Chapter 1: Synthesis
Very_Tired_Person
Self-proclaimed sleepyhead
- Location
- inside a giant coffee mug
- Pronouns
- he/his
This is the story of one boy, and his journey to starting a photography club. Oh, and being a pokemon trainer. That too.
There’s a lot of options you could go with when reborn into the world of pokemon. You could try to be a fanfiction protagonist and fail miserably. You could try to be a fanfiction protagonist and not fail miserably. Or you could be like me, and proudly claim your greatest achievement was creating a photography club named after an insignificant ingame location most well known for a memorization minigame and an expandable soundtrack.
There’s a lot of options you could go with when reborn into the world of pokemon. You could try to be a fanfiction protagonist and fail miserably. You could try to be a fanfiction protagonist and not fail miserably. Or you could be like me, and proudly claim your greatest achievement was creating a photography club named after an insignificant ingame location most well known for a memorization minigame and an expandable soundtrack.
So, what's this?
Well, for starters, it's a fanfiction. That much is pretty obvious. Specifically, it's my attempt at a Unova-focused journey fic. However, it follows a somewhat different route than an average journey, since the protagonist doesn't actually attempt the gym challenge, or any other alternative. I started writing this with that premise since I wanted to see how plausible it would be to actually manage a story that, at least functionally speaking, doesn't have a driving goal or conflict.
Any content warnings?
This fic will contain some spoilers for pokemon Sword and Shield, as well as the DLCs for those games. the actual story of those titles, however, isn't addressed directly. However, if you haven't played either of the aforementioned games, and wish to go through them blindly, you should leave this story for a later point in time. On the rating side of things, this story is G-PG so far.
When will the story update?
Generally? when I have the time to actually finish the next chapter. The update schedule will probably end up being pretty erratic, but I'm hoping to keep it at least somewhat consistent. No promises, though.
How would you like your reviews, sir? Critical, Positive, or Balanced?
I'm mostly hoping to see more from the positive side of the review spectrum, but if you think there's some incredibly large, glaring flaw that needs to be addressed, feel free to tell me about it.
Well, for starters, it's a fanfiction. That much is pretty obvious. Specifically, it's my attempt at a Unova-focused journey fic. However, it follows a somewhat different route than an average journey, since the protagonist doesn't actually attempt the gym challenge, or any other alternative. I started writing this with that premise since I wanted to see how plausible it would be to actually manage a story that, at least functionally speaking, doesn't have a driving goal or conflict.
Any content warnings?
This fic will contain some spoilers for pokemon Sword and Shield, as well as the DLCs for those games. the actual story of those titles, however, isn't addressed directly. However, if you haven't played either of the aforementioned games, and wish to go through them blindly, you should leave this story for a later point in time. On the rating side of things, this story is G-PG so far.
When will the story update?
Generally? when I have the time to actually finish the next chapter. The update schedule will probably end up being pretty erratic, but I'm hoping to keep it at least somewhat consistent. No promises, though.
How would you like your reviews, sir? Critical, Positive, or Balanced?
I'm mostly hoping to see more from the positive side of the review spectrum, but if you think there's some incredibly large, glaring flaw that needs to be addressed, feel free to tell me about it.
I started remembering things, so to speak, at four years of age.
I wasn’t sure why that was the point it began, though it might have had something to do with brain development. If we were going to go by cliche isekai logic, then I should have instantly had all of my memories straight from the get-go, along with the deeply traumatizing memories of being born haunting my nightmares for years to come. Except that’s biologically completely impossible.
(Well, all of this should have been impossible already as well, but that’s beside the point)
There’d be no reason for a newborn to have a consciousness of any kind, their brains just hadn’t grown enough at that point for it to be possible. Maybe by this point, my mind had grown enough to actually sustain those memories. There’s a reason why people don’t tend to remember any clear memories of their early childhoods, after all.
Nevertheless, I started remembering things, little by little. I kept tripping on my own steps as I misjudged the size of my feet, my small legs not strong enough to adjust to the mistakes. I had an easy time learning to speak, only held back by my own vocal cords. Sometimes when I slept, I'd wake up and mumble about weird dreams, of big houses shaped like rectangles, and countless blurry figures walking about. When I looked at my mother’s ampharos, I thought of nonsensical statistics that I shouldn't have even been able to comprehend.
The process continued for what felt like ages, slowly bringing old experiences and memories, older than I had been alive, to the surface. There wasn’t any defining moment where everything came to me in a flash flood of knowledge. It was slow, foreign yet oddly familiar thoughts creeping in during a timespan of several years. In the beginning, I spoke of them to my parents, but they only thought of them as daydreams, or childhood fantasies. Perhaps if I had continued, they may have started taking my mumblings more seriously.
I stopped telling them about my dreams after a while. It wasn’t like they would ever believe me, after all.
I never remembered what happened to me in the end. I wasn’t sure if I’d died, or if I’d simply stopped existing there the moment I was born here. I only knew sheer information. I couldn’t place any names for the people I knew, not even my own. The only name I knew was the one I’d been given here.
