The cold, horrible darkness cloaked the entity's body, grasping like a pair of frozen tentacles.
The entity wanted to scream. It had to scream. But its world had no sound, so its screams would go unheard. The haunting terror of speaking, but hearing no sound could drive one to madness. The entity should know. It had reached madness years ago.
The cold came in shocks; first you would barely feel it, and then it would suddenly overwhelm you. Choking, grabbing, and forcing the life right out of you. There was nothing you could do. There was nowhere in this horrible place that you could escape it. Any other creature would have been killed…
But not the entity. The prison had been constructed explicitly to keep the entity alive. It was condemned here forever, and nobody had any intent of giving the entity the freedom of death.
That was good. The entity did not care how long it suffered. Eventually it would break free. And then those imprisoned it would suffer. They should have killed it… it certainly would have killed them, if given the chance. But they had a warped sense of justice, and were convinced that murder was fundamentally wrong. The entity thought that reasoning was garbage; they simply wanted the entity to suffer for what it did to them. Killing it would be too easy.
And so the entity had been banished here. Forever set apart from the Pokémon world, condemned, alone, forgotten…
That was how it had been for thousands of years, as the entity slowly honed its psychic powers. It had been a Pokémon once as well, after all. One of its attacks was based around disappearing and reappearing somewhere else, and it had been working on modifying this attack to escape this place. It had worked at it for thousands of years…
And it had failed. The entity could no more escape this world than it could spontaneously transform into a big pink Clefairy. And it certainly didn't want to do that. But while the entity couldn't manifest in the Pokémon world fully, it found that with extreme concentration, it could make tiny, tiny adjustments to the Pokémon world. Moving a twig here, and dropping a stone there. All pointless actions… unless you had a thousand years of foresight to alter the future in very, very slight ways. You might cause a cold wind so a woman would run home for her jacket… and meet her future husband. Then you might interrupt a TV show their son was watching twenty years later… keeping him from seeing an army commercial and enlisting in a war overseas. All this would lead to the future the entity intended. A future where it was free.
The entity called out: "Future sight."
A flash of images barraged the entity. The images came and went in seconds, and it took ages to learn to control them. A group of men in black suits standing near a massive tower, a Gyarados deformed and mutated, a fenced woods where strange Pokémon from far-off lands roamed free and trainers gave chase…
And in the center of it all was the trainer.
He wasn't a trainer yet, the entity knew. But he would be, soon enough. And the entity knew what would happen next. It had examined this particular strand of the future hundreds of times; even manipulated events so the trainer's parents would meet. And now the entity knew what would happen.
This trainer would set out on his Pokémon journey today... and that would lead to the entity being freed.
The entity would have laughed. It remembered the sound of its own laughter... a rumbling noise like approaching thunder. But in this world silence was everything, and the entity hadn't heard its own voice in over a thousand years.
The entity peered closer at the trainer's future. He was barely more than a child now… a boy by the name of Kamon. He was sitting at a computer screen in his home in New Bark Town. He was watching a tutorial narrated by the famous Professor Oak…
"I WILL FIRST TELL YOU IMPORTANT THINGS ABOUT THIS GAME," said Professor Oak.
The trainer frowned and clicked past the tutorial. "I know this already," he muttered. "Why can't I skip this part?"
"PLEASE TOUCH ANY TOPIC YOU'D LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT ON THE LOWER SCREEN."
The trainer clicked the "No Info Needed" button. The entity knew that the boy didn't want this tutorial. His mother suspected that the reason the young Pokémon Professor was calling him today was to give him his first Pokémon… but she didn't know for sure. So she insisted on having him watch this tutorial, just to be safe. The trainer's mother was overbearing, and the entity should know… it had monitored her entire life.
Now Professor Oak appeared on the tutorial screen. The entity knew of him, as well.
"SORRY TO KEEP YOU WAITING!" Professor Oak grinned. "WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF POKEMON! MY NAME IS PROFESSOR OAK." Professor Oak smiled, as if this was some sort of shocking revelation. Even if the entity hadn't watched Oak for his entire life, the Professor's name was printed in bold on the cover of the tutorial's DVD case. "BUT EVERYONE CALLS ME THE POKEMON PROFESSOR."
"BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, I'D LIKE TO TELL YOU A FEW THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THIS WORLD!"
"I wonder if Mom would notice if I muted this," Kamon said to nobody in particular.
