Open Humble Beginnings

[Orange Book]

Sitting cross legged with her lab coat hanging wide open, Professor Grove took in a deep breath. It was the dawn of a new generation for Oldale Town of the Hoenn Region. In a matter of moments, the three Pokémon she had taken care of over the past few weeks would be chosen by three up and coming trainers. She knew that. Yet there was still a feeling of attachment running within her bosom for them.

Oh how she adored them all so very much; Torchic, Mudkip, Treeko. She could only hope whomever they were to end up with was prepared to take great care of them.

Awaiting the arrival of the first three trainers, Professor Grove took a glance at her watch. There were many children of proper age to begin their journey in Oldale Town; yet only the first three to show would be leaving with starter Pokémon. Anxious to see who would be the first to march through the front doors of her laboratory, Professor Grove ran her fingers through her luscious violet hair and bit her lip.

 

[Sportacus...?]

The stimulated silence of the professor's adobe was softly, yet soundly, intercepted by a muffled tittering from the outside. As the doors swung open, the tall, teen-aged boy entered Grove's adobe, reeling and cackling like a mental patient, his face cherry-red and evidently harboring a maniacal grin past a broad hand slapped across his mouth as he threw himself forward, dying.

Ginger bangs spilled over the blindfold suppressing the boy's sight.

"Mrs. Holly! Where did you—ahaha—want me to put your package...?" The word 'package' triggered a sudden inundation of sputtering hilarity and the teenager nearly collapsed onto his knees right there, but he continued forward nonetheless with a renewed resolve: "You know I'll always be here for you, even when I leave as a Trainer...!" He lost his composure and gave himself to guffawing again.

He must have expected the silky-smooth inflection of Assistant Professor Carmen Holly to intercept his hysteria, and thus when it failed to arise, his intern's laughter began to suspiciously die. His brow furrowed with concern from behind his blinder. "...Miss Holly? Was this the wrong time?"

 

[Orange Book]

With an attempt given to remove the boy's blindfold, the curvaceous figurine of Professor Grove --seen through her open lab coat-- would have appeared before his line of sight. She gazed at him blankly, the beauty of her intricately woven face nearly dazzling under the lights.

She did not utter a single word, yet instead continued to ponder upon with him widened purple eyes.

 

[Sportacus...?]

Reality assuaged the boy as he felt his blindness swiftly corrected, the cloth ripped from over his eyes who were then left exposed to scintillatingly-immaculate landscape of the laboratory and the most faultless face he'd ever seen. To the intern, it was like beholding a goddess, and he instinctively complied to her majesty, throwing himself backwards. He visibly cowered, arms pulled up protectively and head titled slightly off to the side as if Grove were wearing nothing but a towel, or otherwise, as if his supposed understanding of femininity had been discredited once again.

Professor Grove, at present, maintained a caliber of beauty that was not unlike anything Oleander could find online when his parents weren't home, but she took upon a quality of exoticism, now, standing mere feet away in his realm of existence. There was really no tactful vocabulary within the teenage boy's hormone-raddled mind that could describe this exquisite example of womanhood--this was essentially what Grove had become, in but a mere moment's time to Ollie: the paramount, possible, standard for this enigmatic other gender that had been a mystery to him before Holly. And yet, Grove was far from Holly.

He felt a clenching feeling in his gut, and below there, as he made an inward attempt to reign back his bewilderment. Damn, is every researcher in Hoenn thick?

"Professor Grove,"—he was just vaguely acquaintanced with the woman who would give his first ever Pokémon—"I-I didn't know we were doing the starter-exchange today. I'm... really bad with times. I'm still running on Johto time, honestly." He would have laughed to lighten tension but his face retained the same red color and his throat felt clogged.

 

[Orange Book]

The eyes of the professor remained ever illuminate, garnering within them a trinket of aspiration as Grove herself stood upright to take upon a more professional stance. For a moment longer, they remained fixated upon the retreating Oleander, studying his frame with intense effort, the likes of which felt as though it were an eternity yet amounted to nothing more than a measly seconds in the real world.

Casting a hand through her luscious mane and amounting a greater volume to that which sat essentially in roost upon her scalp, Professor Grove enacted a most miniscule of operations, though it carried along with it such a surplus of strength and magnitude that the very action itself could have brought upon a calamity to the entirety of the Hoenn Region itself --she smiled.

In a grandeur display of divinity, she twirled her soft lips to the corner of her cushioned cheek bones and smiled warmly, radiating a surge of glory in the way of the puzzled boy. "Don't worry about it," she finally said, turning to face the opposite direction, "why don't you come with me this way, hmm? I'll show you to where the Pokémon are being held."