Void is not the same as darkness. Darkness implies that there is sight, as sight is the calibrator for which we see things through light. A lack of light is an appropriate descriptor for darkness, just as the cold is truly just a lack of heat. All these things are perceptions legible only to our minds, the world is not like that. With nothing to perceive vision, there is no darkness, there is nothing. Void, a lack of anything, the inability to know you are seeing void, and the incapability of vision.
That is what they would have experienced had they been alive, but they weren’t. Their carcass was strapped to the hospital bed down in what they’d know as Earth, but they could not go there anymore. Going was no longer a function in the Void. They were nothing, after all. Were they void?
These were the kinds of questions Unown tended to ask themselves. An Unown A would look to its partner, Unown Z, and question it about the very fabric of the universe. Through long discussion, they tried to find their own answers to the universe, and the universe spoke back- their answers defined it. An uncountable number of Unown stared at… Nothing, and yet not Void, and all rumbled. As beings that could not talk in a language any human would understand, their communication instead would look and sound like idle rumbling. They all fiercely fought over what the… thing in front of them could be. One Unown floated closer, an Unown Period. Everyone stopped talking as it floated in the middle of the crowd and Thing, as Unown Periods were known to be the bestest of problem solvers.
It tried to touch the Thing to no immediate effect, though it stirred in response. It backed off and thought for a moment before declaring something to the effect of “I have no fucking clue,” and chaos ruptured through the crowds.
“But!” the Unown interrupted the hollering, everyone simmering down… “If we do not know, there is only one thing that knows. Why don’t we ask the Thing what it is?” Everyone cheered, and the Unown Period glided above the vibrations of successful discourse, proud of itself for continuing the superstitious tradition of them as problem solvers.
One Unown Question Mark waved through the crowd to the Thing-ly mass, everyone watching in excitement. Question Marks, or QM’s for short, were usually the best question askers, they all thought. It tapped the mass causing it to stir again, and so it repeated itself. Tapping it happened again and again, the Thing moving before settling on the ground of nothing once more, like a teenager tugging onto the blankets in order to fall asleep after waking. Frustrated, QM used Hidden Power on the mass, a risky move considering no one knew what it was, but one it decided to take. The mass rumbled, and a cylinder-like shape rolled to be on its tall side.
“What are you?” QM asked the awoken Thing.
“I… don’t know.”
That posed a problem. If they did not know what it was, and it did not know what it was, then what was it? An Unown A in the crowd loudly proposed a solution, “What if we just decide what it is?”
That did not sit right with QM. They couldn’t just decide what it was, this was clearly something they didn’t understand! Yet, it indeed struggled to find the questions to break that down. However, it had the solution.
“I’m going to ask you questions, and you’ll answer them to the best of your ability. This will determine what you are,” QM spoke in a commanding tone. How the Thing understood what it was saying, it did not know, but it at least implied that the Thing was perhaps a Pokemon like them,
“Do you know what a Pokemon is?” QM asked first, attempting to lock in that assumption. The Thing (stared?) blankly, and did something that QM thought to be thinking.
“I do,” it finally replied, in a firm tone. If it tried to think of something without a prompt, it knew nothing. But that question awoke something in its core.
“Do you have a gender? What is it?”
“I…” Thing thought hard. It had two conflicting thoughts, two major ideas in its head- one told it that it was male, the other was a strong desire… no, understanding that, regardless of something it could not remember, it was female. “I’m female.”
“I understand. What species of Pokemon do you think you would be?” QM asked carefully. If it asked what species it was, the Thing may not know at all and perhaps even shut down. Asking it this leading question gave it a way out past objectivity.
“Sylveon,” Thing answered assuredly. It did not know why, and it could not see a Sylveon in its head, but it felt as if its existence had been shaped from that concept, and thus it had been put into its DNA.
“That is all we need to ask,” QM commented, and turned to what one may interpret as the sky. “Universe, we have found a solution. This Thing right here is a female Sylveon.”
Some in the crowd felt unease at the classification of this unidentified object, and some questioned QM’s methods. Yet QM had no doubts, and in fact felt it probably more of a risk to keep it in their realm, rather than to ask the universe to set it into another. And the Universe did reply as quickly as it could, the Thing disappearing and all understood the decision was made. QM felt relief as many thanked it for its quick thinking.
“Why is this here?” Arceus asked. They looked down at the long line of souls it was dealing with for the next while, and something appeared to have cut the line.
A soul of a Sylveon, it seemed, but with no defined origination. See, there were many variants of the World of Pokemon, and Arceus oversaw them all, no matter the workload. In some, Pokemon were trained by humans and competed in sport. In others, they functioned as individual parts of a society with nothing else to abide by, and in some they were what would look like fusions between them and humans.
This always appeared in their soul when they saw it, and yet this one did not have that. It didn’t even look like a Sylveon as a result, Arceus could only understand what it was through its divinity. They looked into this soul’s past and saw everything.
“I see,” they considered it. “They had a run in with that one.” And just like that, Arceus had made its choice; the soul would be returned to life, and it would be in the universe they felt fit it the best.
