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this story was written as an imitation of negrek, but i think it’s decent enough outside that context. hope you enjoy!
BAD EGG
It’s happening on another plane of existence—at once infinitely distant from and yet deeply linked to your own—so you couldn’t possibly know that somewhere, a young boy is pushing an Action Replay into his Nintendo DS, inserting his copy of Pokémon Diamond, and reviving your world from a stasis you didn’t realize it was in.
Your PC boxes tell a story.
The first box and a half are typical. Bidoof, starly, budew. You’d begun your adventure just like everyone else, after all. You fondly recall the line of seven shinx, back when you’d been on the hunt for a male with intimidate and a good nature. That hadn’t been easy. You miss the time when things did not come easily.
Somewhere around the middle of box two, you find God. The PC blasphemously reduces it to the name “Arceus”, a smattering of statistics, and a broken image symbol where its icon should be. (The creator of the universe has never been captured before, so the pokémon storage system does not have assets to accommodate for it.)
After that, it gets repetitive fast. Gods, myths, legends. Palkia, Giratina, Dialga, Rayquaza, Palkia, Rayquaza, Darkrai, Lugia, Giratina. All in amounts and with colorations that should not be possible. The list goes on.
It’s all so boring.
Rowan says words to you that you’ve always wanted to hear, but you can barely force yourself to focus on them. The BAD EGG is so distracting, all hatred and furious, pure-white incandescence that casts no light or shadow. You’re the only one who can see the anomalous thing, the only one who is forced to choke on its odious, ever-present scent of sulfur and rot. It requires conscious effort for you not to look at the thing—it wants you to look at it so badly—but you’re sure not to give it the satisfaction. You don’t want to look crazy staring at something that isn’t there, right?
“... outstanding work, my boy,” the old professor continues. “I have little doubt you will be remembered as one of the greatest field researchers ever to live.”
Remembered? Something about that disturbs you. “Thanks,” you choke out anyway.
“No, thank you,” Rowan insists. He’s still scrolling through your pokédex, bushy eyebrows perched high on his forehead. “I thought many of these pokémon to be the stuff of fairytales, but here’s the data, here are the photos. To think you were doing this all along without my awareness... I’m sure you have so many stories, and I must hear them. Another day perhaps.”
Well, it wasn’t that hard. You woke up one day with 493 masterballs in your bag, and you learned the hard way when you wandered into the grass and were accosted by God that the number corresponded to national pokédex numbers. Throw the masterballs away or destroy them until you have a number of them equal to whatever pokédex number you want, and you’ll find that pokémon in the wild without fail. Strange and awfully convenient magic, and you’re not sure why it picked you of all people, but in principle it couldn’t have been easier to do.
In principle.
The tree warps, and it becomes in front of you, behind you, and on all sides of you at the same time. There’s a dragon shuddering in the grass, its pearlescent scales gleaming in the morning sun, wings splaying and clamping anxiously. Space churns around it like froth-capped waves in a storm. Even though walking feels like forcing your legs through gelatin, you proceed and extend a hand to the cowering dragon.
“It’s okay,” you say.
The tiny dragon’s magenta-rimmed pupils dilate as they take in your face. The universe has not seen such a juvenile palkia in probably billions of years. It shouldn’t be possible. It feels like stealing a glance at something forbidden—a thrill races through you.
“WHERE AM I,” the little palkia demands, its voice a raging psychic projection that gives you a headache like a spear through the eye socket. The sky and the grass are somersaulting around you; it’s as though world has been placed in a blender and you’re somehow balancing ballerina-like on the blade.
“I know you’re afraid,” you say. And you do know. The juvenile dialga and giratina and arceus had been just as frightened. You’re pretty frightened yourself. You know from the way that your throat is constricting and your breaths are shortening and your ribcage is aching that that your life is balanced on a knife’s edge right now; the world is a tempest revolving around you, and the palkia can will that tempest to rip you apart atom for atom on a whim.
“I can make things better,” you promise. “Will you come with me?”
The palkia leans forward, considering you. It’s just the opening you need to pelt the little god with a masterball. The dragon disintegrates into a hazy red cloud of energy, and everything is abruptly as it was; tree ahead, grass beneath, sky above. The dragon will never see the outside of the PC again. A gust of wind caresses the back of your neck, and you sigh with relief.
The air is tinged, just slightly, with the odor of sulfur.
Rowan clears his throat, jerking you from your reverie. “Ah, interesting—I notice that your dex is missing an entry here.”
“What?” You snatch the dex from him and stare at it.
“Luvdisc,” he says. He’s right. There’s a blank row there, staring at you: luvdisc. Encountered, but never caught.
Luvdisc? You cannot be serious. What the fuck is a luvdisc?
You suppress a groan. This was supposed to be the end of all this. You were supposed to be done. But there had to be one more to go. You nod glumly, accepting it, and stuff your dex into your pocket.
“I’ll go get one, then,” you say.
“Oh, not necessary,” Rowan says, waving a hand. “You’ve done enough. No, I’ll have one of my aides go and collect the data. You should take a well-earned rest.”
“No,” you say. “It has to be me.”
Rowan gives you a concerned look, offers some assurance, but you’re ignoring him, already mentally subtracting luvdisc’s dex number from 493.
You have to be the one to finish this. You have to.
When you start thinking about meaning or purpose, you start to freak yourself out a little, so you just try not to. It’s easier to focus single-mindedly on your goal. Or it had always been Rowan’s goal, really, the one he gave you when this all began: capture every pokémon.
