[ WP ] It 's your tenth birthday and you 're finally old enough to get your first Pokémon . On your way to Professor Oak 's lab , and owl flies by and drops a letter into your hands . It 's from Hogwarts . You read the letter and realize you have a very difficult decision to make .

`` Wizarding school?'' I said aloud to the puffs of my breath retreating behind me, holding the letter higher to catch the sun as it finally limped down past the bare trees along the walk to Professor Oak's. I had heard of people who could do... things... without pokes, things that normally only pokes could do, but they were n't particularly credible tales, the stuff of swarthy men in the markets just off a ship from someplace far, or else the ragged old women with more gums than sense in their heads, but they existed, the stories. Everyone had heard them, like any old fairy stories, or spook tales of Pokemon gone bad and feral. 
 
 Yeah, the spook tales were sometimes true, but the wizards? I'd stopped believing in those before I was even eight. 
 
 It stirred something in me to think it, though. My own power. The pokes had always seemed somehow wrong, a little sinister, for reasons I could n't quite fathom at the time, though later I would give the subject much thought. I stopped my brisk walk and looked again at the letter before the dusk fell all around, again at that second line that drew me in, after what felt like an obligatorily exclaimed *Congratulations, you have been invited to the Hogwarts School of Wizardry! *, it went on in its overdone script, *A council of your peers has determined you capable of learning Magic and its varied Arts and invites you to practice it at our esteemed University... * 
 
 How could I have said no to that offer, that astounding and mysterious proposition, and instead taken up a pet from Professor Oak to do my bidding? Should I have become a master of little slaves in their tiny little worlds, and plied *their* powers on the world instead of my own? Would I have been a better boy, become a better man, if I'd made that choice instead of the school? Even after all that has happened, I do not know the answer to that. And if you have an opinion of your own on the matter, I prefer that you keep it to yourself. 
 

