Napoleon had battled Cyrus for the fate of the world… and he had lost.
The boy hadn't worried too much about his loss at the time. Giratina seemed to have everything under control. And the voices reassured him that he could always try again, no matter how often he failed. That was how it had worked before; whatever important battle he had lost under the voices' control, he would be able to attempt over and over again until he finally won, regardless of the circumstances. But then, none of the battles he'd lost before had been quite as important as this one…
The voices didn't take him straight back to Mt. Coronet and the Distortion World after the failure. That was a good sign, right? Napoleon figured that even the voices, incompetent as they were, wouldn't procrastinate too much if saving the world really did have a time limit. Instead of continuing the fight against Cyrus, he found himself wandering into the casino and daycare, two places that the voices had guided him to many times before. The familiarity of his surroundings helped Napoleon calm down further. Everything was safe when the catchy casino music blared through the speakers or the old lady who ran the daycare observed his aimless circling with a watchful eye. Here, he knew that everything would be okay.
It took hours before Napoleon could tear himself away from his usual distractions and go back to saving the world. Along the way, the boy stopped to rest up for the long journey ahead… and never woke up.
It took the healing house's owner a while to realize that something had gone awry. She had been sure that the young Trainer who stopped by for a quick break was sleeping, only sleeping. But the lady had stopped by his bed to see if he was ready to leave, and when she called out to him, he murmured something and took one last hoarse breath.
The woman couldn't quite make out Napoleon's last words, quiet as they had been, and what she had heard didn't seem to make sense anyway. Something about Cyrus, and a "Distortion World", and "the voices." Bunch of gibberish, most likely. Only to be expected, really, given the circumstances.
The boy was in such bad condition that the medical examiners struggled to determine his cause of death. The young Trainer had contracted a particularly vicious strain of Pokerus, as the bright rash that covered his body made all too clear. Napoleon's body showed signs of dehydration, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, overexertion… All sorts of bumps and scrapes and bruises covered his skin, with half the wounds infected by all the dirt he carried around. A few of his extremities had nerve damage from frostbite. All things considered, it was more of a surprise that the boy hadn't dropped dead sooner.
Napoleon's family began making elaborate funeral plans, consulting those whom the Trainer had befriended during his dangerous and inexplicable journey, trying to put together the pieces and solve the mystery of what had led to the death of their beloved boy. But before the funeral, before they even came close to understanding the snippets of information that slowly emerged from the most unlikely sources, the world went dreadfully awry.
Few noticed at first when contact with Mt. Coronet was lost. The mountain was sparsely inhabited, and its handful of occupants generally kept to themselves, shunning the outside world as they fended for themselves against the elements. It took over a week for somebody to investigate the loss of communication, and what that first explorer found was stranger than anybody could have imagined.
Where Mt. Coronet had stood was now a giant, uniform black sphere. Nothing that entered the darkened space ever returned, and it ate away at the surrounding land in bursts and spurts, sometimes gaining only a few inches per day, sometimes engulfing hundreds of feet in a few minutes. In the panic that ensued after this discovery, the story of a young Trainer from Twinleaf Town whose life had been tragically cut short was quickly forgotten.
Nothing that the scientists or reporters threw into the sphere ever emerged, but a strange, high-pitched, warbling noise emerged from it, pulsing through the land in waves much faster than the void's movement. And as Pokemon fled Sinnoh to escape falling victim to the void, it became apparent that the refugees had been changed by their exposure to the inexplicable signal. Those fleeing into the surrounding regions included Pokemon not native to Sinnoh, but also birds that could punch, bugs that shot lasers, and Slakings whose magnetic powers made them faster than ever before. No amount of research could discern any pattern to the changes or alter the effects… at least, none being shared with the public, though rumors quickly spread that Team Rocket had found a way to duplicate valuable "shiny" Pokemon through experimentation revolving around the radio broadcast.
Soon enough, most of the Sinnoh region had disappeared entirely, while all of Kanto's Pokemon had been transformed by the mysterious signal. Trainers saw their Pokemon turn into other species before their very eyes; bystanders watched as waves of randomness took over entire fields or forests without a moment's notice. Most scientists dropped their usual work to attempt to discern the mysteries of the void, but all research remained unsuccessful. The world looked to Lance and Blue, Champions of the ailing Kanto region, but the two were too preoccupied with maintaining their positions of power to help as the region they governed fell into anarchy. Some began to speculate that the world was coming to an end, that this void signified that the apocalypse was nigh. Thousands fled into the far reaches of the wilderness, choosing to live off the land rather than to stay within a society that was growing steadily more unstable.
