Unreliable Predictions

Red wakes in Pallet Town on the one morning his planning can't reach past — his calendar marked with X's up to today's highlighted square and blank after it, every prediction spent. A chatot-shaped alarm, loaded the night before with a recorded taunt from his past self ("Hey Future Red, you awake?"), drags him out of bed with deliberate, escalating cruelty, exactly as he'd designed it to. His room tells the story of who he is: maps and biology charts and overflowing notebooks strewn across the floor, and amid the chaos, islands of obsessive order — alphabetized shelves, zip-tied cables, a desk cleared to bare wood.

Downstairs, his mother stretches breakfast as long as she can. She hides her worry behind affection and prolonged hugs, but Red catches the haunted look she wears in his periphery — the one that means she's thinking of his father, and afraid of losing her son the same way. He bolts his food, then forces himself to slow down for her sake. When the lab finally calls, the goodbye nearly undoes them both; she fits his hat over his hair and tells him he looks ready for anything.

Outside the lab he finds Blue Oak, his oldest friend and lately his rival. Their old argument reignites over Blue's hand-drawn type chart: Blue has erased Grass's weakness to Poison after watching Indigo regional matches where Grass pokemon held their own, and Red presses him on it — the Kanto Grass pokemon Blue studied have mostly evolved their own poison to survive, so his sample is skewed toward the exception, not the rule. The disagreement runs deeper than one matchup. Red, pulled from school years ago to apprentice at Pallet Labs after Oak noticed him reading far above his grade, trusts careful experiment over accumulated anecdote; Blue would rather learn by doing, and a month ago the two traded blows over it, leaving Red a black eye he was made to heal without medicine. Beneath the bickering sits Red's quiet, growing heresy: that "types," the bedrock of all battle strategy, may be fundamentally flawed.

Inside, Professor Oak hands them sleek red pokedexes and introduces a third traveler — Leaf Juniper, granddaughter of an old friend from Unova, come to fill an international index with Kanto species. Three starters wait on the table. Reading charmander's entry, Red snags on a single phrase: it is said that Charmander dies if its flame goes out. He objects that this confuses correlation with causation — the flame tracking health doesn't mean the flame sustains life; more likely the fire dims because the charmander is dying, not the reverse. Leaf surprises him by taking his side: pidove, she points out, flock in city parks where people feed them, but the birds were likely drawn there anyway by the insects and berries the parks already hold — so people may feed pidove where the birds happen to gather, the shared environment driving both, rather than the feeding drawing the flock. Oak concedes no clean experiment exists short of drowning the animal, and Red claims charmander precisely because that unanswered question is a mystery worth solving — a first step toward a Researcher license, and eventually a lab of his own devoted to the origin of every pokemon species. Blue takes squirtle, Leaf bulbasaur, and the one day Red could never predict past finally begins.