Bound to a chair, a scrawny young man can be seen through the din.

In the outside booths, the parents or relatives of the deceased watched on with reddened eyes. Those with too much emotion couldn't help but yell from time to time, but the scrawny young man didn't change his expression once.

The room was clean and brightly lit, but the bound young man found it sterile and cold.

"Murderer"

"Bastard!"

"He killed my daughter, KILL HIM!"

Jared couldn't see behind the tinted glass, but what he heard made him smile inwardly. "I know you are upset sir, but don't hit the glass.

He then sighed secretly, 'Why did they drag this dog and pony show on for five years just to kill me once I became old enough to die by law? Laws are funny things aren't they, these people sound like they want to personally kill me, but they are easily held back by a thin pane of glass. How ironic. I may be the one chained up but they also wearing chains.

Next to Jared, a uniformed man just finished affixing a wet sponge to the metal headpiece on Jared's head.

As Jared felt the wetness trickle down his face, he heard the uniformed man speak, but he didn't turn to listen. "Jared has been found guilty of murdering Alisia Watson five years ago to this day. Today, before your peers, justice will be served. Do you have any final words?"

Even with the furious stares that continued to pelt him from behind the glass, he didn't want to give them anything. He didn't owe them anything.

He knew what they all wanted, well, at least some of them. They wanted him to beg, to grovel, to repent for everything he's done. He knows he didn't do it, but the Watson family is rich and influential. The framing was so thorough that he almost believed he did it.

After a minute passed, the uniformed man shook his head, then stepped out of the room.

Alone in the room, Jared whispered under his breath, "How nice it would be to be truly free, to truly be limitless... to..." -Suddenly Jared only saw blackness.

.

As if a light were turned on, Jared suddenly gasped, and then sat up.

"What was I...about to say just now?"

He grabbed his head, "Huh, why can't I remember?"

Looking around curiously he tried to make sense of the situation.

He knew he should be dead, yet here he was.

Grabbing a clump of cold dirt with his hands he licked it.

It didn't taste good, in fact, it tasted as dirt would.

"I've never been able to taste anything in my dreams, so this must be something else."

While a normal person might spit it out, he swallowed the bit in his mouth, while he just let the rest fall between his fingers.

Being an inmate from such a young age shaped who he was. Actually, he may have really become the monster they said he was. No, perhaps it was the only way to cope, but Jared felt it didn't matter anymore.

He then looked down at his feet and found he was still wearing the same orange jumpsuit.

Shrugging, it seemed as if he was neither happy nor unhappy about the current events. he felt things finally made sense.

After all, wasn't this all just the final synapses of his dying brain creating a world in his min?

He had heard of such things before. No matter how real the dirt tasted, he was still wearing the same prisoners uniform wasn't he? What other logical explanation could there be?

Picking a random direction, he then began walking.

A short time later, he came across what seemed to be a cavernous chasm that sloped down into the darkness below. From the entrance, something shrieked at him.

Jared naturally looked over and found three small quadrupedal rodents. They had purple fur with a cream-colored face, paws. With comically large fangs, they snarled, and their narrow red eyes promised violence.

The young man stood there petrified by the unexpectant event, but seeing the creature's small statures, his frozen state changed to amusement, "What the hell are these things? They look kind of... like... "

As soon as he finished the sentence, it suddenly clicked what they looked like.

Tilting his head, his left hand touched his face. He laughed, "Rattata? That's a pokemon, isn't it? My brain really is going all out, I wonder what else it's going to think up before I finally croak."

The sound of his voice seemed to scare the creatures, as they scampered down the cavernous hole.

Watching them flee, Jared stood there for a moment, before he whispered, "I really am dying arent I..."

Of the three, the larger among them came back and kept a wary eye from within. Low snarls could be heard from inside, as the cowardly of the three seemed to give their morale support, but nothing more.