Hubert.
Years passed. I was ten, the youngest in the village. This place was nice, calm, cozy. It was the Village Bridge, and it was home. Waking up every day to the distant echoes of the river and the clean, fresh air was a sharp contrast from my old home, but it was a welcome change that I’d grown used to, even a little fond of.
I still had problems with writing. Even though everything was spoken in English, Unova used the Galarian writing system, which was very different from the Latin alphabet I was used to. When I wasn’t focusing, I tended to change into English script while writing. It got incredibly annoying to have to erase it all and start over when it happened. Nowadays I did it far less, but it still slipped through from time to time. Thankfully it just looked like squiggly lines and writing mistakes to anyone who looked. Odd, but nothing too noteworthy.
Good thing I hadn’t been born in Johto or Sinnoh, I guessed. Seeing your kid suddenly start to write in Unown sigils of all things would be, unexpected, to say the least.
I spent my days reading pokemon healthcare books I’d borrowed from our neighbor, Mr. Delves, on the lookout for wild pokemon at the park or by the riverside, and doing my distance class assignments for the trainer school at Opelucid. Learning about different species of pokemon on a far more detailed level than I’d ever thought was possible. It was all so fascinating, I just couldn’t resist. Pokemon were cool. But pokemon as actual things you could see with your own eyes, as something you could interact with?
Both even cooler, and also kind of terrifying.
Having a videogame species that can destroy buildings with a single hit was awesome. Actually knowing that a species like that existed in your world, not so much. Thankfully some of the more extreme things from the Pokedex, like shedinja devouring your soul if you looked at its back a little funny, were apparently just folk stories.
Dodged that bullet, at least.
Oh, and also throwing fake pokeballs at dummy targets from weird angles. A surprisingly relaxing pastime, to be honest.
It was to practice my aiming skills with actual pokeballs. I was kind of surprised that this wasn’t something that was recommended for people hoping to become trainers, it seemed like a pretty obvious thing you’d need to learn. From what I’d read, even though the Pokeball itself was a fascinating little piece of machinery, far more complex and robust than anything I could ever have predicted, it didn’t come with any sort of automatic aiming system or anything: your ability to actually get the Pokeball to hit the target was based purely on your throwing hand and your throwing hand alone.
The fakes I used were mostly accurate to the real thing, just without any of the internal technology or the shrinking mechanism. I’d asked for them as a birthday gift from my parents a few weeks back, and after hearing my reasoning, as strange as it was, they obliged.
It required a lot more precision than what one would expect. You had to develop a good eye for soft spots to aim the Pokeball at, how to best throw it, from what angle, you had to judge whether the target would move around or not, how it would dodge, there were a lot of things to consider.
(and oh boy, did it take a while to make a moving target by myself. I couldn’t make anything automated, that’d take way too long to be worth it, but one very long rope, a couple of trampoline springs, a sufficiently large chunk of chipboard, a saw, and an electric drill could get you pretty far, it seemed. Who knew?)
It wasn’t perfect, I doubted I could ever be ready for absolutely every situation where I had to throw something, be it a Pokeball, a set of magical ancient DNA splicing technology, or just a simple rock, but I could be damn sure that I was better off than most.
Though as prepared as I was for a pokemon journey, I still wasn’t all too sure where I’d go with it.
I got into photography at twelve years of age.
Now, I already knew my new mother liked pokemon photography. While other residents of the town might have had family pictures adorning their shelves, ours had mom’s armada of wild pokemon nature photographs.
They were all excellently taken, too. My favorite was the one at the shelf by the kitchen table, a zoomed-in scene of a trio of swanna lounging at a lake, the sunset painting the water a vivid orange. It was already gorgeous as a still image, so I could only wonder about how breathtaking it must have been to witness it first-hand.
When I first asked her about some of the pictures, she’d talked about each and every one with a tone of fondness, a little bit of nostalgia, and pride. Sure, they weren’t trophies or gym badges or frontier symbols or medals. But to her, they were much, much more valuable than any prize ever would be.
Her face practically lit up like a fireworks show when I first asked her if I could try taking a shot at photography myself. It was nice.
We spent that day outside, be it by the bridge overlooking the river, or at the edges of the forest, looking for any wild pokemon we could snap a picture of. We ended up finding a few bibarel by the shoreline further away from the bridge. The pictures I took without her helping me keep the camera steady were a bit shaky, but she loved all of them regardless.
By next week, a shaky picture of a group of bibarel sat by the scene of the sunset swanna, joined by a group of sunbathing petilil, and a lone seviper on a rock, scales shimmering in the light of the scorching midday sun. And on my side, I’d finally found myself something to travel for.
Who knew, maybe someday I could get one of these into a newspaper. That’d be a nice goal to start with.
I was halfway to thirteen years of age when the team plasma incident occurred at the pokemon league. As shocking as it was for my parents, and the whole rest of the community, to be honest, I wasn’t surprised. Alder was still the champion, and unless this had been the anime universe, that would place me somewhere before black and white’s ending. This event had only solidified my suspicions at the time.
