As I’ve been slowly working my way through the Pokémon Violet DLC, I’ve been listening to a wide variety of podcasts. I finished working through the entire Patreon catalogue of Friends at the Table and have begun to catch up on my usual collection of podcasts that fell by the wayside while I was incredibly focused on the one thing. I’ve been jumping around, from one thing to another, as my time and attention demand, and having a generally pleasant time half listening to a bunch of podcasts and half playing a game whose structure I’m fairly content to ignore. It makes for pleasant evenings, most of the time, though I’ll admit it gets very difficult to handle plot bits of Pokémon that I run into if I’m also trying to listen to anything. My general answer to that is to spend time wandering the new land and catching Pokémon when I’m more interested in the podcast than in making story progress, so I’ve barely done any of the DLC’s story (or at least what feels like barely any of the story but could easily be half or more of it, depending on how long it runs). What I’ve done plenty of is catch Pokémon and enjoy the scenery of this new area.

The combination of these two things, casual playing of Pokémon and more attentive podcast listening, means I’ve got a bunch of odd sense memories. I was listening to the latest episode of Worlds Beyond Number (Episode 15, for anyone reading this from sometime in the future), as we wandered through the comatose dreams of one of the player characters, when I encountered a Shiny Growlithe. As a result, I’ve got a strange association in my mind between descriptions of that character’s past and the emotional tone of that segment of it and the line of thought that went through my head as I almost missed that shiny Growlithe. The thing is, for two games now (Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Pokémon Violet), I’ve been fooled many times into thinking I found a shiny Growlithe. My ability to take a color as seen on my phone (since that’s how I look up the shiny models for Pokémon) and imagine it on my TV is incredibly messed up because I have a heavy blue-light filter on my phone that I’ve grown so accustomed to that I constantly forget it’s there and absolutely nothing like that on my TV. As such, everying looks a bit more red and orange on my phone than anywhere else. So the golden-orange shiny of the shiny Growlithe as shown on my phone does not match up to the yellow-gold shiny Growlith as shown on my TV. What it DOES match up to is a well-illuminated Growlithe. Any Growlithe walking in bright sunlight in a Pokémon game looks like it is shiny to me because I looked so frequently at the off-color shiny model on my phone.

I’ve been incorrectly excited about a normal Growlithe so many times that, any time I see a Growlithe and think “OH, is that a shiny??” I reflexively stop myself, check the illumination around it, and ignore it if it’s standing in any kind of bright light. So far, this has been absolutely the correct choice. Until last night, anyway. Last night, as I went through this process and started to walk away while listening to an incredibly emotional discussion of a character’s upbringing and the achingly familiar solitude she felt, I got incredibly lucky. A second Growlithe spawned as I turned away which prompted me to do a double-take. I saw that it was also off-color and in bright sunlight, so I was about to carry on, but my subcconscious threw the brakes as I tried to leave. After all, what my eyes had perceived but that had not yet trickled into my mind was that the two Growlithes standing next to each other in the direct sunlight were actually different colors. One of them was far moe golden-yellow than light-orange. Still, I’d been so entrenched in doubting what my eyes where telling me that I only believed it was a shiny when I entered a battle with it and got the sparkles that indicate a shiny Pokémon . It also helped that, at the same moment, the in-game clouds moved overhead and I could now clearly see the difference between my brand new shiny, golden Growlithe and the brilliant orange one standing just behind it.

As I’ve thought back to this experience the past two days, trying to examine the associated emotions, I’ve found myself just feeling very attached to this Growlithe. I came across it while I was thinking about my isolated and unhappy childhood. I heard tell of a sad story about childhood isolation and being set apart from those around you while I found a shiny Pokémon that I’ve wanted to get my hands on since I first learned that shiny Pokémon were a thing (and that there wasn’t just a weird Gyarados in Silver and Gold versions for story reasons). It was this odd moment of having a familiar pain that I still deal with today but that is rooted in my childhood evoked at the same time as a small, silly dream I’ve held onto since I was the same age, that I actually developed because of that specific pain, became reality. The dream I developed as part of dealing with a childhood pain came true while I was sifting through that pain. It was the sort of odd moment of intermingled pain, catharsis, and healing that therapy can only dream of. A truly implausible sequence of events. And sure, I’m not magically cured of my loneliness or the way that it can dig deeply at me because of my lonely and isolated childhood, but I do actually feel better about it. I don’t believe in fate or destiny or any of that (I believe in ghosts and spirits more than I believe in any of that predeterministic stuff and, as a reference, I am only willing to admit that the spiritual is technically possible but still very unlikely in the way that most people imagine it), but this is one of those moments that has me wondering how far I’m willing to stretch concidence.

I started writing a paragraph about not changing as a result of this event, but I actually don’t think that’s true. I didn’t consciously change, sure, but I was willing to be more actively involved in a work event because of it. Indirectly, sure, but still, the chain of events is there and it leads from this weird confluence of childhood dreams and pains to me showing up to my workplace’s Halloween event in costume and making an effort to participate in the various parts of the event. I doubt I’d have had the mental energy to push myself to do it if I’d spent last night as caught up in my head about my current loneliness as I usually am after a D&D session and a short hangout with some of my friends on Discord. Who knows, maybe I’ll wind up talking to strangers this weekend and at my friends’ wedding. Anything is possible and a lot more of it seems plausible now after this incredibly unlikely series of concurrent events.