"THIS WORLD IS WIDELY INHABITED BY CREATURES KNOWN AS POKEMON." Professor Oak clicked a Pokéball and a small Marill popped out. "WE HUMANS LIVE ALONGSIDE POKEMON AS FRIENDS." Professor Oak patted the Marill, which looked like it would rather be anywhere else in the world.
"AT TIMES WE PLAY TOGETHER, AND AT OTHER TIMES WE WORK TOGETHER."
"And sometimes we fight together," the entity said. "And that doesn't end well for anyone at all. Certainly not for you, Professor."
"SOME PEOPLE USE THEIR POKEMON TO BATTLE AND DEVELOP CLOSER BONDS WITH THEM."
Professor Oak recalled the Marill and turned directly to the screen. "NOW WHY DON'T YOU TELL ME A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOURSELF? ARE YOU A BOY? OR ARE YOU A GIRL?"
The entity admittedly wasn't sure why Professor Oak was asking for the trainer's gender. It was no expert on human emotions, but this seemed sort of out there.
"WON'T YOU PLEASE TELL ME?" said Professor Oak, and that was around the time Kamon skipped through the rest of the tutorial. Holding his finger down on the mouse pad, the remainder of the tutorial passed in less than ten seconds.
"SOYOU'REABOYTHENPLEASETELLMEYOURNAMEYOURNAMEISKAM ONKAMONAREYOUREADYYOURVERYOWNTALEOFGRANDADVENTUREI SABOUTTOUNFOLDFUNEXPERIENCESDIFFICULTEXPERIENCESTH ERE'SSOMUCHWAITINGFORYOUDREAMSADVENTURESLET'SGOTOT HEWORLDOFPOKEMONI'LLSEEYOULATER!"
The tutorial ended, and Kamon left the bedroom. The entity knew the boy wouldn't return for a long time. He would go off to visit Professor Elm, and then he would receive his first Pokémon. The entity briefly peered inside the Pokémon lab next door, and saw the Pokémon Kamon would choose next to two others. Each of those Pokémon would have a role, but it was the ball in the middle that the entity was most concerned with. That held the Pokémon Kamon would choose… and that Pokémon was the only reason Kamon mattered at all. The trainer was just a means to the end. It was the Pokémon that the entity needed.
The entity watched Kamon descend the stairs to speak with his mother.
"Hi Kamon!" His mother smiled as he descended the stairs. "You're finally awake! Your friend Lyra was just here."
"She was playing hide-and-seek with her Marill." Kamon's mother smiled again. "Oh, I almost forgot! Our acquaintance, Professor Elm, was looking for you."
"You did forget," the entity thought. "I blew an elm leaf in through your kitchen window, and that reminded you."
"He said he had a favour to ask of you. You know where the lab is, right? It's right next door to us."
The boy lived next door to Professor Elm. New Bark Town was lucky that such a renowned Pokémon Professor would choose to live in such a rural place… or rather, it seemed like luck. The entity had inspired a love for nature in Professor Elm when he was still a young boy, and today Elm enjoyed conducting research in the forests of Route 29. Soon Elm would give the trainer his Pokémon. And then his role in this would be finished.
"By the way, do you have everything you need to go out? Here, use this bag to carry things… This is your trainer card… Here you can save a record of your progress… These are also rather helpful… Just try touching the buttons and you'll know what to do in no time."
"What!?" Kamon asked. "That last part made no sense."
"I mean the buttons on your bag." His mother pointed to the yellow bag. "By the way, was that tutorial useful?"
Kamon shrugged. The entity knew the boy had hated the tutorial… but he wasn't about to say so and insult his own mother. The entity wondered how Kamon would feel if he knew that his trainer's journey, and the Pokémon he would choose as his starter, would directly lead to his mother's painful and violent death.
Kamon's mother gave him a quick hug. "Professor Elm has been waiting for you, dear. Please go help him."
Waving goodbye to his mother, Kamon walked out the door. The second he did, a Marill crashed into him.
The Marill belonged to Kamon's friend Lyra, the entity knew. One of the Marill's ears always bent down and it had a funny smell to it… or so everyone said. Smell was another sense lost to the entity in this horrible world.
From far down the street, Lyra waved to him. Kamon waved back. Then Lyra whistled, and the Marill ran towards her.
"She's trained it to do that; you'd think she could housebreak the thing." Kamon smiled and walked towards the lab.
"Go," the entity thought. "Get your Pokémon, and begin your journey. Catch as many Pokémon as your little heart desires. Take your precious gym challenges. And when you're finished, come find me."
It couldn't help it. The entity began to laugh. It heard nothing, but it didn't mind.
"Your starter and I will make this world burn."