Disclaimer: I do not own Pokémon or any related franchises. I am merely an overexcited consumer willing to put my ideas on the table.

Crink. Crink. Crink.

One by one pages of paper are crumbled up and hit the wall, slowly fluttering into the wastebasket below, which was beginning to overflow.

Crink.

The room was darkened. The only light was from a single lamp on a desk. Multiple shattered pencils litter the desk, as do wrappings of multiple packages of loose leaf paper.

Crink.

The young man sat at his desk, head in his hands. Groaning, he takes another piece of paper and begins to write. Thirty seconds in, he crumpled it up.

"No, no, no! All wrong!" He yelled, throwing the ball into the wastebasket.

Crink.

It hits the mountain up top and knocked it over, causing an avalanche of paper to cascade down.

"Dammit!" The man yells. He cradles his head again.

"Why won't this work?"

The truth is, it hasn't worked for the last three months. Ash Ketchum had become what he'd always feared in literary school. A failure of a writer.

Ash stood up. His black hair was unruly, his hat off and to the side of the desk. His jeans, which were littered with pencil shavings, emptied their passengers onto the floor. His black shirt glistened with lead. His face was grizzled, hairs sprouting up all over his face.

He ran his hands through his hair. Checking his watch, he noticed it was 4:26. He hadn't had lunch yet.

Sighing, he shuffled down the stairs of his two-story house. In school, he was a prodigy. His professors called him brilliant. And he worked hard. So much so that he graduated at age 20.

Now he struggled to write a full paragraph.

It wasn't that it was difficult. Given anything, Ash could write about it. Full length novels in middle school were unheard of.

Turning on the light to the kitchen, Ash made his way to the fridge, which had become bare, save for enough milk to make a bowl of cereal. Sighing in defeat, the man took it out along with a bowl and cereal.

Defeatedly, Ash ate his cereal in silence. The only sound was that of the clock on the wall.

He took a note from a notepad and scribbled "Buy groceries" on it, sticking it to the fridge. He'd remember that tomorrow.

He glanced over to his phone. "I should probably call someone to see if that helps, eh, Pikachu?"

A cat-sized yellow mouse emerged from underneath the table, red cheeks contorted into a frown. "Pika."

Ash nodded, pushing the bowl away from him and reaching for the phone.

He stopped, realizing he didn't know who to call. "Uh, Pikachu, who should I call?"

It seemed as if the yellow mouse was actually thinking, before scurrying over and sitting underneath a picture of a blue-haired woman.

"Dawn?" Ash asked aloud. The girl was a good two years younger than him, enrolled in the foreign Sinnoh's Twinleaf Community College.

Dawn Berlitz-Ketchum had an interesting backstory. At the age of four, her single mother, a close friend of Ash's mother, died in a car crash, leaving Dawn orphaned. Ash's mother took her in as her own, caring for her as her own daughter. Ash, six, quickly accepted the girl as his sister.

Her blue hair wasn't her only feature that differed her from Ash, though. She had paler skin, blue eyes, and stood a good foot shorter than him at four foot eleven.

Sighing, Ash decided to call his sister. After a few rings, the girl to all picked up.

"Ash?" She asked. It sounded like there was loud music in the background.

"Dawn?" Ash asked, "Are you at a party?"

"No..." Came a reply.

Ash shook his head. "Anyway- I just want to know what's going on with you."

He could tell she moved away from the party, because the music dulled. "Why do you want to know?"

"I just wanna know how my sis is doing." He lied.

There was a pause. She saw right through him. "Ash. I know you're struggling. You sound depressed. Is it your writing?"

"Uh..." Ash didn't know how to respond.

Dawn sighed on the other side of the phone. "Ash. I may not be an author, but I know one thing. When you lose your spark, it's hard for you to do anything. Maybe all you need is to get new inspiration from somewhere. I don't know where that inspiration is, but you'll find it bro."

Ash sighed. "Sure. Everyone says that. Nothing's changed."

Dawn sighed on the other end of the line. "Look. You'll find it. I promise. No need to worry. Anyway, has anyone bought Gary's old house?"

"No." Ash answered. His best friend Gary used to live in the house next to his, but after his sister Daisy was involved in a car accident, he moved closer to the hospital.

"Aw, that's too bad." Dawn mourned. "Oh, Look. I gotta call you later, Kenny's looking at me."

Ash listened as the girl cut off the call abruptly before he even had a chance to ask who this "Kenny" was.

