Banette is a creepy pokémon. Apparently, all banettes are discarded dolls, which out of anger and abandonment have become possessed by cursed energy and become alive. The only bit of comfort the pokédex offers is that all of that dark energy is, in fact, trapped inside of the doll. The energy can only escape if Banette’s mouth is opened.
So how do you trap energy? Outside of Banette’s actions, this dark energy has no effect on the rest of the world. It doesn’t leak out, it doesn’t effect anyone else, it presumably can’t be measured. The cursed energy that created Banette is entirely isolated, insulated, and trapped inside of the doll.
There is a device that has a similar effect in our world – a Faraday Cage. A Faraday Cage can shield or trap electrical field effects, radio waves, lightning strikes and other electrical effects. Any source of electricity on the opposite side of the cage as yourself (whether inside or outside, relative to you) is completely and entirely undetectable.
Michael Faraday, whom the cage is named after, invented it after discovering certain properties of conductors. Conductors are typically metals, or materials where the electrons aren’t bound to specific atoms but are free to move through the entire object. You can think of it like a “sea” of electrons: instead of one or two atoms sharing one or two electrons like a covalent bond, all of the atoms in a metal share all of their electrons together.
This property is what makes Faraday Cages possible. Electrons are negatively charged particles, so they react to an electric field. For the sake of example, let’s imagine a donut-shaped Faraday Cage. With nothing inside or outside of it, all the electrons inside the conductor are evenly distributed.
Now let’s place a one-directional electric field inside of the cage. We know that opposite charges attract–just a fundamental concept in electricity. And we know that since the cage is a conductor, the electrons are free to move wherever they want. So because of the field inside the cage, the electrons organize themselves inside of the walls of the cage. This is called induction.
So now think about what’s happening outside of the cage. Before there’s anything inside, the electrons are all distributed equally. The whole system is neutral, and has no field or other effects.
Now once the field is inside of the cage, you really have two things going on. The conductor is no longer neutral: as you can see, the way the electrons orient themselves has a specific pattern to it. So instead of being a neutral conductor, the conductor is actually now producing its own electric field. However, the catch is that this field is exactly the opposite of the field that is inside the cage. The two fields – the enclosed field, and the field made by the conductor – perfectly cancel each other out, making the entire system appear neutral from the outside.
This entirely shields the electric properties of the interior of the cage from the outside of the cage. Even though both scenarios are very different, from the outside they appear exactly the same – perfectly electrically neutral.
So that’s an example on how you can trap electric energy inside a Faraday Cage. How could you trap “cursed energy” inside of a Banette? Imagine Banette as a Faraday Cage. The fabric (or skin?) that Banette is made of has certain properties that respond very well to the cursed energy. Perhaps that’s why the cursed energy took hold in the first place. In any case, once the cursed energy is inside, the fabric responds to the energy by producing a field exactly opposite of the cursed energy: effectively canceling it out, and making the entire system neutral.
This traps the cursed energy inside of Banette, making it unable to escape, making it entirely invisible and undetectable from the outside, and so on. We are entirely protected from Banette’s cursed energy, because it is trapped inside this way. But if Banette were to open its mouth, the energy would be free to pour out back into the world.
Banette acts like a Faraday Cage for the cursed energy that give it life. Banette’s fabric perfectly counteracts the energy trapped inside, making the whole system act as a neutral one.
PiraticOctopus 