Body and Mind

Alone in the hospital, Red lines up two errands: a bulletin offering spinarak owners free pokedex data in exchange for letting him study theirs, and a paid session with a psychic, Colan Narud, to test himself for the Gift and to learn what really hit him in the forest. Professor Oak primes him by phone on psychic etiquette — they skim the surface of your thoughts involuntarily, the way the rest of us read faces, so offense often isn't intended; deliberate mind-reading is rarer and conscious; and to guard a secret you keep your attention on prepared questions, since you can no more help a stray thought than avoid picturing a pink donphan when told not to.

Narud, unsettlingly young behind ancient eyes, runs a direct scan (waiver signed), and Red feels it: not a touch but a second presence waking inside his skull, company behind his eyes. The verdict is a double blow. The good news — Red has the Gift; he is psychic after all. The bad — his powers are stunted by trauma. His latent abilities, acting on instinct, walled the pain of his father's death into a partition of his psyche and have maintained it ever since; the spinarak's attack, which Narud names Night Shade (a Ghost attack that turns one's own deepest hurt against them), tore at that partition, which is why it nearly destroyed him. The implication lands hardest of all: his "recovery" from his father's death may not have been resilience and therapy but his fledgling power hiding the wound — and such trauma can cut a psychic off from the Gift permanently.

Two things make the chapter. The first is how Red handles a truth that threatens his self-image. Rather than argue from the gut, he runs the flowchart his childhood therapist built: I notice that I am upset → why, and for whom → is this a tangible harm or merely an offensive idea → and crucially, am I upset because it might be true, or because I know it's false? His resilience is part of his identity; conceding that his powers, not his grit, carried him would cost him a piece of that. If the truth hurts, it's time to grow. The second is the epistemic standoff that follows. Red accepts Narud's reading of whether he's psychic — a thing within a psychic's demonstrated competence — but refuses to accept the interpretive story about his trauma on authority alone, and presses for a falsifiable prediction. Narud retreats to expert consensus; Red answers that "most psychics would agree" is thin if he can't hear the dissenters' reasons, since a wrong belief held by a whole school is still wrong, just wrong in an understandable way. The only clean test — removing the partition — means reliving the trauma in full, an illegal harm Red himself won't risk, leaving the claim suggestive but unproven.

The session does settle one old mystery: the spinarak's blast was Ghost, not Psychic, turned ruinous by Red's own latent mind. It also resolves Red on a course — he will become a psychic, because powers acting on him without his consent are intolerable. His mind, he reflects, is the one thing that is finally him; if memories or feelings must be locked away, he would rather do it knowingly than never be sure what he truly thinks or why. A staff psychic, Laurie, is flagged for a second opinion.