Versus Reality Book One: Pocket Monsters

A Harry Potter, Sword Art Online & Pokemon Fic.

By Wolf Ghoul

I remember everything. I remember every last detail as if it happened only yesterday. I was barely seventeen, and I once killed a man with a fender guitar. I can't remember if it was a telecaster or a stratocaster (huh, the irony), but I do remember that it had a heart of chrome and a voice of a twisted creature. I don't remember if it was a telecaster or a stratocaster, but I do remember that it wasn't at all easy. It required the perfect combination of the correct power chords and the precise angle from which to strike!

The guitar bled… for about a week afterwards, and the blood was… Oh! Dark and rich! Like wild berries. The blood of the guitar was Chuck. Berry. Red. The guitar bled for about a week afterward but it rung out beautifully, and I was able to play notes that I had never even heard of before… but that's the problem, the notes i could play were ones that allowed me to see weakness' in my enemy, the power in which I needed to carefully choose to overcome any obstacle. It wasn't an easy journey, and I didn't expect myself to get to a point where I'd kill a man. But i did. He was only a homeless man that lived under the bridge by the local canal. Not like his life meant something to someone, otherwise they would have helped him. He was in need. No one knows it was me, it wasn't my guitar, I was drunk, to be honest with you, I'm not too sure if I had even had a second thought on the matter. I know I just struck. When I told Kitty about it she just turned around and said "Honestly Strat. You shouldn't be so hard on yourself, everyone makes mistakes." of course I hadn't told her that I killed the guy… or that I was drunk, because then her opinion of me definitely would have changed, and she'd also know a truth about my true identity. Here they all know me as Strat… or STRXT as it says above my cursor.

We've been stuck in this strange place for almost two years. I haven't aged a day, I'm as fresh faced as I was when i came in here, not a single facial hair in sight, my shoulder length blonde hair still the same length, my dark roots the only sign that I naturally have black hair. My real name is Harry Potter, when I was about one year old, my parents disappeared, and their bodies were never found. They were presumed dead, and I had to live with the Dursleys, my aunt and uncle and their slightly obese child Dudley (what a spoilt turd he was), some would say what they did to me wasn't right… I'd probably have to agree with them, until I was eleven years old they kept me under the stairs, my mattress that was never cleaned smelling of piss and sweat (my uncle Vernon and Dudley used to enjoy frightening me as a child), i was malnourished… some other things that you'll eventually find out about as the story I'm going to tell unfolds.

Anyway, I got a letter during the summer that I turned eleven telling me that I had a place at a boarding school called Hogwarts. It was a mixed gendered school that focused on nurturing its students abilities. It's apparently the place my parents met, my aunt of course was incredibly jealous that she wasn't gifted enough to earn a place at the school and so detested my mother and my father. I enjoyed my time at the school, If it wasn't for this game I would still be there, learning more about the battle of Waterloo, or analysing George R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, or learning more about trigonometry, training in fencing and kung fu… y'know, the normal school stuff that you see happen in television boarding school shows. But it's true, it is a lot like those things, and I loved being there, i felt like i was truly living a life whilst I was there, nothing like what I had been living whilst with my Aunt and Uncle.

It was around three years ago that I was approached by a company called Niantic, they offered me a position on their Cyber Sleuth team, it was a relatively easy job, all they required me to do was to play their games and use their programs and run my own diagnostics on them and try to break them, try to hack into them… the usual stuff. Don't worry i'm not some prodigy or anything in the subject, I dislike maths too much to be that, but during my first year at Hogwarts, i had discovered that one of the professors was trying to use a virus system made years ago by a school group called Nic-F.L.A.M.E.L to break into banking systems and steal money, I had to go through many firewalls and puzzles that I wasn't even aware that computer systems had in order to catch him and inform the headmaster about it. Word of this got back to Niantic and when a position became available they came to me.

I had pretty meager jobs to do, but around two years ago they placed a game they had nicknamed Capsule Monsters into my possession and told me to play and try and break the game.

I was one of fifteen people to beta test Capsule Monsters, or as it was later known as 'Pocket Monsters'. Although everyone just calls it Pokemon. The premise was pretty simple, you'd choose your avatar, male or female, its skin tone, hair colour and such on the company's website, create your login information alongside some basic information about yourself (already a flaw in their system), confirm the email address and then the normal person would then have to purchase the game cartridge and the console separately, but because I was testing the game, I got both for free. The console was called the Nintendo NRV Gear (Nerve Gear). The NerveGear's high-density microwave transceivers are capable of accessing the user's brain, allowing it to send fake signals to the five senses of the user. The transceivers are not only capable of inducing fake sensory signals but can also block every movement command from the brain to the body, preventing the player from moving their body while in FullDive to avoid injuries. The transceivers are also capable of blocking sensory information from the body to the brain, thus, while using it, the player is completely insensate to the physical world, which basically means you actually are in the virtual world, and that you need not have to worry about straping your real body down in the real world because the signals are basically being sent to your virtual avatar rather than the real thing.