Her eyes shoot open. Stimuli flooded in from all around her, filling her with visions of grass, trees, the relaxing sounds of the running water of a river, leaves swaying in the wind.
She stands on her (four?) feet breathing deeply and loudly, her chest filling with lovely oxygen. Her body starts to stabilize as she looks around once more. “I’m… dead?” she thought out loud. She’d never been a believer in higher forces, but considering what had just happened to her? That had to be accounted for as a possibility.
And with how serene the world around her was, how could this be anything but heaven? She watched the calming water crackle against clean rocks at the riverbed and suddenly felt thirsty. She moved a (paw?) in front of her, then the opposite back paw, then the opposites… She was trotting! Feeling the wind on what she perceived to be her fur made her feel fresh, excitable!
She came to a stop when the river was right in front of her, failing to entirely stop quickly, leading to her standing in the shallow water. But that was okay. Everything felt fine… She dipped her head close to the water, considering if she should use her front paws to cup water, but that didn’t seem practical at all anymore. Instead, she just dipped her head closer with her eyes shut and lapped at the clear, life-endowing water. The freshest water she’d ever had, she thought to herself, and chided herself for being greedy as she drank more and more.
When she finally felt her thirst fulfilled, she raised her head higher and opened her eyes to see a reflection. ‘Is that… me?’ she thought to herself, and squinted. Those light blue orbs half disappeared, and when her eyes bulged they grew taller- those were her eyes? Now that she was getting a better look at herself, she paid attention to it all, and came to a conclusion her mind had seemingly skipped the process of thinking about earlier: she was not human, anymore.
Her heart raced as she looked around the forest again, “Where am I?! Who am I?!”
“We all ask those questions, but everyone else seems to have the decency to not yell it in the morning,” a voice rang from behind her. She turned her body around awkwardly only to see what she would describe as several blue ovals forming a white-spotted alien, but an alien she’d like to keep as a pet.
“Am I dead?” she asked the Pokemon point-blank. He stared at her, looked her up and down, then tilted his head.
“I mean. I don’t think so? Hey, um… You alright in the head there?” he asked. “Well, um, I’m Bubbles. I live nearby and heard you screaming, so.”
She looked away from Bubbles and tried to hide her shame, she’d just woken somebody else up with her troubles. Still, importantly… She didn’t seem dead, so maybe she wasn’t dead. But she could’ve sworn the last thing she did was die! None of the details were in her head, but she’d woken up with just a few core suggestions of what she was. “I-I just woke up here, and I don’t know what any of this is. Where are we?”
“Yeah, you must've hit your head REAL hard, huh. Honestly, for your safety I think you should just come with me,” Bubbles said matter-of-factly. He shifted in place before tilting his head and turning to look at what seemed to her a random direction into the woods. “C’mon.”
She recoiled a bit further into the water, scared of what he could be doing. She knew better than to follow random strangers in her (?) years of life. How many years she did not know, but she had a base instinctive awareness that she was pretty old. “I don’t think I want to do that, s-sir.”
“Oh my God, just relax already,” he grumbled, turning back to see the worried Sylveon. He noticed they were both standing in water and decided to use a practical approach. He waved his hand into the water and within seconds the quadruped was tossed into the air with a squelch, tossed onto his back.
“H-hey, what the fuck was that!” she whined while her front paws dangled around the top of his head.
“You really don’t know anything, huh? Well, I’m an Azumarill, a Water-Type, and we were in water,” Bubbles started explaining as he marched through the thicket. “So I just commanded the water, easy as that. Hey, um, you gonna get off my head?”
“S-so you try to get me to follow you, and now that I’m on top of you you complain?”
“I don’t see how that correlates, but whatever,” he sighed. The two went quiet as she looked around the trees, spotting a few things that made her mind scream the word ‘butterflies!’, and then immediately fry itself when the creatures did not meet the subconscious description her mind understood.
Being on Bubbles’ back was calming for her. She felt taller being hoisted onto something that was already taller than her, and he seemed sturdy. If anything attacked her, she felt she could trust him, especially since he’d been kind so far. Thinking about how she seemed so scared of him at first made her feel embarrassed, but she didn’t show it. She just observed the world she found herself in.
“Y’know,” Bubbles started, “I’d ask for your name, but you seem like an amnesiac so I’m not sure how that’s useful. Do you know anything about yourself at all?”
She almost felt she should be angry at his assumption, but he was right. She couldn’t remember her name, nor much about herself. “Um…” Think, think…
Well, she knew a few things about herself that she’d recalled in her wake. She knew she was an adult, she knew she was a she, and she knew that she was not what she once was. “I guess I’m an adult?”
“That doesn’t narrow much down, to be quite honest with you. You know what kind of Pokemon you are? You seemed confused earlier.”
“What’s a Pokemon?”
“That’s a problematic question, and one for the philosophers, not me. Would it help you if I told you I’m a Pokemon, and you’re a Pokemon?”
“So… Everyone’s a Pokemon?”
“Pretty much. Oh,” he paused as he saw what was ahead.