(And I was almost positive it wasn’t the anime universe. Team plasma's very existence as an organization, instead of neo team plasma, functionally proved that to be the case.)
Although mom and dad had watched the whole thing with bated breaths, I’d excused myself with one excuse or another, simple nerves if I recalled correctly, and went to my room. I already knew the conclusion of the affair, after all, and staying over there watching the whole thing wasn’t really going to be all that interesting when you knew exactly how it would end.
And even if I ever had to watch it later on in life for one reason or another, an event as big as that would surely be left somewhere on the web to rewatch. Instead, I had gone back to reading my book about the effects of weather pokemon types and abilities.
The only other deviation from the norm that day had been the ice cream cones we’d gone off to buy after the news report had finished.
“Well, I guess tomorrow’s the day,” I said, sitting at the kitchen table. We were having some Topo berry salad for dinner tonight. It was one of my favorites. We’d all pitched in and done it together to make this the best family dinner we could. But even though this was supposed to be a celebration, it just didn’t feel right.
Dad and I were heading for Lacunosa tomorrow. He’d help me out with getting my first pokemon, we’d be spending a few more days at a local inn, and that’s where we’d go our separate ways. Dad would be heading back home.
And I would be heading for Undella Town, and starting my journey.
We’d been planning this for years now, the specifics coming together months ago, but it was still a little bittersweet. I promised I’d come back once in a while, and that I’d stay in contact and do my best to call whenever I could, but leaving this place after living here for so long was hard. But this was what I’d studied for, what I’d wanted to do for so, so long. I wasn’t backing out by this point.
We ate in silence, and though that might’ve been agonizing for anyone else, I thought of it as a blessing. It was calming, acting like this was just a normal dinner on a normal day, instead of a big event. The salad was great, the Nomel berry juice helped bring out the flavor a lot.
“I guess it is, huh?” my father answered, breaking the silence. He sounded resigned, but there was still some pride peeking out from behind that tone. It was reassuring to hear that confirmation.
“So, tomorrow morning?” I asked him.
“Tomorrow morning,” he responded. We finished eating, and started picking up the plates. There were still some Topo berry chunks by the side of my plate. I wasn’t going to just leave them there, so I nabbed them while walking towards the kitchen sink. I’d have to wash my hands after putting everything into the dishwasher anyway.
Just before I left the room, my mother called out a “We love you!” from her seat. “Me too,” I said, glancing back at them with a tiny smile on my face. I climbed up the stairs and closed the door behind me when I got to my room. I sat on my bed, lit up the reading light, and spent the rest of the evening and all the way ‘till nightfall reading a fancy old book about status moves. It was fascinating stuff, though I already knew some of it from the games. Mr. Delves really loved lending me his book collection, didn’t he?
“Well, son, we’re here,” dad said “Lacunosa Town. Where everyone does the same thing every day, you never leave your house at night, and people start screaming if you bring up old folktales.” A chuckle escaped his lips at the statement.
I had to admit, out of all the bad jokes he’d told me throughout my childhood, that one was actually kind of funny. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of finally getting a chuckle out of me, however. My carefully cultivated persona of relaxed, oddly confident aloofness wouldn’t be brought down that easily.
Regardless, true to my father’s words, we had reached Lacunosa. We’d been on the road for a bit over two days now, having stopped on regular intervals to cook up something. I hadn’t really thought much about regionwide travel, having lived at the Village Bridge my whole (second) life, so I was only now realizing just how locally isolated Unova was. For how technologically advanced the region was in its central hubs, there didn’t seem to be almost any, actually disregard the ‘almost’, there literally weren’t any streets in this place. Unovans apparently just, didn’t use cars.
Well, at least it preserved the environment.
We’d taken lots of breaks in between the long stretches of walking and walking and walking some more, and eventually spent the night at an inn located a bit after the midway point of the route. Thankfully it hadn’t cost us much. After that, it was off to the road again. The most exciting thing we’d encountered during the trip was a lone rapidash, though it had thankfully left us to our own devices once it saw that we didn’t mean it any harm.
Back to the present, we’d just finished paying for a room at an inn for dad, since he’d be staying here for a few days. Some place called Oceanside. Apparently, it was really old, or such? I hadn’t memorized the entire history of the place when we’d planned where to sleep at, but the few reviews it had were pretty good, so it would do. He hadn’t brought much luggage, just his backpack, and I wasn’t going to stick around much anyway. I’d only be coming back for some last-minute farewells and to return dad’s pokemon, since he’d lent it to me to help with catching a pokemon. After that, it was off in two different directions.
Dad was off to restock on a few spices that we couldn’t get back home. There was a salesman who knew our family over here at Lacunosa, and this place was closer than Opelucid anyway, so he always got them from here. Meanwhile, I’d been given our family herdier to help out with finding, and hopefully catching, a pokemon of my own. To the southernmost path of the region.
My destination was Route Thirteen.
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