Guilt.
With a soft hiss and a thump, Green fell on his side; his feet tangled up in a pair of thick, green vines. He twisted around and made to untangle his legs, which were so bound together that he couldn’t move them. After a few moments of writhing about, he reached for his belt and pulled out a pokeball and, after a brief session of playing find-the-release-button, he let out his Scizor and pointed to the vines. The scizor understood, and the plants were reduced to shreds in an instant.
The gym leader scrambled to his feet and gave himself a little shake. It wasn’t every day that he got caught in something and fell; in fact, it was virtually never. But his mind had been preoccupied, and he hadn’t seen the vines. Then he had tripped.
His mind sprang directly back to where it had been before, however, though this time he decided it would be better if he thought out his problems while sitting at the base of a large tree. Scizor, who hadn’t been given any further instruction, went and sat patiently beside its master.
Green was in the middle of nowhere, plain and simple. And being in the middle of nowhere meant not being at the Viridian Gym; this was one of the things that bothered him. Gym leaders were usually at their gym most of the time to accept trainers; he had built a system to get around that simple rule. But any day now, he expected one of the gym leaders – either from Kanto or the one he was in now – to shoot right in and tell him he had been away for too long; that he needed to go back, hang around his gym, take on some challengers face to face… He hadn’t wanted to take the position though, he had wanted to travel around every region and research everything, more along the lines of his grandfather Professor Oak. But he had taken the position anyway, since Red couldn’t at the time, and now he was stuck with it, and he felt a twinge of guilt, as if he weren’t doing as well as the other leaders.
Holding his head in his hands, he mulled over the situation for a while longer; so long that the sun moved from directly over head to almost brushing the horizon. With resolve, he decided to find his way out of the forest he was in and head back to Viridian City; maybe hanging around there for a few days would absolve him of his guilt, at least for a little while.
