>>44851839Cynthia had always been quite confident in her strength as a trainer. When she was younger, she believed that only the strongest Pokemon had any value, the rest simply being peripheral. It was her desire to train the strongest Pokemon of all that led her to Sinnoh's various myths and legends, and she dedicated herself to tracking down the gods of space and time.
Her intelligence paid off, and after months of exploration and study she found herself with everything she needed to summon Dialga / Palkia (depending on game version). At the Spear Pillar, she began the ritual to summon the legend, but it attacked. Even not fully materialized in our dimension, its strength was beyond anything Cynthia could have imagined. Her own Pokemon tried to defend her but they were easily overpowered. Dialga / Palkia began to break the pillars of the ancient temple, with one falling onto Cynthia - she had to use an incantation to stop the ritual and seal the distortion hole back up. She lay with the bottom half of her body crushed under a broken pillar for what felt like days. The noise at Spear Pillar had attracted the attention of some Hikers, who found her in time and used their Rock type Pokemon to lift the pillar and free Cynthia, taking her to a hospital in Jubilife City.
It was here Cynthia learned she would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
She didn't know how to process this at first: did it mean she was weak? Were her Pokemon weak and worthless for not being able to defend her?
It took weeks of physiotherapy and time spent around people she would have once considered "weak" but she slowly began to understand. She saw more true strength in the hospital, in people fighting for their lives on ventilators or defying terminal illnesses, than she ever did in "strong trainers". It changed her whole perception of life.