Bending down, Jared made sweeting sounds, as if he were trying to tempt a stray cat to come to him. The rat pokemon, however, was not having it, so Jared shrugged and moved on.

Not more than a minute later, he spotted several massive green caterpillars gnawing on what appeared to be large maple leaves in the canopy above. In the midday light, Their bright red antennae actually glinted like a polished piece of wood or a dull metal. When one of them looked up in alarm, the creature's yellow underside was revealed.

Tilting his head, Jared laughed, "Yep, these look like the caterpies from my memories."

Provoked by the human's words, the pokemon began shooting white webs out of their flat mouth.

"Ugh, what's this?"

With his legs sprayed, Jared instinctively turned to run, but the gooey webs were like quick hardening super glue.

He then tripped, as the pants of his jumpsuit were glued together. He fell hard, and the air was knocked out of him.

As if sensing weakness, more of the caterpillars joined in. Soon he was covered head to toe in the stuff.

By luck, he had been facing away from the attackers, so his nose and mouth weren't sealed shut. He could still breathe, for now.

He couldn't move his arms or legs, and the constriction was growing ever more painful. The dream was beginning to feel more real by the minute.

He yelled and flailed, but since struggling only seemed to agitate the caterpie, he tried to stay still, and soon the streams of goo stopped.

While Jared didn't expect to wake up in the middle of a forest full of pokemon, in his wildest dreams, he didn't expect to be tied up by the seemingly harmless caterpies. At least he assumed them to be harmless at the time. Would he make that mistake again? probably...

After a few minutes, a familiar snarling was heard from the bushes, which made Jared's eyes go wide.

"Don't tell me..."

The sharp-toothed rattata's appeared to have followed him!

In the prison, he had once heard a story. In that story, a man was bound by ropes, and eaten alive by rats. It was actually one of his biggest fears. These rattata were much bigger, but they were still rats, so who's to say they won't eat him?

So what if this world was just his imagination? So what if it was fake? He realized in this moment that he still dearly wished to hold onto it for as long as he could. He never wanted to die, there were still things he wanted to accomplish, even if it was futile.

Jared began racking his brains for a solution, and then he thought of something. If fiction was to be believed, then perhaps pokemon could understand human speech.

Clearing his throat, Jared tempted a question, "Hey, uh, rattata's, I don't mean any harm, I was just passing through and I got webbed all of the sudden... "

Jared couldn't even turn his head to plead his case, so he just kept talking with one side of his face smeared in the dirt, "So, do you think you can help me out?"

Feeling his jumpsuit being tugged on by something, he yelled, "Hey, cut that out!"

Soon the largest of the three rattata came into view. When he got a good look at the Ratatta he found there was a scar down their left cheek and only one whisker on the left side of their face. The pokemon looked scrappy, to say the least.

The Rattatas forehead then began to glow, as it moved closer to the bound human.

"Wait, what are you doing?"

Suddenly, the pokemons forehead touched his, and the light covered his vision for a moment.

A memory popped into existence, a memory he never had before now. It seemed to bypass all barriers. It was as if it were a kind of universal language. 'Superior, equal, servant, slave.'

For the first second, he thought it seemed like the rattata was trying to form a pact with him using one of these words.

He was slightly happy at first, for a split second he thought maybe the pokemon wanted him to be their trainer, but then he almost choked when he understood what was happening.

Whatever this was, he felt something intuitively. If he gave in to the memory, or the light, or whatever it was, then he would become the slave of this Rattata. The kind of pact where the small creature can control him with just a word! This wasn't what he wanted at all. He was a dead man walking, there's no way he would spend the little time he had left as a slave.

Jared spat, "You want me to be your slave? Fuck. You. Rat."

With a swift motion, the scrappy rattata plunged their teeth into Jared's shoulder.

Jared screamed, this pain didn't feel like a dying dream. In fact, it was like a nightmare coming true.

The scrappy rattata once more proposed the same pact to him.

He would shake his head if he could, "Screw you!"