Nova had been looking for a Pokémon to protect Aresdra — something that could stand between her and the kind of ambush tactics that trainers like Robbin relied on. What he had not been looking for was a walking disaster waiting to happen. If the Psyduck ever lost control near Aresdra the way it apparently had in this room's history, Nova didn't want to think about it.
But he had already made his decision internally. The scars on Kim's arms had done that much.
Even so, he stayed where he was. Kim had set aside time from a clearly busy schedule to speak with him directly, and she hadn't finished. Walking out before she did would have been both rude and ungrateful. He owed her the courtesy of listening.
There was something else keeping him seated, too. A Pokémon that caused serious harm to a human was, by any normal standard, a Pokémon with a troubled history — one that, in serious cases, could end up in a containment facility with no hope of return to regular training or companionship. Yet Kim had not directed a single word of blame at the Psyduck. She had called the incident a dark chapter in her own history as a Trainer. That, more than anything, made Nova want to understand what had actually happened.
Kim ran her left hand slowly along the scar on her right arm. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and even, the way someone sounds when they have made peace with something painful enough that telling it no longer costs them as much as it once did.
"This Psyduck was prepared for me by my grandmother," she said. "When it was born, everyone in the Gym had doubts. It was too vacant, too slow to respond to anything. But Grandma was certain — she said its potential was exceptional and that it was exactly the right Pokémon for me."
"I was ten years old at the time, and I wanted to be first at everything. So naturally, having my very first Pokémon chosen for me — and chosen to be this — felt like a strange joke. Still, it had been Grandma's choice, so I brought it to school to show my classmates."
"That did not go the way I hoped."
She smiled faintly, but it didn't reach her eyes.
"Young girls protect their pride fiercely. So I fought back the only way I knew how — I told them that Grandma had said Psyduck's potential was exceptional, and that they had no business mocking me."
"It only made things worse. They said Grandma was a senile old fool who didn't know what she was talking about, and they had some outside Breeder's opinion to back it up."
"Children can be cruel in a very specific way. They don't bully because they hate you, and they don't gain anything real from it. They do it because it's entertaining to them, and that's all. There's no logic to argue against, no grievance to resolve. The harder you try to prove yourself, the more amusing they find you."
"I thought if I could win a Pokémon battle, I could shut them up. But Psyduck couldn't beat anything. It was too confused, too slow. Even Pokémon with no particular battle experience could handle it."
"Looking back now, even if it had won, they would have found another excuse. Battles were never going to fix what was actually happening. But I was ten, and I didn't understand that yet."
"All I understood was that Psyduck had embarrassed me. That it had embarrassed Grandma. That it had failed to live up to what its own lineage should have meant."
She paused.
"One afternoon, a boy from the next class — one who had been making my life miserable for weeks — showed up with a brand-new Goldeen. It hit Psyduck with Water Gun and knocked it down without much effort. And something in me just... gave out."
"I picked up a folding chair from the side of the battlefield and hit Psyduck with it."
Kim said it plainly, without excusing it.
"I don't know what happened immediately after. I woke up in the hospital."
"What my friends told me later was this: Psyduck lost control. Everyone on and around that battlefield — trainers, Pokémon, bystanders — was locked in place by Disable. None of them could move. They could only watch as the energy released by its Psychic power tore the battlefield apart."
"The wound on my arm was from being caught in that. The skin and muscle there were shredded by the force of it. That's why the scarring looks the way it does."
She glanced down at her arm briefly, then back at Nova.
"As for the boy who had been bullying me, and the Goldeen he had just bought..."
She stopped. Her eyes dropped to the desk, and for a moment she was quiet with something that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite guilt but lived somewhere between the two.
Nova had already worked out what she wasn't saying. The Psyduck had unleashed everything it had, in that moment, to protect the person who had just struck it. Kim herself had been caught in the edge of it and nearly lost her arm. The boy who had been standing on the other side of the battlefield would have had no such luck.
"The boy's injuries left him unable to walk," Kim said at last. "He's been in a wheelchair ever since. As for the Goldeen — when the Security Officers came to investigate, they couldn't find any trace that it had ever been there."
Nova said nothing.
"It should have been classified as a serious injury incident. Psyduck and I both should have faced consequences."
"But the investigation found that Psyduck had been acting in a state of involuntary loss of control — no deliberate intent to harm. And I had no knowledge of what was coming. So in the end, neither of us was held legally responsible."
Nova understood the reasoning. The laws of his previous life had something similar — intent and awareness mattered when determining responsibility for harm caused. By that standard, the Psyduck's situation was not unlike cases where the person causing harm genuinely could not have understood what they were doing.
He kept that thought to himself.
"After that," Kim continued, "Psyduck and I couldn't be partners anymore. The responsibility for what happened was ultimately mine — that's why I've always called it my dark chapter, not the Psyduck's. But every time I saw it after that, I felt two things at once: fear of what it was capable of, and guilt over what I had done to it first."
"That guilt eventually made me step away from battling for a while."
"It was Grandma who kept this Gym running through all of that. When she passed away a few years ago, I didn't have anywhere left to retreat to. I came back and took the position of Gym Leader. But I still couldn't bring myself to face the Psyduck directly. And I didn't want it disposed of, either. So I just... left it where it was. It wasn't a solution. I knew that."
She looked at him steadily.
"So when I heard you say — in almost exactly the same words Grandma used — that this Psyduck's potential was exceptional, you can probably imagine what that meant to me. In all this time, you're the only person who's said what she said."
"That's why I told you all of this. The decision is yours now, Nova. Knowing everything — do you still want to take Psyduck with you?"
Nova sat with the weight of everything she had just shared.
A Pokémon that had shattered a battlefield to protect someone who had just hurt it. A girl who had never fully forgiven herself for a moment of anger at ten years old. Two lives, running in parallel for years, unable to reach each other.
If nothing else, they were a remarkably tragic pair.