The Sylveon pushed herself a bit higher while holstered on his back. They seemed to be at the top of a tall incline that lowered into several homes below, a bowl-shape with their left side of the bowl being carved allowing for easy exit to what looked like a lake to her. Trees by the cliff sides almost seemed to shroud everything, but smoke from a large building’s chimney eclipsed them. She noticed that they were made of many different materials, some clearly made of sticks, some straw. One at an opposite incline to where they were seemed like what she recalled to be a ‘cabin’, but much bigger. Some homes littered around the sides of the town, but more movement seemed to go on in dirt streets, signs in a language she couldn’t scattered about.
“We’re just about in town. I don’t know what I’m actually gonna do with you, though; it’s not like we can throw an adult in elementary school, and I think you understand less right now than they do.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll bring you to a Psychic-Type, I think. They might know what to do.”
“What’s a Psychic-Type?” she asked.
“Useful tricksters that are always nerds for some reason. I want you to not ask these questions while we’re outside, I don’t want any unwanted attention.” Bubbles knew that when any problem came to town, the entire town came to the problem. In other words, everyone would jump in to try to help, and he felt she was already shy enough just meeting him. What about a more intimidating member of society?
“Hey there Bubbles, who’s that Sylveon on your back there?” a random, high-pitched neighborly voice rang out. Bubbles turned his head to see the friendly Druddigon, his buddy from school. “Is that your kid or something?”
“How would she be,” Bubbles started, then realized something. “She’s related to the family, just showing her around town. You know if Brillian’s at his house?”
Something about the scaly beast should’ve made her scared, she thought deep down, but something in her heart told her there was nothing to be afraid of. She felt self-assured that if he did anything, she’d have the advantage, even!
Besides, he seemed to be nice enough… But…
She stirred on his back, her mouth curling to a frown. “I’m not a kid, and I’m not related to him at all. He’s a liar!”
Bubbles tried to turn his head to look at her sternly, only she turned away from him. He grumbled under his breath.
“Woah, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I do know that you’re not supposed to bring strangers into town, Bubbles.” He scratched his cheek with a claw bigger than the Sylveon’s head. She tilted her head.
“Okay, fine. I’ll explain what happened, but you can’t tell anybody. Okay?” Bubbles offered, though he implicitly understood that the Druddigon had no real reason to accept other than curiosity.
“Hm… Fine, I suppose I don’t imagine you’re doing anything with malicious intent anyways,” Druddigon sighed.
Bubbles walked a bit closer to him and whispered, “She’s an amnesiac I found by the riverside. I want to take her to a Psychic-Type to see what to do, and I don’t want this to become a big deal. Alright?”
“I see, I see,” Druddigon said while stroking his chin. “That’s a good reason I think, but she’s still a stranger. I don’t know where the Brillian went, but why don’t you just leave her at his house anyways?” he suggested.
“That’s not a bad idea, though at some point she’s going to need to be independent pretty quickly. Hopefully Brillian can recover her memory.”
“Hey uh,” she spoke up. “Don’t you guys mean ‘brilliant’?” she tilted her head. She also wanted to bring up how they were talking about her, but she decided that she didn’t trust herself right now in town, either.
“No,” both Pokemon said in unison, followed by a groan. Druddigon waved his claw in the air and opened his mouth to speak before reconsidering. “You’ll uh,” Druddigon started, “just have to get to know him. Yeah.”
She felt unease at that before both she and Bubbles thanked Druddigon for not just kicking them out. As they walked down the dirt road with haste, she got a closer view of the different buildings of different shapes and the Pokemon that lived in them. Quadrupeds like her, shapes more comfortable to her, flying creatures, creatures with no legs… She was practically overloading while trying to decompress the fact that all of these things existed. One Pokemon she stared at was identified quickly as a spider, but it was much larger and multi-colored than any she could imagine on her own. As it picked something up from another Pokemon in its many legs, it turned around and stared back at her with its many eyes. She shuddered and looked away.
“Alright, here we are,” Bubbles said under his breath. They’d walked to the cabin-like house she’d seen earlier, and she decided to hop off his back for the first time in maybe an hour. Her paws let go and she slid back to the ground, thankfully catching herself with her hindlegs. They felt shaky, she was still new to using them!
“Are you home?” he said as he knocked on the door, to no response. Groaning, he opened the door himself. The doorknob was not where she’d have predicted. Rather than being at the middle, it was at the very bottom so anyone could use it, she presumed. As she walked into the cozy, warm room she considered the picture of that Druddigon fellow trying to bend forward with its stubby arms to turn the knob. Maybe it’d use its feet?
She shook her head and looked around. A fireplace was located at the back of the room with a fabric carpet covering the majority of the floor. There was only one room, but it was a room packed full of character; by the door was a bookshelf stacked several times higher than herself, and in the other corner was what looked to her like a couch.
“Alright,” Bubbles yawned. “You’re gonna stay in here and I’m going to go and find Brillian. If I know anything about him he’s probably trying to buy something from a neighboring town, so I’m going to ask Pelipper to bring him a letter immediately.”
“Is Pelipper a Pokemon?” she asked. She was starting to understand this world more and more, or at least the fact that almost everything she didn’t know would be a Pokemon. “So they do like, mail delivery? Are they one of the ones that can fly?”
