This was wrong, he thought to himself. This was wrong, it had always been wrong, and it was not going to become right anytime soon. Maybe he could have blamed growing up with so many hungry male siblings and spending the preponderance of his time around kitchen utensils. Maybe it was the fact that he was the only child in the family with reasonable cooking skills, as his mother burned boiling water and his father had reappeared from his Pokemon journey not days before Brock left Pewter City to travel with Ash and Misty. Or maybe he felt this way because Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny and the rest of the women he pursued never gave him the time of day.

He had no rational explanation for his emotions. He only knew this: Brock Harrison was literally pansexual, for he was in love with his trusty frying and drying pan.

During the day, Brock was easily able to contain his deviant desires. He acted like himself then, chasing beautiful women with voluptuous figures and imposing his gentle philosophy on his younger teammates. Of course, cooking meals was worlds away in difficulty from that—he used that frying pan for everything, whether it was for sautéing meat or making jelly-filled donuts. He found it almost impossible sometimes to gaze upon the frying pan with anything other than lust when Ash and Misty were awake and patiently waiting for their food, but he knew that he had to. If they ever discovered his "relationship," he would be shunned. Rejected. No longer with the friends he coveted so. It was all he could do to ignore his raging feelings, keep them chained to his heart and out of sight so as to continue supporting the people he loved.

But when Ash, Misty, and Pikachu dozed off at night, a door of relief opened up for Brock. As soon as the three drowned in the throes of sleep, Brock would slip out of his sleeping bag and to his zipped knapsack, frayed and worn from weathering. He would reach for his front pocket—undoing the zipper was a slow, sensual action, one that seemed to take forever. Then, dipping his fingers beneath the sturdy fabric as if he were caressing a dressed body, he would retrieve his frying pan.

His gorgeous, sexy frying pan. The pride of his very existence.

He had purchased the pan in Celadon City at the famed department store, in the massive cookware section that put even the kitchen mall in Pewter City to shame by its sheer size. For a few days now, Brock had lost his former frying pan in an attack by Fearow when its handle had broken off, and he could not salvage the remains. Tearfully, Brock gave the frying pan its final rites and discarded it in town the trio passed through—and if they wanted to eat square meals again, he needed to find another. Taking the few assets he'd accumulated by winning Pokemon battles, he went to the department store in the fresh hours of dawn, while Ash and Misty slept in the Celadon hotel.

The moment he had entered the cookery and laid eyes on the frying pan in the display up front, he was slapped with a deep sense of joy and love. It was an emotion that traumatized him in a way that he never wished to forget. This was what it was like to meet one's soulmate, Brock was certain. In its state of newness, Brock marveled at the frying pan's beauty as he would for the rest of his life—the black sheen of the skillet glaring him seductively in the face, the steel handle that was coated with only the finest enamel, and the flat bottom that would have been undesirable on any other piece of kitchenware.

Brock was hypnotized. He knew at the very instant he laid eyes on this frying pan that he needed it. And it needed him. So he bought this magical frying pan. It had cost him a pretty penny, but the pleasure he received from it was well worth the price tag. Now, months after the event, the frying pan was beginning to wear from overuse—scratches tarnished the once-glamorous shine and grease stains were prominent in its belly, but Brock did not care. Even as it aged, he fell more and more in love. The frying pan was a fine wine that only seemed to make everything taste better with time. Ash and Misty agreed—they loved the speed at which the frying pan cooked and how reliable its weight and durability was. This frying pan was not weak like the other one. This one sizzled in heat and crackled in cold, cooking food to utter perfection and leaving tingles in Brock's fingertips as he touched it.

He could not live without this frying pan. If it left him, he would die. The frying pan was a part of him that he could not deny—to him, it was a God, an Arceus, or perhaps more like a mysterious lover that stealthily appeared at night to make love to him. He would clutch the frying pan to his chest and whisper sweet nothings to it, kiss it with the intensity of a truly enamored man, and relish in the delicious abrasion it made against his skin when he touched it.

This pan was the woman he loved. No others could compare. Some might call him crazy, and others might denounce him as a freak. But as long as they never knew, they could not judge him.

And they could live together in peace and solitude.

Without hate.

And without prejudice.

"You are my most precious secret," Brock told the frying pan every night. To him, the pan was sentient, and it could hear his words. The vast majority of the human population would disagree, but Brock knew better. He was aware of its ears, for he trusted that its soul held him as close to itself as he did to it. And if he listened with enough tolerance to silence, the frying pan spoke back to him.

I love you.

And only Brock could perceive its fluid, loving words.