sapphire-verse.
When Pokemon trainer Crystal left New bark, her rise to fame was slow and sure. She first appeared in the newspapers as little more than a footnote: just one of several names on the weekly list of trainers who had defeated Falkner. Then there the expose about the well in Azalea: a criminal organization, kidnapping and mutilating slowpoke unhindered, until a small-town girl with blue pigtails and a strong sense of justice put a stop to their scheme, rescued the townspeoples' pokemon, and defeated the local gym leader without breaking a sweat... May knew that she was in deep when she carefully cut out the article with scissors and pinned it to her wall. A wall that rapidly accumulated more and more stories, magazine candids, photos of her loyal pokemon, and other miscellanea over the months, and then years. Her mother learned to tune out her daughter's squeals over the newest front page news, the obsessive taping of every tv documentary about Johto's first female star trainer, the constant whining and complaints about mooom, could I get hair dye for my birthday? did you see the papers, did Kris beat Pryce while I was at school? when am I going to get my own pokemon, when am I going to be a master just like Kris?
Then, just as suddenly as her fame flared up, it died down when Crystal became Johto's champion, climbed Mount Silver, and returned with the previous pokemon legend before her. Everybody knew who Pokemon trainer Red was, a battling prodigy who had single-handedly demolished Team Rocket and cleaned out the gyms and the league before vanishing into thin air. Nobody had heard from him in more than two years. But now the papers and the television was bursting with photos and breaking news and interviews with his crying mom, his sullen-faced rival, the proud professor who had given him his first pokemon... honestly, May couldn't care less. But whenever she flipped impatiently through channels and pages until her eyesight blurred, she couldn't find any reports anywhere of the girl who had brought down Kanto's golden boy in the first place. Even weeks and months after the uproar over Red's return faded, Crystal's name had disappeared from the front pages, seemingly for good. The only and last picture she could even find was annoyingly fuzzy; the focus had been on Red and his successful and well-publicized arrival at Pallet. To a casual viewer, she was only another member of the studio audience, a smiling pigtailed girl in a sea of cheering onlookers. May carefully snipped out this photo too (while cropping out Red with vindictive bitterness) and, after a glance at her overcrowded walls, tucked it into her wallet, instead.
There still hadn't been any new reports when May finally became a trainer herself, years later. Leaving her wall of Crystal memorabilia was more difficult than she imagined, but the thought of finding Kris herself drove her onward. Sure, she wasn't even in the same region and they were separated by a whole sea, but once she got a water pokemon and could surf, that wouldn't be a problem, right? She'd be able to find out what happened to Kris, right? If she became a master just like her idol, they'd definitely be able to see each other, right? The dirt roads were long and dry, but May shrugged off lunch breaks and the pain of blisters in order to keep training her pokemon, keep pushing onwards. Camping in the wilderness was less romantic and more uncomfortable than she'd thought, but May snuggled into her thin bedroll in an effort to stop shivering and tried ignoring the chill wind by instead gazing up into the stars and the moon and the night sky, the same night sky that Kris was sleeping under, somewhere. But worst of all, no matter how well she thought she knew Kris' fighting style and line of logic, she never could quite be sure... would Kris have let combusken stay in and try to take down the weakened wingull with peck, or switch out to minun? Would she have used a normal pokeball or her last great ball on that rare relicanth? Would she have forgotten that tropius still had a weakness to flying, would she have gotten defeated so easily against Winona? Or Team Aqua?
The questions kept piling up on May's shoulders like a literal weight and the edges of Crystal's last photo became more and more frayed as May took it out more often, in the middle of the rainforests when she got lost, in the light of her campfire just before she drifted asleep, even in the middle of battles when she had no idea how to act next. What would Kris have done? Surely she wouldn't have permitted Archie's escape with the blue orb. She would've made it in the nick of time, disposed of all his grunts with poise, and used arcanine's extremespeed to have retrieved the precious item, and everything would have been saved. Kris wouldn't have let Team Aqua steal the submarine, either; her xatu could have stopped the machine from moving with a powerful psychic move. But May was May, and May had been too slow and too weak and too late, and no matter how often she stared into Crystal's slightly blurry face and her sapphire blue eyes, the other trainer couldn't offer help and only beamed blearily at her in a smile captured in time.
