form in the corner of my eye.

Brock didn't appear to have noticed. He let my mishandled limb go, and as I shook it to get some blood back into its veins, he added: "So, I'm persuaded you are here to make a gym challenge?"

"No, I... Um, I don' really w-"

"And I'm sure you wouldn't deny a spot of hot tea. Would you?"

"Um... No, mist'r Sturgeon, I s'pose not..." I managed, but there was almost no voice to the words.

"Capital!" boomed Brock, throwing a hand across my shoulders and pulling me up the small set of stairs that let into the building. "I'm sure we'll get along like a house on fire."

"Right, um, mist'r..."

I was led into a hallway, while hoping that this was not the building he wanted to torch. It was immense, and there was an actual mountain road running through it: A giant mass of rock seemed to have been dropped into the house once, and then somebody had gone over it with a chisel and chopped out hills, valleys and even ornamental stones to lie about randomly. The path went straight through.

"A magnificence, isn't it?" Brock said, waving a hand with expanse. "A lot of fine workmanship went into this gymnasium. Come, the tea room is just past here..."

We emerged into a small enclosed space beneath the shadow of a very impressive rock formation that looked as though it could topple and murder everything under it at the slightest touch. I walked as far away from it as I could.

"Now, then... I believe I never quite caught your name," said the gym leader, making his way to a small table and sitting down by it. He nodded. "Do have a seat."

The table could be called dainty. No other words would fit it. It was small and the marble top had space for exactly one teapot and two ornate cups, and this was exactly what was on it at the moment. They all steamed.

Beside it stood Clifford, the butler. I was very careful when inching my way to the seat, afraid of being sucked into his majestic nose whenever he sniffed.

" 'm Kim, mist'r Sturgeon, sir," I muttered.

"Kim, eh? Fancy that. What brings you to Pewter?" He took a few extra puffs from his pipe, and sighed appreciatively.

"Jus' passing through..."

"How many Pokémon have you acquired, then?"

I drew my breath, then paused. "A... Ac-what?"

"That is, how many Pokémon do you own?"

"Oh... Um... I've got four, sir..."

"Most droll, most droll indeed. I only have two of my own, you know."

Once again I had to make a stop. "... Droll? What's that, um, mean?"

"You don't know?" he asked me, showing surprise. "Well... Actually, it might be a bit difficult to explain... But I suppose, 'funny' might be another way of putting it. Yes, 'funny', most definitely, yes. Or 'amusing'." His pipe was now out, and was fuming right beneath the butler's nose; when those nostrils snorted, I found myself shoving the chair backwards.

"It's a bit of a boring life up here, you know.* Dreadfully boring, at times - if it wasn't for Clifford here, I sometimes think I would go stone cold crazy alone in this estate!"

"Sorry, um, mist'r," I said, because something had been bothering me, "but isn't it a bit too early for tea now?" My eyes were latched onto the teapot as I spoke.

"It's never a bad time for tea, I find," he chuckled back. "Now then, you wanted to make a gym challenge, isn't that so?"

"Um... Not really, no..."

"My two gents would be thrilled for the scuffle, I expect."

"Well, um, sir, I'm not..."

"Is now a good time for you? I'm rather afraid I have all day on me," Brock said, and chortled. "If you're all set, then, we might begin?"

I tried once more to break through to him. "But I can't! I haven't trained, or 'nything!"

He seemed to take this as boasting. "Really? And you still want a battle? That's quite sporting of you!"

My head sagged down. It seemed difficult if not impossible to talk him out of it.

"The hyoung challenger hwould perhaps like a biscuit?" intoned the butler. To my horror, I noticed that his nostrils were moving more than his lips.

"Um, no, mist'r..."

"If that is indeed the case," Brock said, clapping his hands together and standing up, "we may as well get started! What say you? Personally, I'm positively itching to begin."

I sighed, and resigned myself to the fight; there seemed to be no way out. "Right, mist'r..." I mumbled, and Clifford came up and led me aside and ahead.

There was a small wooden corridor there, with a sink and a cupboard in it, and also an oven. It was a bit dank, despite the effort that had gone into making the rafters look like climbing vines.

