>>46876806Your knees were already weakening before you made your challenge. In fact, you had been feeling strange ever since you stepped inside the Saffron City Gym, as if a sweet pink fog was tickling the edges of your thoughts. For some stupid reason, you couldn’t get the plaque at the gym entrance out of your head:
“Sabrina, the Mistress of Psychic-Type Pokémon!”
Something about the word mistress in particular snagged at your attention, tugging your mind back to the inscription long after you first read it, the syllables rolling around inside your brain as if somebody was still whispering them to you while you battled your way past the gym trainers.
Sabrina, the Mistress of Psychic-Type Pokémon!
Sabrina, the Mistress of Psychic...
Sabrina the Mistress...
Mistress... Sabrina...
‘I am Sabrina. I had a vision of your arrival.’
A vision? You blinked, suddenly unable to remember how you had made it this far into the building. Had you defeated all the gym trainers already? There were strange figures lurking in the shadows here, glassy-eyed and... underdressed, but they were all so motionless and cloaked in fog that they might have just been statues. Every one of them knelt or bowed before the gym leader.
Whether her psychic prescience was real or not, Sabrina herself was a definitely a vision: poised and athletic, with a swoop of raven hair and legs so shapely that your mouth turned dry just looking at them. And those eyes. Were they pink, red... green? It didn’t matter: the moment you stared into them it was as if you had been nailed to the floor.
‘Poor little trainer. You still think you’re here to battle me, don’t you?’
That voice — it was as if she was speaking to you from just behind your ear, so close that you could feel her breath across the hairs on the back of your neck. You were intimately aware of each soft little noise made by her lips and tongue as they shaped her words.
