I was ten and a half when I got my first pokemon. The last six months had been agonizing, but I had a promise to keep. I couldn’t start my pokemon journey until she could, too. The she in the question was Sophie, my best friend. I suppose a really savvy guy would have figured out that having a lifelong best friend of the opposite gender would carry some baggage, but I had just never seen things that way. I lived with my mother, my best friend, and the pokemon all around me. That was the way it had always been.

So when it came time for me to get my first pokemon, I waited six long months so that I could get my first pokemon at the same time as Sophie. We went to the local pokemon center together and received our partner pokemon within minutes of each other. The guy there had held onto two special pokemon just for the cute young kids from across town: he gave Sophie a shy little Ralts, and he gave me a grumpy Deino. It was almost a yin-and-yang thing he had going there, with each pokemon being simultaneously super effective and ineffective against the other. I think it was meant to be some kind of weird arranged poke-marriage.

One way or another, we certainly stuck together. We spent five years traveling together. I struggled endlessly to control my downright flippant Deino, which evolved into a half-cantankerous, half-obedient Zweilous, and finally became an affectionate, caring, hard-headed Hydreigon that always knows better, even now. I worked so hard to feed the more obedient head on that Zweilous, and was rewarded with the most stubborn dragon to ever live! I wouldn’t change my Ferdinand for the world, though. Sophie’s Ralts, however, blossomed into the bane of my existence. That Gardevoir, Isabella, mocked, teased, annoyed, and otherwise made me miserable for every single one of the five years I lived with her. I doubt I will ever find it in my heart to forgive her.

And in none of those five years did either one of us develop any interest in the other. No flirting beyond the ironic level occurred between us. Not a single dumb anime cliche led to my “accidental” viewing of her nude body. We barely even had a single double-entendre between us. So you can’t really blame me when I say that I thought we had a brother-sister relationship going on between us.

My life fell apart and everything changed ten days after the Unova Doubles Championship. Sophie and I had done well for ourselves in the tournament, rising all the way to the final 16 before we met the team that went on to take the prize. We hadn’t felt bad about it, it was a highly respectable placement in a prestigious regional competition, so we had gone camping as a fun vacation-slash-training holiday. It’s the kind of thing only a couple of introverted freakazoid trainers would do, so it suited us perfectly. The Winding Woods are gorgeous and quiet in the late summer.

And it was then and there that I made the stupid decision to go train my sixth pokemon. I had gotten the Heatran as an answer to a host of type advantages my team suffered from, and it had been a wild ride locating such an elusive pokemon, but it fit my team perfectly and I was overjoyed that I finally had a chance to train it. So I ran off on my own without telling Sophie. That had been dumb move number one. The second dumb move had been neglecting to release one of my team members as personal protection. The third dumb move was turning around.