Tracey found him a seat, then hurried off to work.
Before this, Shen Qi had only been inside Fuchsia Gym and had never seen a battlefield in person.
The sandy battlefield had to be half the size of a soccer field, giving frail Pokémon that specialized in ranged attacks room to maneuver.
The arenas in the anime's League tournaments were also large, but the boundaries were different.
In reality, battlefields had irregular shapes, with boundary lines that twisted and turned.
It was a little like racing, where courses ran through unfamiliar wilderness to test adaptability;
Battle arenas were also adjusted at any time, and all of them were irregular areas.
Shen Qi's seat was toward the rear half of the field, near a simple shed-like structure resembling the staff seating beside a soccer field.
The Viridian Gym staff sat in their team's seating area at one end of the battlefield.
As time passed, ticket-holding spectators streamed in. The atmosphere grew increasingly noisy and lively, and tension rose like the tide.
During races, the drivers went straight into the service bays, some distance from the spectator stands. By the time Shen Qi took the field, the seats were already full, so he never experienced this steadily mounting tension.
There was another crucial difference: drivers sat inside their cars wearing helmets, away from the direct gaze of a huge audience. After driving a little way, they could leave the spectators' field of view, only showing their faces after the race at most.
In battles, the Pokémon Trainers became the direct focus of everyone's attention, and there were only two of them on the field.
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With the whistle, Tracey entered the field in a referee uniform.
Of the acting Gym Leaders, he had achieved the best placement, and he would personally referee