In June of 2020, Alexa received a tip from Cassius that Bill Fjord’s ward, Mige Fjord, was coming to Kalos. Maybe to compete in the League, he wasn’t sure, but he’d be meeting with Professor Sycamore. Considering Mige’s “performance in the League”, he thought that Alexa might want to know. Alexa thanked him and did a rudimentary google search on the guy.
He was young, but during the most recent Indigo Conference, people started calling him a prodigy by the end. She realized where she’d recognized the name: his Pidgeot had seemingly evolved in order to defeat an opponent. She hadn’t seen it live, but she’d seen the highlights of that match floating around for weeks now.
He was all the talk among a certain class of academic—a class that included Professor Sycamore, apparently: Sycamore had long been theorizing about Mega Evolution being real. It was hard to take seriously for a lot of people, who dismissed the ancient stories as little more than myth. But Mige had done it. Of course Sycamore would be interested in him. Which meant that Alexa was interested in him. After all, the guy might be the first person to achieve Mega Evolution in centuries; that had to have the “broad appeal” that the chief was looking for.
So, she made a couple more calls and when Mige landed in Lumiose City, she was among the first to know. She went to the neighborhood where Sycamore lived and she began to just kind of loiter around the streets. She hoped she might be able to catch him walking around one day. To her luck, on the morning of her second day, she saw him.
Alexa had dressed more casual than normal. She didn’t want to look like she was with the press; she wanted to look like a cute college girl who might want to flirt with him. She hoped it’d make him a bit more cooperative; or at the very least, he might not immediately shut her down.
She ducked into an alley when she saw him with a cold cup of coffee in hand, and stepped out at the right second, pretending to look down at her phone so she’d bump into him. It worked, and she played up being “so clumsy”. She apologized for spilling her drink on him, and he was chill about it; accidents happened. She introduced herself and, doing her best “bite my lip and play with my hair” smile, asked if he’d like to accompany her to buy a replacement.
He agreed (he was a polite boy) and they talked a bit. She gauged him as a person. She took the conversation as casually as she could. She’d never been the best actress, but if Mige could smell what she was up to, he didn’t show it.
She casually inserted pointed questions; why he was in Kalos, what he thought of the country, his goals while he was there. At some point it seemed like either he’d caught on or was losing interest. Desperate to get more information, she came clean: her name was Alexa, and she worked for the Lumiose Press. She thought Mige would make a good public interest story and asked if he’d be willing to answer some questions.
He acquiesced, but he seemed eager to leave. Alexa was professional and kind, doing her best to put him at ease and maybe even try to get him to smile or laugh. She didn’t get much out of him, but after she got as much from him as she could, she spared him and turned him loose. Before he left, she gave Mige her card. If there was anything else he thought to add, or if he heard anything interesting in the future, to let her know.
She didn’t expect to hear from him. Maker, that went bad. She felt bad about the way she’d tried to get him to talk to her. Maybe he’d have been more open to a conversation if he hadn’t felt like she’d been trying to trick him. I mean, she had been trying to trick him. But maybe that was the problem? On the other, other hand, he might not have talked to her in the first place if she had just called him up as a member of the press.
Oh well. Not much left to do with that, she supposed.
She spent the next week or so writing up a piece, adding in all of the research and interviews that she could; she managed to dig up some people who knew Mige, and tried to get a better idea of who he was from them. Most of them declined to speak with her, but a few people were helpful; a curious character named “Anthony the Hitmonchef” had a lot of good things to say about him, and evidently he’d even met B4W a few times? Huh. Mige led an…interesting life by the looks of things.
Bill Fjord refused to speak with her. Not surprising.
Eventually, she had a damn good article. Sure, it was kind of a puff piece, but it was good. She turned it in to the editor-in-chief, who deemed the article not worth published.
“Nobody cares that a guy who lost in the semifinals of a foreign tournament is in Kalos. There’s a hundred guys like him coming and going from Kalos every day.”
“Well, have any of those ‘other guys’ achieved Mega Evolution?”
“Mega Evolution? Don’t be ridiculous; that’s a myth.”
“Tell that to Professor Sycamore. He invited Mige here because—”
“I don’t care, sweetheart. And trust me, neither will the public at large.”
Alexa was fuming. What a prick, she thought to herself. She rage ate a burrito at lunch, then went back to doing her job.