"Hai hapologise for the himproper hentrancehway," came a wheezing sound from around the nose up the sky, "but Hai fear the hyoung master hasn't hyet got haround to horder somebody to build a hallway for haccessing the stadium, hmmhyes."

That was all that was said until I found myself on the other side of the indoor mountain, on a rickety wooden skeleton on which could stand one person, perhaps two, before it tore apart and sent its occupants tumbling into a pile of broken wood. It overlooked what I now realised was the battleground, not just a mountain, with the constructed cliffs surrounding a large and somewhat circular flatness in the middle. On the far side, I saw Brock at the ready, holding two Poké Balls with the fingers of one hand and leaning on his cane with the other.

"My sincerest apologies!" he called out. "I'm rather afraid it was wrecked two days back, and I just can't get the good mahogany to save my life!"

I steadied myself against the wobbly bannister and saw Clifford the butler arrive by Brock's side, holding a silver plate.

"Shall we begin?" Brock continued, flicking one of the balls into his palm and enlarging it in one flowing motion. He tossed it forward, and it exploded before it was anywhere near meeting the ground, the white burst of energy throwing it backwards.

Nothing seemed to have changed once the glow faded. But then, after a second or two, one of the rocks started blinking. Before I knew it, it also had arms, and a mouth, and it glared at me.

I was not an expert on rocks, but I was reasonably certain that they didn't usually do that sort of thing.

And then I remembered, I had no idea how a gym battle went. I'd fought Kevin, and there were sometimes televised battles, but most of them were from fighting films and I was quite sure real gym matches never included the leader telling the challenger that he was his father, or everything on the field exploding out of nowhere as both sides dived for cover and one man with muscles shouted "You'll never get away with this!"

I hoped very much that this one wouldn't have any of that, at least.

But at least I knew that I had to send out my own Pokémon... That should be it, right? So I carefully took up the capsule holding Caldera, which was easy to find because it had somehow managed to become dented, and sometimes sent out surges of electricity. Glancing at it, I pushed the button, and out came the Beedrill, who tried to land on the railing.

"Goodnezzzz," it said from the ground, where it had ended up.

"A Beedrill?" asked Brock, sounding interested. "An intelligent, but perhaps not educated, choice. You have the first move, Kim, my dear."

As he leant back and watched as though this was a match of tennis, Caldera climbed up on a rock that hadn't been wobbly until it had come near.

I bit my lip, and told it: "Um, Caldera... C'n you 'tack that stone?"

It jumped up, then took to its wings, batting its forehead with a stinger. "Right away! I'll give it a real' good hiding!"

And so they fought. I stared in horrified fascination as Caldera flew up and attacked the Pokémon with more enthusiasm than success, and the opponent kept trying to tackle it but Caldera was out of its reach the whole way, mostly because it kept stumbling on stones and tangling itself into crevices just when the other had figured out where it was originally going.

My Beedrill's whole and sole tactic seemed to be based on having luck so bad it became good, and to never ever be predictable. By getting its foot stuck under a small pebble it avoided the much larger rock that was flung at it, and by flying into a cliff it avoided the other Pokémon which was going at high speed in the other direction.

That last move dislodged a number of stones, and they all came tumbling down on the opponent. There was a resounding crash, and when the dust cloud had settled, Caldera was trying to lift a rock off its wing.

"Zzzeemzzz we made it, doezzn't it?" he cheerfully called out, just as a slightly delayed shower of pebbles fell over him.

"My word," exclaimed the gym leader, and he recalled to his Poké Ball a stone that was just like any other in the pile of stones. "That was certainly unexpected."

I did the same to Caldera, because I couldn't bear it handling that field any longer. Instead I called out Jolene, sighing as it gained its new and more pointy shape in the middle of the rock field. " 'm trusting in you," I shouted, as loud as I dared.

Then I asked Brock: "Um, mist'r Sturgeon, 's yer Pokémon all right?"

"I should say so," he said, and he smiled a winning smile. It was winning because the teeth were as white as porcelain. "And I'm most definitely not about to gravel for you. Onix, old bean, you are next!"