Whatever Crystal would've done, she wouldn't have allowed Kyogre to wake up and go berserk, May thought bitterly as she strode into Sootopolis' pokemon center, soaked through to the bone. The consequences of her failures were everywhere. Already the rain had eaten up more than half a foot of Sootopolis' shoreline and was lapping up to the door of the gym, threatening by the hour to begin swallowing it up. The television was flashing news nonstop of stranded swimmers out at sea, clinging to their pokemon, who couldn't even navigate the raging seas to return to dry land. The pokemon center's machines were stuffed full, and a long line of waterlogged trainers waiting to deposit their wounded pokemon were glaring at her. She could imagine what they were thinking: what were you doing? why aren't you in the Cave of origin trying to fix this mess? are you even trying, are you going to just let the world drown without a fight? But all May could do was shoulder her way through the crowd, try not to trip over youngsters' outstretched feet, avoid everyone's judgmental eyes. Steven had told her to rest for the night and take on Kyogre in the morning, which was probably a good idea given the fact that the last time she slept was more than forty hours ago and every muscle in her body was aching from the effort of holding onto relicanth through a day full of diving to find the seafloor cavern. The only thing she wanted to do was just disappear, but the next best thing she could do for now was just slam her hotel door shut, kick off her shoes, and collapse into bed, not even bothering to remove her clothes, letting them drip into the neatly-folded sheets.
All the exhaustion and frustration and hopelessness crashed into her like a tidal wave and May curled up into a fetal position on the mattress, pulling out a sodden wallet and withdrawing the photo of the one person who could possibly inspire her in this disaster. Crystal's picture was miraculously dry, but heavily creased from May's journey, and May had to restrain herself from crushing the paper in a gloved fist. All she wanted to do was be just like her. All she wanted to do was be great like her. All she wanted to do was love her, but she could never compare to Kris' flawless legacy. Why did she even try? Disappointment coiled and burned in her lower stomach; May squeezed her eyes shut and her legs together, whimpering from defeat and want. If Kris was here, she'd be able to fix everything. If Kris was here, May could ask her what she was supposed to do. She could throw her to the wall and ask her what was her secret, how she could be so perfect, what her formula was for saving the world from megalomaniac criminals. She could dig her nails into Kris' arms, press her forehead to the other girl's as if she could absorb Kris' genius through osmosis, demand an answer, demand anything beyond that eternally blurry and sunshine-bright grin that wasn't even directed at her, but at a boy champion she had cut out of the picture altogether. The smile that inspired her to conquer gyms and challenge Team Aqua and try to save the world now seemed damnedly judgmental: you could never live up to me, Kris seemed to be saying, so all May could do was just kiss her viciously and wipe that beatific smile from her face. But that wasn't enough, so she attacked her clothes instead, pulling off the pure white jacket and the blood red of her shirt and the sinfully tight biker's shorts. What would Kris do? Would she fight back? Would she mewl when May sucked on her neck? Would she blush and stutter with childish embarrassment if May fingered her? Would she whisper her name when she came, or bite back moans in protest?
What would Kris do? When morning came and May groggily sat up in bed, half-horrified and half-asleep and still dizzy from the stress of her mid-teens crisis, the first thing she noticed was the photo crumpled within her fist and the loud tapping of a continual rainfall on her window. With an effort, she let the paper drop to the floor; a floor which, she noticed, was already submerged by a full inch of water. The world was drowning. She had made too many mistakes to let things get to this stage, but there was nobody who could save her region now except for herself. May reached for her pokeballs and gave her inventory a cursory check before walking barefoot out of the center, past the wide-eyed stares of passerby, out into the rain and towards the Cave of origin's yawning mouth.
Kyogre was waiting. Maybe it didn't matter, what Kris would've done. The only thing she had to worry about was what she, May, would do. And the answer to that was simple: to save the world.