“Correct. Well, not every Pelipper does a delivery service, it’s just a good trade job, and their ancestors long ago started doing it, there’s some conflict about it and sometimes Unfezant are unpleasant (heh) about it, but I mean yeah, good job reading the context clues,” Bubbles rambled. She stared at him blankly, then decided to trot over to the couch. “Yeah, sorry I got a bit carried away there.”
“It’s fine. But uh, gotta figure this out,” she said. She tried to listen to her body and visualize what she wanted to do, and with her body pushed back as far as she could, she let it push forward with all her muscle to jump. Her claws caught onto the top of the couch, and before she slid off she repeatedly tried to gain purchase using nails. Bubbles winced at the sound of fabric being ripped as she finally got herself on top, sitting on her hindlegs as she looked back at him. “I figured it out!”
“And you ripped up the couch, good job. If you don’t really know how to jump, you’re going to struggle to use your moves, I think. But that’s getting ahead of us, I’m going to go deliver the letter.” Bubble rubbed his forehead with his stubby flipper, and walked out of the cabin, shutting the door behind him.
“What’s a mo- oh, he’s gone already.” She looked down at the couch and saw the damage. It was definitely noticeable, but she could find comfort on the sides, she thought. She turned around and around before laying her body against the back. ‘I wonder what a move is. That sounds interesting. I have moves? Was that the thing he did to me?’
She burrowed herself into the couch further, enjoying the comfort while the cackling of fire warmed her spiritually and physically. As minutes passed, she kept trying to subdue her wandering mind with the words of Bubbles to essentially stay put, and the fact that thinking about much was not going to be helpful.
The point of the ‘Psychic-Type’ was they’d do the thinking for her, right? Like her name! She doesn’t know her name, but no need to think about that when the Psychic-Type would figure it out! What was a move? Well, she thinks it’s what Bubbles did to push her out of the water, but… No, she didn’t want to wait until the Brillain man or whatever came to help out. She wanted to figure this out on her own! Besides, what if someone attacked her for some reason? Overhearing the conversations of the others made the townsfolk seem dangerous, after all.
She decided it - she would figure out how to use ‘a move’. Hopping down from the couch, she landed with a short ‘oof’ and walked around the small abode, thinking. What was she, anyways?
Right. She recalled that Druddigon referred to her with a name she didn’t get, ‘Sylveon’. Was that even a Pokemon? Maybe it was a word that described something like an outsider, but she decided to roll with it for now: she was a Sylveon.
“That doesn’t help.” She sighed. What else was there? She thought about the reflection she’d seen earlier, with the ribbon on her left ear. She tried to curl out an arm to touch her ear, but of course that didn’t work - and yet something touched it. Her eyes turned up and she saw something dangling in the air around her ear, and it moved with her eyes down to right in front of her. ‘What are these?’
She moved it up and down, left and right, all around. It seemed to follow her movement, and yet when she didn’t touch them it seemed to just follow the wind. Then, considering she’d moved one on the left, she tried it again on the right and found she had another. ‘So I have these arm-like things, and I can move them around. But what is that type? Arm-Type? Do I hit things with these like magic?’ she thought to herself.
Holding the two ribbons together in front of her she tried to wave them around in unison with the idea of conjuring… something, to no avail. She tried again and again and again. Nothing. Were the ribbons themselves ‘a move’? Maybe she’d already mastered her abilities, and Bubbles would eat his words!
No, that didn’t feel right…
“Hm.” She stared at the wooden floor while she thought of a plan. Nothing would come to fruition, however, because her ears perked up at a large disturbance downtown. She looked at the kitchen table and hopped onto one of the wooden seats, all the while doing a much better this time than she did with the couch. When she felt confident, she then hopped another time onto the top of the table. She was met with a window to look out from.
Due to the cabin being at a higher elevation than most of the town, she got an adequate look at what could be happening. She saw a few Pokemon walking away from the epicenter of the noise (or so she thought?), but nothing panicked. She was prepared to chalk it up to nothing until she saw red and orange swirling violently above a building.
‘Wow… That must be another move. I wonder if whoever did that could teach me?’ she thought. Yeah, Bubbles wanted her to stay here… But she felt strangely confident, having experienced so much in just a few short hours. And she wanted to explore! She’d been jockeyed about all day, never allowed to do anything of her own volition. If she just went back to the home before he’d come back, he’d never even know.
She hopped back down to the floor with an ‘oof’ and walked right to the door. Her ribbons wrapped around the doorknob, twisting it and freeing herself to the fresh air of a nice sunny day. She closed it behind her and started to walk away from the cabin, stealing glances of it every few steps.
‘I may not know much, but I have to learn some on my own,’ she decided. While traveling the dirt path her heart pounded quickly. She passed a few strangers of various body shapes and colors while the road curled into different rows of buildings. Many seemed to be shops, but she didn’t know how to read the signs.
Her heart raced as she found herself in the middle of a business district. All around her were different Pokemon entering and leaving different stores, all with their own little purposes- hell, it didn’t even read to her as a ‘town’, it felt more like she was in a city. But as she observed people leaving out towards the lakefront, she realized not everyone here must live here. She shook her head.
