You have to be an Artist and a Poké Maniac, a trainer of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot PSN in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs―the slightly feline outline of a green crest, the slenderness of a white limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate―the little deadly demon among the wholesome Ralts; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.
Furthermore, since the idea of level plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several badges, never less than two I should say, generally six or seven, and as many as eight in a few known cases, between Pokémon and trainer to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was an egg, my little Buneary was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted Battle Frontier of time; but today, in September 2022, after fifteen years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful Human-Like in my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the PSN was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a trainer of twenty-five to court a Kirlia of level sixteen but not a Ralts of twelve.
