If I learned one thing during the five days we had to wait to get called to the Gym, it was that I never, ever, wanted to retire to Eterna City. We did our best to explore the city, to find anything that was truly engaging and interesting but sadly, we came up empty. Unless the inhabitants had their own, hidden circles in which they travelled to have their fun without outsiders barging in, they were utterly lifeless, to the point that I had seen livelier rocks.

Getting to know Cliff and Lucas some more was one of the few interesting bits of our stay, talking about their education while sifting and sorting the reams of paperwork in the Pokécentre. Curiously, while Lucas was the more talkative one, I felt that I learned more about Cliff, especially when it came to their reactions.

Lucas happily shared anecdotes about his past, but there were never any real details. He told me about his schooling and the people in his class but I had yet to learn where he actually came from. I thought it was Sandgem Town, but he had never actually said so. Nor had he told me how he had become a helper for Professor Rowan or how long he had been one. If anything, I knew as much about his past as I knew about my own.

On the other hand, Cliff was happily sharing and telling me about Claire’s and his past and their childhood in Twinleaf Town. In turn, I told him about my first meeting with Claire and a couple of vague stories about my training with Cynthia, without actually giving him details.

There was a clear reaction when I told him about the meeting with Claire, that I had been introduced by her aunt and didn’t know anyone in Sinnoh, let alone anyone our age. It was quite interesting to watch his expression go from a somewhat guarded, vigilant look to one of compassion and pity, and that was without telling him the actual circumstances of how I got here. Not that I could do that, as I didn’t know myself.

On that front, I had only been able to make a bit of progress, the comfortable bed and longer nights in town actually helping a bit, giving me more time to dream and ponder my dreams right after waking. During our travels, I had gotten up immediately after waking, to either stand a watch of my own or break camp so we didn’t waste daylight and by the time I had the leisure to consider the nightly images, they had already fled, buried by the necessities of reality.

Sadly, while I was able to examine the images more, I wasn’t any closer to making sense of them. What I was now certain of was that there were two different states to my dreams, two different emotional sets. In one set, I was feeling confident, ready to take charge and in most of them, Charm was at my side.

In some of them, I was riding atop Charm, only evolved into a Charizard, his flames burning strongly as we soared through the sky. While I only had vague impressions of the world I was riding above, I was somewhat certain that it wasn’t Sinnoh we were flying above, mostly due to the lack of the incredibly distinctive Mount Coronet.

In other images, I was standing behind Charm, directing him to do battle, a fire burning in my heart as I watched my partner, doing my best to help him win. Whom, or what, we were battling, I couldn’t remember, the images were mere shadows, impossible to identify, but we were battling. And winning, at least judging by the exultation I remembered upon waking.

Those dreams, they made some sense and I could relate them to me and my current existence. It was a little weird that the hands I sometimes saw in those dreams were a lot more weathered and worn than my hands, but if Charm could be a Charizard in my dreams, I could be older, too.

Visions of the future, that I could understand and, to a point, accept. It was weird and made me wonder where they came from and what was going on, but it was easy to conceptualise.

On the other hand, the dreams without Charm were a lot less relatable and the emotions going with them were conflicted as if I was lost and seeking guidance. It was still me I was dreaming about, of that, I was convinced, but the images were just weird. Some of them, I could accept and understand, even if I couldn’t believe them. Cities, stretching below me into the distance, as I stood on some high place, looking down at tiny figures far below. In other images, I might be one of those figures, looking up my gaze following a gleaming facade of metal and glass that seemed to pierce the sky, reaching far higher than anything I had ever seen in my living memory.

The sheer scale boggled my mind, but they were dreams, scale could be whatever my mind decided it to be. It was fantastic, the architecture and the sprawl of humanity impossible in reality, but in dreams, the human spirit was unbound, or something like that. If I thought about towns far larger than Jubilife, I could only shake my head, trying to imagine the logistics and reality of it, and fail at doing so. It truly boggled my mind.

And those were the dreams I could accept as figments of my imagination. There were other dreams, similar in sensation to those, but they only made me wonder what was going on in my mind.

In some of them, I was looking into the sky, watching weird, motionless birds draw clouds into the sky. In my dreams, there was no sense of wonder as if my dreaming mind saw those things as something ordinary. My waking mind could, again, only try to comprehend the images and fail to assert a scale or make sense of them in any way. Looking back at the memory of Ho-Oh and the way he had been slowly drawing his seven-coloured light through the sky, I thought the scale of those weird birds was far larger, their speed far greater and the distance further, but it seemed to be impossible. And without anything to relate the dreams to my lived memory, I could only wonder and worry, sometimes trying to put the images to paper in the hope that the physical representation would spark something. So far, it had not, but it might, at some point.

Sadly, I was no great artist and most of the images I drew were little more than scribbles, with one exception. A familiar face, so very reminiscent of the face I saw whenever I looked in the mirror, with similar eyes and facial features, only flipped into a male version. In the confident set of dreams, the face was older and weathered, somewhat mirroring the aged appearance of my hands in those dreams, with worry lines and a few scars marring the strong features.

In the other set of dreams, the face was younger, with a confident look in his eyes, one that sometimes reminded me of Lucas when he was to prank someone. It was a look I had learned to dislike on Lucas, as it seemed that he was unable to go for a full day without playing a prank, but when I saw that same look on the face in my dreams, I had a gentle feeling of happiness in my heart, not the burning annoyance I always felt when suffering a prank from Lucas.

Why that face was in both sets of my dream and why I was completely, utterly convinced that it was my brother was a question I had yet to figure out, just like everything else. At times, I wondered if my imagination was simply running wild, trying to fill the holes in my memory with anything, that the images of motionless birds and sprawling cities were simply reflections of what I had seen on my journey, scaled up to impossible proportions, while the dreams of Charm reflected a different part of my desires, the desire to grow and reach the top.

A single sentence, that I want to be the very best, was sometimes echoing in my dreams, curiously mostly in those I was feeling lost and searching for direction. Maybe those dreams were a reflection of my desire to fit into humanity but failed as it was scaled up around me, growing far larger than I could comprehend. It wasn’t a perfect explanation, especially as it didn’t give me anything to actually understand my situation, but it was, so far, the best I had.

Maybe I could meet with Professor Rowan again at some point, or maybe the three Lake Guardians would be able to give me a deeper insight into the wonky workings of my mind. But for now, I could only forge on and do my best to take further steps on my journey.

And maybe, if I managed to become the very best, whatever that meant, I would find answers. A laughable thought, but given that it was a nice sentiment and there was a catchy tune echoing in my mind whenever I remembered those words, I let it motivate me to push on.