She was here for a reason! To find where, or more importantly, who that fireball came from!
That is what they would have experienced had they been alive, but they weren’t. Their carcass was strapped to the hospital bed down in what they’d know as Earth, but they could not go there anymore. Going was no longer a function in the Void. They were nothing, after all. Were they void?
These were the kinds of questions Unown tended to ask themselves. An Unown A would look to its partner, Unown Z, and question it about the very fabric of the universe. Through long discussion, they tried to find their own answers to the universe, and the universe spoke back- their answers defined it. An uncountable number of Unown stared at… Nothing, and yet not Void, and all rumbled. As beings that could not talk in a language any human would understand, their communication instead would look and sound like idle rumbling. They all fiercely fought over what the… thing in front of them could be. One Unown floated closer, an Unown Period. Everyone stopped talking as it floated in the middle of the crowd and Thing, as Unown Periods were known to be the bestest of problem solvers.
It tried to touch the Thing to no immediate effect, though it stirred in response. It backed off and thought for a moment before declaring something to the effect of “I have no fucking clue,” and chaos ruptured through the crowds.
“But!” the Unown interrupted the hollering, everyone simmering down… “If we do not know, there is only one thing that knows. Why don’t we ask the Thing what it is?” Everyone cheered, and the Unown Period glided above the vibrations of successful discourse, proud of itself for continuing the superstitious tradition of them as problem solvers.
One Unown Question Mark waved through the crowd to the Thing-ly mass, everyone watching in excitement. Question Marks, or QM’s for short, were usually the best question askers, they all thought. It tapped the mass causing it to stir again, and so it repeated itself. Tapping it happened again and again, the Thing moving before settling on the ground of nothing once more, like a teenager tugging onto the blankets in order to fall asleep after waking. Frustrated, QM used Hidden Power on the mass, a risky move considering no one knew what it was, but one it decided to take. The mass rumbled, and a cylinder-like shape rolled to be on its tall side.
“What are you?” QM asked the awoken Thing.
“I… don’t know.”
That posed a problem. If they did not know what it was, and it did not know what it was, then what was it? An Unown A in the crowd loudly proposed a solution, “What if we just decide what it is?”
That did not sit right with QM. They couldn’t just decide what it was, this was clearly something they didn’t understand! Yet, it indeed struggled to find the questions to break that down. However, it had the solution.
“I’m going to ask you questions, and you’ll answer them to the best of your ability. This will determine what you are,” QM spoke in a commanding tone. How the Thing understood what it was saying, it did not know, but it at least implied that the Thing was perhaps a Pokemon like them,
“Do you know what a Pokemon is?” QM asked first, attempting to lock in that assumption. The Thing (stared?) blankly, and did something that QM thought to be thinking.
“I do,” it finally replied, in a firm tone. If it tried to think of something without a prompt, it knew nothing. But that question awoke something in its core.
“Do you have a gender? What is it?”
“I…” Thing thought hard. It had two conflicting thoughts, two major ideas in its head- one told it that it was male, the other was a strong desire… no, understanding that, regardless of something it could not remember, it was female. “I’m female.”
“I understand. What species of Pokemon do you think you would be?” QM asked carefully. If it asked what species it was, the Thing may not know at all and perhaps even shut down. Asking it this leading question gave it a way out past objectivity.
“Sylveon,” Thing answered assuredly. It did not know why, and it could not see a Sylveon in its head, but it felt as if its existence had been shaped from that concept, and thus it had been put into its DNA.
“That is all we need to ask,” QM commented, and turned to what one may interpret as the sky. “Universe, we have found a solution. This Thing right here is a female Sylveon.”
Some in the crowd felt unease at the classification of this unidentified object, and some questioned QM’s methods. Yet QM had no doubts, and in fact felt it probably more of a risk to keep it in their realm, rather than to ask the universe to set it into another. And the Universe did reply as quickly as it could, the Thing disappearing and all understood the decision was made. QM felt relief as many thanked it for its quick thinking.
“Why is this here?” Arceus asked. They looked down at the long line of souls it was dealing with for the next while, and something appeared to have cut the line.
A soul of a Sylveon, it seemed, but with no defined origination. See, there were many variants of the World of Pokemon, and Arceus oversaw them all, no matter the workload. In some, Pokemon were trained by humans and competed in sport. In others, they functioned as individual parts of a society with nothing else to abide by, and in some they were what would look like fusions between them and humans.
This always appeared in their soul when they saw it, and yet this one did not have that. It didn’t even look like a Sylveon as a result, Arceus could only understand what it was through its divinity. They looked into this soul’s past and saw everything.
“I see,” they considered it. “They had a run in with that one.” And just like that, Arceus had made its choice; the soul would be returned to life, and it would be in the universe they felt fit it the best.
Her eyes shoot open. Stimuli flooded in from all around her, filling her with visions of grass, trees, the relaxing sounds of the running water of a river, leaves swaying in the wind.
