It started with breeders.
It was so innocent, so pure. They paired off Pokemon of various breeds for the best stats and attacks imaginable. Pair this with that and pray you got what you needed. It was all so simple and no one thought of the risk, the consequences or what may be. Not until what many thought was unthinkable happened.
After generations of mating things like Skitty with Wailords the effects of what we had done became truly apparent as what hatched out of the Poke Egg was not something we expected. More than just techniques had been passed down to the newborn Skitty, it had begun to develop gills. This wasn't the only case, far from it actually, reports were springing up all across the world of similar cases. Pokemon were beginning to develop physical characteristics of their male parent's species. Pokemon once incapable of flight were learning to take to the skies as those who were opposed to the water found that swimming came second nature to them. And that my friends is when the entire world of Pokemon changed.
Trainers began to breed their Pokemon bring out these additional traits to give them the edge in battle. Some of these crossbred species became the latest fads and trends in fashion, becoming accessories for the rich and famous. This also allowed for once wild Pokemon to be bred into more docile species that could be turned into house pets. That's when we all raised the question we wished we never did; "why stop there?"
Why stop there? Why not genetically engineer the perfect Pokemon? Why breed generations when you could just pick and choose the desired characteristics and get exactly what you wanted in one go? So scientist began to play God in a world we were still learning much about. At first the results were exactly what we expected. Some failures but just as many success. Failures were either destroyed or released into the wild while the success stories were praised and were fawned over. As the technique was slowly perfected we saw more and more of these spliced Pokemon and less and less of their original breeds. It was too late when it became all too apparent that the original were gone. Nature had taken its course and the newer and stronger breeds that we had created. It came as a shock, at first, we slowly stopped our attempts to further splice Pokemon where we could. We attempted to protect the few remaining endangered species of Pokemon but it was too late. The spliced Pokemon had even began to mate with the originals and finally acceptance came. We accepted our mistake and did only what we could, moved forward.
Many of us hung up the idea of splicing newer breeds and simply let what roamed freely be recognized as official Pokemon, of course some of us continued our projects in the dark. Just when all was quiet our crimes came back to punish us and this would not be the first, but this would be the defining moment that would shape our planets history.
We needed to stop. We needed to know when enough was enough. We needed a point to mark the end. The end of the Pokedex. The end of splicing. The end of it all. That was how project Z-END came to be. Some of the most brilliant minds in the Pokmeon community came together for one last project. In secret they pooled all of their efforts together to create what would be the final entry in the Pokedex. They took the best genes of every Pokemon sample they had available. Using the once failed reproductions of Mew, Ditto, as a catalyst they began to forward engineer the Pokemon to create something far greater than we had once thought possible. Of course with something this grand there were of course far greater failures, failures they needed to destroy. But some proved far stronger than we had ever imagined and escaped into the outside world. We could only pray that they too would not come back to haunt us. But finally it seemed that all of our efforts would pay off and scientist thought they had created Z-END, and they were right. But no one would remain to tell the tale. No research data would remain and certainly nor would the scientist. At the exact moment Z-END was birthed everything went dark. The magnitude of Z-END's power was beyond our comprehension. The site of the experiments was immediately whipped from existence in a pillar of light that we would soon come to refer to as the Beginning.
That pillar of light was a beacon that awakened every Pokemon on the planet to its more primal instincts. They turned against their master's and creators as if guided by the invisible hand of Z-END. It was a massacre as humanity was taken by surprise by what we had thought we had tamed. We were driven back into corners as our numbers dwindled and our towns were destroyed. We hid in shelters as we waited for the worst to come to an end but it would never come.
Finally we did what only came natural. We fought back. We used whatever weapons would could find or manufacture with our own hands and turned against the Pokemon we had created. Slowly we pushed back their numbers but the war raged on. We just needed time and finally we had it. We engineered newer Pokeballs to bend them back to our will. Now with our very own spliced Pokemon once again at our side we could fight back on equal terms. And so the war raged on until it all suddenly stopped. As if saying it was finally enough the Pokemon all retreated back to their habitats while others created new territories of their own. Humanity was thankful for whatever the cause, most of us attributed the cease fire to that of Z-END.
Now our land had become scarred and overrun by what we had created, slowly we needed to take back what was once ours. Slowly an elite few trainers categorized as Hunters would explore once familiar territories that we now referred to as the Wilds. They would be our eyes, ears, swords and shields in the new age to come. Our only method of seeing how far the catastrophe we had created reached. They were martyrs in a world where we could not follow, knowing that each day could be their last. With nothing more than their gear and trusted Pokemon they knew that at any moment they could lose it all and meet Z-END.