He cast a look at Pikachu. The mouse was shrugging.

Silently, the man stood up. "I'm gonna go get some fresh air, Pikachu."

The mouse scurried off somewhere. Ash chuckled. The little guy didn't like the outdoors, possibly because of the Spearows. While most animals would love a chance to go outside and mess around, Pikachu was different. Ash found him basically on his doorstep after he was spooked by something. Ash presumed it was the Spearows.

Ash found his blue jacket and walked through his house to the front door, turning off the kitchen light as he left.

The cool Kanto autumn breeze his him as soon as he exited the house. Despite the mood he was in previously, it was enough to bring a smile to his face.

Pidgeys chirped as he decided he needed to take a walk. His mind wandered each time his shoe hit the pavement.

He remembered his college days. His best friend Brock was a senior when Ash graduated, but he never received any messages from the tanned hopeless romantic.

His other friend, Gary, had cared out better. Living halfway across town, he and Ash managed to meet up every once and a while. The guy had already been married twice, but despite his joking and narcissistic nature, he could be a real help.

Next was Misty. Ash was pretty sure she'd just had her third child with Tracy Sketchit, another good friend of Ash's. he sometimes visited. He loved to see old friends again.

The thought of seeing old friends got Ash thinking more. "What if I go see them? Will I get that spark back?"

Debating with himself, Ash nearly tripped over himself on a crack in the sidewalk. He blamed Kanto's weird temperatures.

Being in the center of the world, near the north, Kanto was oceanside, receiving hot summers and cold winters. Ash silently cursed the misfortune of his hometown, a small farming community named Pallet, where his feet hit the ground currently.

Reaching the end of the sidewalk, he looked up from his shoes to look upon the hills that gave Pallet its' fame. They stretched like a bed sheet far inland towards the nearby Viridian Forest, and further towards Viridian City.

Smiling, he took out his notebook. Countless pages had been sketched in or torn out because of constant failure. Reaching a new, clean page, Ash reached for his pencil.

"This is it! Yes!" Just before the lead met the page, however, he stopped.

The creative juices stopped flowing. Yet another well run dry.

Disappointed, Ash stared at the pencil in his open hand. The bright green grass underneath his hand almost made the pencil in his hand seem dimmer than it actually was.

Sighing, Ash clutched the pencil and lightly tucked it back into his pocket. He'd find inspiration some other day.

Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he slowly shuffled his way back to his home, careful not to trip on any annoying crevices the sidewalk may have had lying in wait for him.

His eyes stared downward. He'd decided at a young age that writing and authoring was what he wanted to do.

"I lied to myself." He found himself murmuring. Truly, he did feel as if he was dishonest to his younger self by being so slow with writing. He knew writing novels and books was a slow process; he'd learned that in middle school. But now, older, he felt as if thoughts should come to him easier.

Right?

He mentally slapped himself. What was he doing? He was a strong man, one who followed suit through his ideals. He was not going to cry and call himself a failure just because of a while with no ideas. Such was the norm in the writing community: a long period with no ideas.

Slowly approaching his front door, he strode in with an air of something lost, not even remembering why he left his house in the first place.

Slowly, he deflated on his couch. His TV remained off.

"Nothing interesting on," he'd always say.

Sadly, he closed his eyes. He hadn't slept the night before, and he could virtually feel the bags underneath his eyes.

Seconds passed by with the only sound being the ticking of the clock. Seconds slowly turned into minutes. After a while of lazing around on the couch, Ash's somber slumber was torched to a screening halt.

There was a ring from the doorbell.

Ash sat up immediately. Normally, some person trying to sell something would be here at this time of the week. But something was different about this knock.

There would be a knock if someone was trying to sell something. His doorbell even looked like a part of the doorframe itself.

He stood up. The only other people who knew that were friends and family, and they didn't like to wait. Especially his mother.

Quickly making sure he didn't look like he'd just been asleep for 42 minutes, which was difficult, he opened the door.

This woman was definitely not Gary. Definitely not Brock. Not Misty or his mother.

This woman was different. She had long brown hair that stretched to her mid-back, a red blouse, and navy blue biker shorts on. Her dress code was not what made Ash's gears stop turning, though. It was her face.

Her skin was a warm cream color, perfectly accentuated by a pair of stunning sea blue eyes. Her mouth was twisted into a surprisingly honest, pearl white smile.

"Hello." She greeted. "I'm May, and I just moved in next door."