She stands on her (four?) feet breathing deeply and loudly, her chest filling with lovely oxygen. Her body starts to stabilize as she looks around once more. “I’m… dead?” she thought out loud. She’d never been a believer in higher forces, but considering what had just happened to her? That had to be accounted for as a possibility.
And with how serene the world around her was, how could this be anything but heaven? She watched the calming water crackle against clean rocks at the riverbed and suddenly felt thirsty. She moved a (paw?) in front of her, then the opposite back paw, then the opposites… She was trotting! Feeling the wind on what she perceived to be her fur made her feel fresh, excitable!
She came to a stop when the river was right in front of her, failing to entirely stop quickly, leading to her standing in the shallow water. But that was okay. Everything felt fine… She dipped her head close to the water, considering if she should use her front paws to cup water, but that didn’t seem practical at all anymore. Instead, she just dipped her head closer with her eyes shut and lapped at the clear, life-endowing water. The freshest water she’d ever had, she thought to herself, and chided herself for being greedy as she drank more and more.
When she finally felt her thirst fulfilled, she raised her head higher and opened her eyes to see a reflection. ‘Is that… me?’ she thought to herself, and squinted. Those light blue orbs half disappeared, and when her eyes bulged they grew taller- those were her eyes? Now that she was getting a better look at herself, she paid attention to it all, and came to a conclusion her mind had seemingly skipped the process of thinking about earlier: she was not human, anymore.
Her heart raced as she looked around the forest again, “Where am I?! Who am I?!”
“We all ask those questions, but everyone else seems to have the decency to not yell it in the morning,” a voice rang from behind her. She turned her body around awkwardly only to see what she would describe as several blue ovals forming a white-spotted alien, but an alien she’d like to keep as a pet.
“Am I dead?” she asked the Pokemon point-blank. He stared at her, looked her up and down, then tilted his head.
“I mean. I don’t think so? Hey, um… You alright in the head there?” he asked. “Well, um, I’m Bubbles. I live nearby and heard you screaming, so.”
She looked away from Bubbles and tried to hide her shame, she’d just woken somebody else up with her troubles. Still, importantly… She didn’t seem dead, so maybe she wasn’t dead. But she could’ve sworn the last thing she did was die! None of the details were in her head, but she’d woken up with just a few core suggestions of what she was. “I-I just woke up here, and I don’t know what any of this is. Where are we?”
“Yeah, you must've hit your head REAL hard, huh. Honestly, for your safety I think you should just come with me,” Bubbles said matter-of-factly. He shifted in place before tilting his head and turning to look at what seemed to her a random direction into the woods. “C’mon.”
She recoiled a bit further into the water, scared of what he could be doing. She knew better than to follow random strangers in her (?) years of life. How many years she did not know, but she had a base instinctive awareness that she was pretty old. “I don’t think I want to do that, s-sir.”
“Oh my God, just relax already,” he grumbled, turning back to see the worried Sylveon. He noticed they were both standing in water and decided to use a practical approach. He waved his hand into the water and within seconds the quadruped was tossed into the air with a squelch, tossed onto his back.
“H-hey, what the fuck was that!” she whined while her front paws dangled around the top of his head.
“You really don’t know anything, huh? Well, I’m an Azumarill, a Water-Type, and we were in water,” Bubbles started explaining as he marched through the thicket. “So I just commanded the water, easy as that. Hey, um, you gonna get off my head?”
“S-so you try to get me to follow you, and now that I’m on top of you you complain?”
“I don’t see how that correlates, but whatever,” he sighed. The two went quiet as she looked around the trees, spotting a few things that made her mind scream the word ‘butterflies!’, and then immediately fry itself when the creatures did not meet the subconscious description her mind understood.
Being on Bubbles’ back was calming for her. She felt taller being hoisted onto something that was already taller than her, and he seemed sturdy. If anything attacked her, she felt she could trust him, especially since he’d been kind so far. Thinking about how she seemed so scared of him at first made her feel embarrassed, but she didn’t show it. She just observed the world she found herself in.
“Y’know,” Bubbles started, “I’d ask for your name, but you seem like an amnesiac so I’m not sure how that’s useful. Do you know anything about yourself at all?”
She almost felt she should be angry at his assumption, but he was right. She couldn’t remember her name, nor much about herself. “Um…” Think, think…
Well, she knew a few things about herself that she’d recalled in her wake. She knew she was an adult, she knew she was a she, and she knew that she was not what she once was. “I guess I’m an adult?”
“That doesn’t narrow much down, to be quite honest with you. You know what kind of Pokemon you are? You seemed confused earlier.”
“What’s a Pokemon?”
“That’s a problematic question, and one for the philosophers, not me. Would it help you if I told you I’m a Pokemon, and you’re a Pokemon?”
“So… Everyone’s a Pokemon?”
“Pretty much. Oh,” he paused as he saw what was ahead.