He took closer his next and last ball, and flicked it out atop the rubble from the avalanche.

I looked up. And I looked up some more, then some more again.

Just below the ceiling was an enormous face, made up of a big stone plate for the chin, a large rock and some eyes, and the whole thing was topped with a pillar. Going all the way down was a snake-like body that had been crafted from rugged boulders, and each one of them was a lot bigger than me.

The shadow of it loomed over me, and it grumbled like a slab of stone being pushed across a mountain.

And I screamed loudly, in sheer terror, and I dropped to my knees, turning my back. It was the scariest, most humongous thing I'd ever seen in my life, and I'd had nightmares that had eaten the nails off my feet.**

And I hugged myself, and tried all I could to shut out the horrifying size, and the mouth that could have eaten not only me but also the podium I was on, and to forget that it was towering over me like I might tower over a cockroach, and I feebly flinched and crept together to try and keep it away, to keep it from swatting me as I would a fly.

And I heard the resounding crash and felt the shock waves as it struck the ground at high speed, to the background noise of a merrily crackling fire...

"Oh, boulderdash," exclaimed Brock, and it sounded more like he was mildly annoyed than actually angry. Cautiously, I tried preening my fingers off my eyes, and I slowly turned around and finally saw Jolene, victorious, breathing fire into thin air. The Onix, the giant stone snake that could've stomped me like I was a mere ant, lay curled up in defeat between wild flames that had settled on the bushes which were growing inside the gym.

Then it hit me, with the force of a ton of bricks, that Jolene was the one who had been in danger of being crushed, not me - and that I'd turned away, and shrieked, and acted so selfishly, when I should've been... Well, helping...

I slumped, and saw that walking towards me was first Jolene, then Brock, and lastly his butler, Clifford.

The Charmeleon stopped at my side, then lay its arms around me, and I weakly copied the move. Brock, on the other hand, didn't go up on the podium but stopped just at the bottom of it, beaming up at me as though he was proud.

"You have a couple of remarkable Pokémon there," he said, then appeared to remember something and added, "in one way or another, at least. They led, perhaps fortunately, to my demise!"

He brought his gloved hands together at a relaxed pace, and the butler behind him drew in air with his nose; I noticed that Brock's hat lifted a bit.

"I... Um... Thanks," I mumbled, still embracing Jolene.

"I would like to award you the Boulderbadge for your splendid efforts. May I also say that I wish to see you persist in challenging gymnasiums? The trainer world might certainly be entertained by it."

There was something about the way he said it - the words tried to point out that he was making fun of me, but the rest of him angrily denied any association with them. He was still beaming jovially up at me, and was now gripping his cane.

The butler, on the other hand, was walking forward with the silver plate, and I noticed that there was a white cloth covering the middle of it.

He came up to me, held up the plate, and took away the cloth. Beneath it was... A shiny grey pin, and...

"What's that?" I asked, pointing.

"Ginger biscuit, young master," Clifford said, and he ended with a very polite yawn.

"Oh." I reached out, and took it, and the silvery pin, and put the first in my mouth and the last in my pocket. " 'ank you, miss'r Gli'or', sih," I said, spraying crumbs at him.

"Hah pleasure," he bowed, then turned and walked over to Brock. The two of them retreated as though I no longer existed, and walked away back to the small lounge where he'd offered me tea, chattering.

As they disappeared, I caught the gym leader's distant voice as he said "Well, it's sedimentary, my dear Clifford..."

Left alone with my Charmeleon, I staggered upright and walked down from the construct, helping Jolene the same way once I had my feet on steady ground. And I tried to tell it how sorry I was...

* I would eventually learn that rich people, no matter where their houses are, and how high they are in the terrain, will talk about living 'up here'. They never degrade themselves by asking people to come over, or even worse, come down to visit.
** This is not a figure of speech. One of my more recurrent nightmares featured a wad of gum that would chain me to a wall and bite off my toenails.

Team Update:

Jolene the Charmeleon

Mr. Squeak the Rattata
Caldera the Beedrill
Euphemism the Pidgey