It’s the pipe dream of every starry-eyed schmuck who ever embarks on a badge quest, but no one expects to actually achieve it, not realistically. There are so many pokémon out there, probably most of them undiscovered, many of them legendary and maybe even long-dead. It’s hyperbole, symbolic: catch them all. It just means to do your best. And if we citizen scientists all do our best, maybe we can advance our collective knowledge just enough.
But you, lucky you, you’re doing it for real.
You could have stopped at any time. For some reason, you never did. You’re not sure what you’ll do when it’s all done and you’re finally forced to. Rest, you guess, if you’re capable of such a thing anymore. The BAD EGG occupies almost half of your vision now, spiteful and blinding. Its stench disrupts your sleep. Maybe all this time you’ve had to keep going, because you know that when you stop you’ll fall and fall and you’re not sure you’ll ever hit the ground.
You feel like a god sometimes, not because you’re all-powerful but because the divine and the impossible have become so mind-numbingly uninteresting to you. You’ve met the gods, seen them upside-down, as babies, in impossible colorations. You’ve thrown them against each other in nonsensical matches that could not have occurred in history just to satisfy your tepid curiosity about who would prevail. Sometimes you see people in the street clad in religious garb, or with their patron god’s iconography emblazoned on their backpacks, and you can’t even meet them in the eyes.
It’s not that you feel nothing at all—sometimes you feel that guilt, slight bemusement, and even depression—but nothing gets your blood pumping anymore. You think this must be what it’s like to be omniscient, to be God. Just...
Boring.
“Come on, Infernape. This will make you stronger. You need to eat it.”
Infernape pokes at his food despondently. It’s twinkling with cerulean shards of crushed rare candy. You’re not sure how many of them you ground up into his food, but it was a lot. More than enough to get him to maximum level. You thought he’d be excited about that; he’d always cared so much about strength.
“Look, you and I both know things are changing. I know it’s not the journey we set out for,but... we’re fighting serious pokémon now. Legends, gods. You need to be as powerful as possible if we’re going to stand a chance against them, okay?”
Infernape looks away, lip curling, and he pushes his bowl away with too-human hands.
“Stop being so stubborn,” you demand, the beginnings of anger itching at the back of your neck. “It’s just been you and me since the beginning, you know? Don’t you want it to stay that way? If you don’t do this, I’ll have to replace you with a more powerful pokémon. I’ll have to, or else I won’t make it. I know you don’t want that. You want to stay by my side, don’t you?”
The infernape’s head flame is sputtering barely an inch above his scalp, but it’s white hot. His shoulders are square, and he won’t make eye contact with you.
You never learned to speak with Infernape, but you know what he’s thinking as clearly as if the thought were your own: “I wanted to stay by your side. But not like this.”
He’s made his choice.
Your brow twists into a scowl. “Fine,” you say, your voice quivering. In the last moment before he’s recalled into a cloud of red, Infernape meets your eyes.
You never release him again. He’s an icon in your PC now, somewhere between bidoof and your tenth copy of God, buried beneath dozens of other infernape you’ve summoned, fully leveled, so many of them shiny.
None of them can measure up to him.
Try as you might, you can never forget—or replace—your first pokémon.
You go to the water to catch the luvdisc. You’ve tried summoning fish on land before—it works, technically, but it isn’t pretty.
You made sure to destroy the correct number of masterballs ahead of time, so the gentle aquamarine waves that lap at the sugar-sand beaches of Route 219 were already crawling with pink, heart-shaped fish when you arrived.
Luvdisc.
You swear you have never heard of this thing before, and you’re unsurprised to find it’s unremarkable in every way. Slow-moving, aesthetically plain, and apparently not even particularly skilled at water manipulation. They’re just... there.
In a way, it’s fitting and profoundly unsatisfying at the same time that this should all end with such an unremarkable creature. Everything else has caught your attention by now, and you probably have five or more of each in your PC for good measure. It always had to come down to something like this.
You brush the minimized masterball in your hand with your thumb. This will be the last one you throw. You wade right into the ocean, waves splashing up against your pants legs and darkening them, running shoes squelching on the saturated sand. The luvdisc swim right up to you, dumb little things. The BAD EGG is hovering over the ocean, almost taking up the entire sky, but the sea bears no reflection of its vast and wicked light.
You toss the masterball lazily, and a luvdisc disappears into it. The ball bounces back into your hand.
Your last pokémon.
Your vision goes hateful white, and then all black, and the smell of sulfur and death lances through you and becomes the world, and that’s all there is.
“Truly remarkable, old boy. You did it. We’ll have a toast in your honor. This is a glorious day for science. Ah, here, I made you this—”
Rowan forces something into your hands. A thick piece of paper.
“What is it?” you ask. “Sorry, my vision has been screwy lately.” To say the least.
“A diploma of pokédex completion,” Rowan proclaims. “We wanted to honor all your hard work. Truly, thank you.”
A piece of paper.
You lean back in your chair.
“I was glad to do it,” is all you can say.
It’s happening on another plane of existence—at once infinitely distant from and yet deeply linked to your own—so you couldn’t possibly know that somewhere, a young boy is closing his Nintendo DS and returning his copy of Pokémon Diamond to its case for the last time, freezing you in this moment for all of time. Maybe it’s something like rest, something like death.
It’s over. You did it!
Was it worth it?
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