The Sylveon pushed herself a bit higher while holstered on his back. They seemed to be at the top of a tall incline that lowered into several homes below, a bowl-shape with their left side of the bowl being carved allowing for easy exit to what looked like a lake to her. Trees by the cliff sides almost seemed to shroud everything, but smoke from a large building’s chimney eclipsed them. She noticed that they were made of many different materials, some clearly made of sticks, some straw. One at an opposite incline to where they were seemed like what she recalled to be a ‘cabin’, but much bigger. Some homes littered around the sides of the town, but more movement seemed to go on in dirt streets, signs in a language she couldn’t scattered about.
“We’re just about in town. I don’t know what I’m actually gonna do with you, though; it’s not like we can throw an adult in elementary school, and I think you understand less right now than they do.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll bring you to a Psychic-Type, I think. They might know what to do.”
“What’s a Psychic-Type?” she asked.
“Useful tricksters that are always nerds for some reason. I want you to not ask these questions while we’re outside, I don’t want any unwanted attention.” Bubbles knew that when any problem came to town, the entire town came to the problem. In other words, everyone would jump in to try to help, and he felt she was already shy enough just meeting him. What about a more intimidating member of society?
“Hey there Bubbles, who’s that Sylveon on your back there?” a random, high-pitched neighborly voice rang out. Bubbles turned his head to see the friendly Druddigon, his buddy from school. “Is that your kid or something?”
“How would she be,” Bubbles started, then realized something. “She’s related to the family, just showing her around town. You know if Brillian’s at his house?”
Something about the scaly beast should’ve made her scared, she thought deep down, but something in her heart told her there was nothing to be afraid of. She felt self-assured that if he did anything, she’d have the advantage, even!
Besides, he seemed to be nice enough… But…
She stirred on his back, her mouth curling to a frown. “I’m not a kid, and I’m not related to him at all. He’s a liar!”
Bubbles tried to turn his head to look at her sternly, only she turned away from him. He grumbled under his breath.
“Woah, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I do know that you’re not supposed to bring strangers into town, Bubbles.” He scratched his cheek with a claw bigger than the Sylveon’s head. She tilted her head.
“Okay, fine. I’ll explain what happened, but you can’t tell anybody. Okay?” Bubbles offered, though he implicitly understood that the Druddigon had no real reason to accept other than curiosity.
“Hm… Fine, I suppose I don’t imagine you’re doing anything with malicious intent anyways,” Druddigon sighed.
Bubbles walked a bit closer to him and whispered, “She’s an amnesiac I found by the riverside. I want to take her to a Psychic-Type to see what to do, and I don’t want this to become a big deal. Alright?”
“I see, I see,” Druddigon said while stroking his chin. “That’s a good reason I think, but she’s still a stranger. I don’t know where the Brillian went, but why don’t you just leave her at his house anyways?” he suggested.
“That’s not a bad idea, though at some point she’s going to need to be independent pretty quickly. Hopefully Brillian can recover her memory.”
“Hey uh,” she spoke up. “Don’t you guys mean ‘brilliant’?” she tilted her head. She also wanted to bring up how they were talking about her, but she decided that she didn’t trust herself right now in town, either.
“No,” both Pokemon said in unison, followed by a groan. Druddigon waved his claw in the air and opened his mouth to speak before reconsidering. “You’ll uh,” Druddigon started, “just have to get to know him. Yeah.”
She felt unease at that before both she and Bubbles thanked Druddigon for not just kicking them out. As they walked down the dirt road with haste, she got a closer view of the different buildings of different shapes and the Pokemon that lived in them. Quadrupeds like her, shapes more comfortable to her, flying creatures, creatures with no legs… She was practically overloading while trying to decompress the fact that all of these things existed. One Pokemon she stared at was identified quickly as a spider, but it was much larger and multi-colored than any she could imagine on her own. As it picked something up from another Pokemon in its many legs, it turned around and stared back at her with its many eyes. She shuddered and looked away.
“Alright, here we are,” Bubbles said under his breath. They’d walked to the cabin-like house she’d seen earlier, and she decided to hop off his back for the first time in maybe an hour. Her paws let go and she slid back to the ground, thankfully catching herself with her hindlegs. They felt shaky, she was still new to using them!
“Are you home?” he said as he knocked on the door, to no response. Groaning, he opened the door himself. The doorknob was not where she’d have predicted. Rather than being at the middle, it was at the very bottom so anyone could use it, she presumed. As she walked into the cozy, warm room she considered the picture of that Druddigon fellow trying to bend forward with its stubby arms to turn the knob. Maybe it’d use its feet?
She shook her head and looked around. A fireplace was located at the back of the room with a fabric carpet covering the majority of the floor. There was only one room, but it was a room packed full of character; by the door was a bookshelf stacked several times higher than herself, and in the other corner was what looked to her like a couch.
“Alright,” Bubbles yawned. “You’re gonna stay in here and I’m going to go and find Brillian. If I know anything about him he’s probably trying to buy something from a neighboring town, so I’m going to ask Pelipper to bring him a letter immediately.”
“Is Pelipper a Pokemon?” she asked. She was starting to understand this world more and more, or at least the fact that almost everything she didn’t know would be a Pokemon. “So they do like, mail delivery? Are they one of the ones that can fly?”
