Mitch

This section applies to the ILCOE.

Mitch is the leader of the Scorpio City Gym and a famous expert on poisons and antidotes, treating those who are stung by Scorplack on the way to the town.

Appearance

Age (current)
17, though he has been passing himself off successfully as three or four years older for the past seven years, so he looks somewhat older than he actually is.
Stature
Tall and lean.
Eyes
Large, gray and shiny.
Hair
Long, silver hair past his shoulders.
Clothes
Black, in particular a black cape. He also wears a belt with a golden Scorplack-engraved buckle.
Handedness
Right-handed.
Images
Mitch, by Pyraven

Pre-Story Biography

Mitch's real name is Richard Brown, and he used to live in Merville. Seven years before the start of the story, when he was ten years old, he got a Venonat as a starter Pokémon and headed towards Scorpio City for what was then the first Gym. After getting there, he headed into the Black Desert to train, went a bit too far and stayed a bit too long, and encountered an early Scorplack, which had managed to sting him before he caught it in a Pokéball. On his way back to Scorpio City, he fainted from the slow effects of the poison.

Mysteriously, he came to a few months later to discover that his hair had grown out and turned silver, as had his eyes (though he didn't know that yet), and he was somehow still alive despite being alone in the middle of the desert and having been stung by a Scorplack. Starved and delirious with thirst and remembering almost nothing about who he was, he managed with difficulty to make his way back to Scorpio City, where he got food, water and medical treatment, but not before he had thoughtlessly thrown away his jacket in the hopes of cooling down, losing his wallet with his only identification in the process. At first he only muttered senselessly about death, but slowly he regained his memory. At the same time, however, the strange prescient or psychic feelings he had been having since he woke up in the desert but dismissed as a product of his delirium intensified, and fearing that he had gone crazy or worse combined with his physical changes, he decided not to return to his old life. Instead, he made up the name Mitch and passed himself off as older than he was, always having been tall and mature for his age, in order to be able to enter a specialized school of biology in Green Town and dedicate himself to studying venoms in order to try to figure out just what happened to him there in the desert.

Eventually, he returned to Scorpio City, hoping to use his expertise to save others from the deadly Scorplack venom that had so nearly killed him, and there discovered the Bug-type Gym leader was retiring. He took on the job, modifying the theme to Bug/Poison Pokémon specifically, and continued to research venoms, still vaguely hoping to find out what happened to him in the desert.

Character Rambles

You have no idea how many times I've gone back and forth with just what Mitch's whole deal was. Originally, there was no thought to it whatsoever and I just decided I wanted to make him mysterious, so I gave him mysterious eyes, a mysterious tendency to look up while he talked, the mysterious fact he should have died seven years ago but didn't, the mysterious ability to appear out of nowhere, a mysterious opinion about odds, and mysterious hinted psychic powers. There, I thought, that should be plenty mysterious enough! Look! I made a mysterious character!

I didn't attempt an actual explanation of these mysteries until a long time later, when I had realized it was a good idea to actually know the answers to the mysteries you write into a story. First I thought up one, but that was kind of lame. Then I thought up another, which was way overly elaborate and didn't explain everything properly, but I think that was actually the origin of the whole idea of the Chosen (which, of course, wasn't thought up until Gyarados had been merrily using Dragon Beam for years, as usual with this fic). Then I think at some point I decided the other explanation was better, and then at some point I thought up yet another one that was a kind of a refinement of the second one, and sometime much, much later, I suddenly realized that Mitch was a perfect missing link in another plot hole, and I had what is probably (in my opinion) the best idea I've had since I started this fic.

Unfortunately, however, I can't give any real details about any of this, because that would be way plotty, so that will have to wait until everything has been revealed in the ILCOE.