I wake up, get Juniper's box, pick Tepig from it, then fight my friends with their new starters. The next three-four hours are a strange mess I never can quite recall. A few faces stick, though: the museum curator of Nacrene City, Driftveil City's mining tycoon, that actor from Icirrus... I think they all have something in common, but I'm not sure what it was.
Each time, once those few hours pass, I end up in Opelucid City, the Legend Badge in my hands. Juniper's there again, handing me some purple ball. I'm not sure what it actually does, but surely it's important. Immediately, I rush to the Pokémon Center.
I take the steps three at a time, adrenaline pushing me to do the trip with an efficiency I never thought I had.
With the ball in hand, I urgently pass it over to some strange flaming boar Pokémon I apparently have. I'm not sure when I got it, but it looks similar enough to Tepig that I think it might be an evolution?
I talk to the man in the middle, go by him and enter the basement through the elevator.
I'm there. As in, someone who looks exactly like me.
"I" offer myself a Pokéball, revealing a small grey bird inside. I feel compelled to hand the ball with the boar Pokémon inside it to "me". I don't know what the bird does, but I have a feeling that this isn't a fair trade.
I wake up, get Juniper's box, pick Tepig from it, the-
No.
I'm not doing this again. I'm not going through another adventure I can't remember which is doomed to get cut short as I trade away something I don't know the use of.
Is the ball valuable? Is it something to hoard and stockpile?
Surely it's something valuable if I'm going through this so many times just so someone else can have it.
Are they even "someone else"? Am I suffering endless loops so a different version of me can prosper?
Somehow that thought hurts even more. Somewhere out there, there's a version of me that benefits from whatever luxury the ball provides. I cannot use it, even though I'm the one who goes through all of this to get more of it. I've gone through a thousand permutations of my life, I've been both boy and girl hundreds of times and everything melts together into this mess where I can't even tell who I am anymore. I'm not allowed to have the adventure I was promised, the Pokémon I've caught along the way, the memories I've made. All I have is my name, and it's just... A. A single letter. My one and only real possession is the first letter of the alphabet.
Is this fair?