“Correct. Well, not every Pelipper does a delivery service, it’s just a good trade job, and their ancestors long ago started doing it, there’s some conflict about it and sometimes Unfezant are unpleasant (heh) about it, but I mean yeah, good job reading the context clues,” Bubbles rambled. She stared at him blankly, then decided to trot over to the couch. “Yeah, sorry I got a bit carried away there.”
“It’s fine. But uh, gotta figure this out,” she said. She tried to listen to her body and visualize what she wanted to do, and with her body pushed back as far as she could, she let it push forward with all her muscle to jump. Her claws caught onto the top of the couch, and before she slid off she repeatedly tried to gain purchase using nails. Bubbles winced at the sound of fabric being ripped as she finally got herself on top, sitting on her hindlegs as she looked back at him. “I figured it out!”
“And you ripped up the couch, good job. If you don’t really know how to jump, you’re going to struggle to use your moves, I think. But that’s getting ahead of us, I’m going to go deliver the letter.” Bubble rubbed his forehead with his stubby flipper, and walked out of the cabin, shutting the door behind him.
“What’s a mo- oh, he’s gone already.” She looked down at the couch and saw the damage. It was definitely noticeable, but she could find comfort on the sides, she thought. She turned around and around before laying her body against the back. ‘I wonder what a move is. That sounds interesting. I have moves? Was that the thing he did to me?’
She burrowed herself into the couch further, enjoying the comfort while the cackling of fire warmed her spiritually and physically. As minutes passed, she kept trying to subdue her wandering mind with the words of Bubbles to essentially stay put, and the fact that thinking about much was not going to be helpful.
The point of the ‘Psychic-Type’ was they’d do the thinking for her, right? Like her name! She doesn’t know her name, but no need to think about that when the Psychic-Type would figure it out! What was a move? Well, she thinks it’s what Bubbles did to push her out of the water, but… No, she didn’t want to wait until the Brillain man or whatever came to help out. She wanted to figure this out on her own! Besides, what if someone attacked her for some reason? Overhearing the conversations of the others made the townsfolk seem dangerous, after all.
She decided it - she would figure out how to use ‘a move’. Hopping down from the couch, she landed with a short ‘oof’ and walked around the small abode, thinking. What was she, anyways?
Right. She recalled that Druddigon referred to her with a name she didn’t get, ‘Sylveon’. Was that even a Pokemon? Maybe it was a word that described something like an outsider, but she decided to roll with it for now: she was a Sylveon.
“That doesn’t help.” She sighed. What else was there? She thought about the reflection she’d seen earlier, with the ribbon on her left ear. She tried to curl out an arm to touch her ear, but of course that didn’t work - and yet something touched it. Her eyes turned up and she saw something dangling in the air around her ear, and it moved with her eyes down to right in front of her. ‘What are these?’
She moved it up and down, left and right, all around. It seemed to follow her movement, and yet when she didn’t touch them it seemed to just follow the wind. Then, considering she’d moved one on the left, she tried it again on the right and found she had another. ‘So I have these arm-like things, and I can move them around. But what is that type? Arm-Type? Do I hit things with these like magic?’ she thought to herself.
Holding the two ribbons together in front of her she tried to wave them around in unison with the idea of conjuring… something, to no avail. She tried again and again and again. Nothing. Were the ribbons themselves ‘a move’? Maybe she’d already mastered her abilities, and Bubbles would eat his words!
No, that didn’t feel right…
“Hm.” She stared at the wooden floor while she thought of a plan. Nothing would come to fruition, however, because her ears perked up at a large disturbance downtown. She looked at the kitchen table and hopped onto one of the wooden seats, all the while doing a much better this time than she did with the couch. When she felt confident, she then hopped another time onto the top of the table. She was met with a window to look out from.
Due to the cabin being at a higher elevation than most of the town, she got an adequate look at what could be happening. She saw a few Pokemon walking away from the epicenter of the noise (or so she thought?), but nothing panicked. She was prepared to chalk it up to nothing until she saw red and orange swirling violently above a building.
‘Wow… That must be another move. I wonder if whoever did that could teach me?’ she thought. Yeah, Bubbles wanted her to stay here… But she felt strangely confident, having experienced so much in just a few short hours. And she wanted to explore! She’d been jockeyed about all day, never allowed to do anything of her own volition. If she just went back to the home before he’d come back, he’d never even know.
She hopped back down to the floor with an ‘oof’ and walked right to the door. Her ribbons wrapped around the doorknob, twisting it and freeing herself to the fresh air of a nice sunny day. She closed it behind her and started to walk away from the cabin, stealing glances of it every few steps.
‘I may not know much, but I have to learn some on my own,’ she decided. While traveling the dirt path her heart pounded quickly. She passed a few strangers of various body shapes and colors while the road curled into different rows of buildings. Many seemed to be shops, but she didn’t know how to read the signs.
Her heart raced as she found herself in the middle of a business district. All around her were different Pokemon entering and leaving different stores, all with their own little purposes- hell, it didn’t even read to her as a ‘town’, it felt more like she was in a city. But as she observed people leaving out towards the lakefront, she realized not everyone here must live here. She shook her head.
She was here for a reason! To find where, or more importantly, who that fireball came from!
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