I did the normal steps and i entered the world of Pokemon. My avatar was a generic avatar, it looked around eleven years old, it had light brown hair, wore a red cap. It was basic, I explored the town that I found myself in, I assumed that it was the starting town of any player at Level One, but I later found out from Jagwire that that isn't true "You found yourself in Pallet Town?! Lucky! I woke up somewhere in the Safari Zone, a herd of Tauros running at me! I didn't get out of there for at least three hours, i had no idea how to navigate that place!", Jagwire was also a Beta tester, I haven't seen much of him lately, but I know he's alive somewhere around here. I explored the place and eventually found myself in a laboratory, the Professor or the lead scientist of this place (Online forums dubbed it the Indigo Region but it was later revealed sometime in the first year of the game that it's actually called the Kanto Region) called Professor Oak was waiting for me and two other players to arrive. They called themselves Red and Blue, very original names, they swore that they didn't know each other.

We all chose one of the capsules on his table. I walked up to the thing and chose the one that seemed to call out to me, inside of it was this orange/reddish reptilian looking creature with a flame on its tail, the cursor above the sprite read 'Charmander LV5', and then I set out in this world, after having to endure a few tutorials on how to use certain tools I soon discovered how deadly it was here. The creatures known as Pokemon would battle one another to the death but they'd 'faint' when you were in safety zones such as PvP's or in event battles (Like fighting a gym leader, which is the equivalent of a boss fight). I left Pallet town after acquring a map tool from one of the houses and i entered my first battle almost immediately, it was against a Pidgey, in this world it is as common as finding a bird in the park, but the battle I witnessed was horrific for a beginner. I ordered my Charmander to use scratch, which is a simple enough demand, but when its claws pierced into the feathered creature, its blood spluttered everywhere feathered stuck the claws of my fire beast, the bird screamed in pain and went in for a tackle, Charmander tried to dodge it but it caught his tail, a purple bruise spurting up, i shouted for Charmander to spin and scratch Pidgey, this to-and-through action continued for a long time, until Pidgey was finally beaten, Charmander gained some EXP, not enough for it to level up.

I continued playing the game for three months, I was playing it every spare second that I got, eventually I had a team of five (the players on hand team of Pokemon was 6, even though there were 140 catchable pokemon in the beta), my Charmander became a Charizard LV42, to help me fight the first gym leader I had to acuire myself a pokemon called Mankey which was a fighting type monkey looking pokemon that seemed to be quiet effective against the rock types that the gym leader used (I would love to get into the mechanics of the typing chart, but i think you'll pick it up as i go along) and i have evolved it since then into a Primeape LV34 (Evolution is something that a pokemon undertakes when it has gained a certain amount of exp and has grown up in levels) a Poliwhirl LV32, which is a big blue humanoid tadpole with a black swirl against a white belly, a metal looking rhino called Rhyhorn LV29 and a pokemon that looks like a bat called Noibat LV21, Noibat was the Pokemon that i had found completely by accident, whilst I was trying to hack the game, i found code for something called GENVI-CAVE_DROP, i copied the code file over and next thing i know i had this strange digital egg in my inventory, i lost my collection of potions but that was fine, because Noibat seems to have potential.

Throughout the three months that I had been playing the game, i had ran into a few cheats and hacks to help gain exp quicker, my player character was just about to reach LV41 and I had even ran into a few otehr beta testers, played them a 1v1 PvP, my Charizard easily squashing the opponent. it was at the conclusion of the third month that Niantic had emailed me saying that the beta test had come to an end, and that I was to return the game cartridge and Verve Gear console to them until further notice. I was a little distraught, playing pokemon had become all i thought about. I spent my free time playing the game and my time in lessons creating strategies and figuring out how to use short cuts and tricks to exploit the map. I had only caught around thirty pokemon in the game, and according to the private chatrooms, I knew that I hadn't even grazed the surface of the potential of pokemon in the game.

I took the game cartridge out of the Nerve Gear console and I placed it into my computer, using a similar game chip I copied my saved data onto the new card, and then erasing the data from the cartridge. I returned the items back to Niantic and I thought that would've been the end of the whole ordeal.

About five months later Niantic had released an advert on their website.

"Pocket Monsters Zero! Coming this September!"

attached was a video which showed some of the players saved data of them playing the game, although the battles didn't seem as brutal. But September? that was only three months away, I wasn't too sure at the time how I felt about the turn around of finalizing the game, but I was excited to be back in Kanto again.

I didn't release how real being in Kanto would actually be for me... and how my adventures there would later change my life.

To Be Continued...

AUTHORS NOTE: So this was my first attempt at writing something like this and in this format, the words seemed to easily roll onto the page and the story crating itself. I have thought about this story very much and it will be more than one book. This of course being the first. I hope you all find the change in the normal Harry Potter fanfic stories to be interesting. This is Harry Potter, its just him in a whole new world, with the same bad luck.

Read & Review!