Then, unexpectedly, a new Kanto Champion emerged.
The new Champion was named Alice, and the girl quickly agreed to the flood of requests for assistance that were sent her way. She was a bit of an oddball, certainly. In addition to being strikingly young for somebody holding such an honorable title, Champion Alice owned a legendary Pokemon which she claimed had been given to her by a stranger, had attained the position after an epic journey where she traveled for weeks without pause, and kept spouting some nonsense about being guided by "the voices." But in this time of peril, the Kanto populace was entirely willing to overlook their new Champion's peculiarities. What mattered more than anything was that, almost immediately after gaining power, Alice took action. She organized the ragtag teams of researchers into a clear hierarchy and contributed her own research haphazardly assembled during her time roaming Kanto.
And what better person to help Alice lead the fight against the randomization than her father, Bill?
Even aside from their relation, the young Champion had valid reasons to enlist his help. Bill was a renowned computer programmer with the skills to set up a variety of systems and with plenty of contacts in the industry to call upon for more specialized expertise. And he was all too willing to join in the fight, telling his daughter that he would stay up day and night writing programs and crunching numbers if that was what it took to make her happy. Sure, the voices that Alice had heard during her journey had been leery of Bill- some had even claimed that he was the reason the world was falling apart- but what did they know? The voices were clearly fallible when it came to basic conditions of reality, and her father had quickly proved to be one of the most valuable contributors to void-related research. Clearly, the idea that Bill was the one to blame here was just another delusion of the voices
For a little while, Alice's organization seemed to be making some progress. As the signal began entering Johto and the sphere began nibbling away at the far reaches of Kanto, the two regions teamed up to fight the threat. One researcher had a breakthrough by comparing the transformation signal to the radio signal given off by the Ruins of Alph; theories that the Unown were somehow altering reality flourished, even after the Unown themselves had been altered along with their surroundings. Another scientist found limited success with preventing Pokemon transformation, preserving the state of his son's beloved Rattata companion when a wave hit their home of Cherrygrove. None had figured out a way to halt the void or the signal which emerged from it, but these small victories gave people hope that success was just around the corner.
But then, when the world needed her most, Alice vanished. The system she had developed plodded along, but even after three years of investigation, nothing could be done to stop the mysterious force from overtaking the land. The Cherrygrove Rattata that had once stood as a beacon of hope to all began transforming, not just once but again and again, with the transformations separated by only a few brief hours. After a brief period of optimism, the repeated failures of the investigation felt more painful than ever.
Even Bill, agent of the Dome, began to panic after waking up to find that his trusted Eevee partner was now a slow-moving, clumsy Gloom. The randomization was going far beyond what he had expected, and his prayers to the Dome Fossil found no audience. He had agreed to help with the plot, but had expected to be spared from the brunt of its effects as compensation for his assistance; the Dome, it seemed, did not play favorites.
Another rumor started going around Johto. There was a girl, they said, a young Trainer who'd been breezing through the gym challenge. This girl- Aurora, her name was, or so the story went- had shut down a Team Rocket mission practically on her own. But strangest of all was that she, like the Pokemon of the region, transformed. She would flicker between colors from time to time, going from normal to black or green or invisible or every color at once, and her surroundings would often follow suit.
And, on one rare moment when the girl had decided to speak up, she had mentioned hearing voices.
Bill knew what had to be done.
When he heard Aurora was in Ecruteak, he rushed to the Pokemon Center to meet her before it was too late. The voices suspected a trap, and chanted KILL BILL and spoke of the PC creator as some kind of dark god; Bill recalled the Dome Fossil's explanation of their flawless plot and warnings that the voices were a primal force of chaos not to be trifled with. But Bill gave this new host the Pokemon that had been his treasured Eevee, a token gift that would serve as a message that he hoped would make it through to the voices, despite their garbled logic. The Dome Fossil had betrayed him, despite his years of dutiful service; Bill was all too willing to return the favor. If the voices still didn't trust him, if they proved to be a useless ally, so be it. He couldn't change his bloodstained past, but he could try to work together with those that had been his enemies to create a better future.
But when Bill saw Aurora again, smiling widely as she was inducted into the Hall of Fame, his Eevee-turned-Gloom was nowhere to be seen.
A storm of media hype erupted as the young Aurora was named Johto's Champion. Some called her the second Alice, hoping that she too would help the world push back the approaching chaos. For a moment, the new Champion seemed to be a ray of light in a time of darkness.
But, like Alice before her, the girl disappeared from her post abruptly. Alice had at least tried to deal with the chaos before abandoning the Championship; Aurora left before addressing any of her region's many concerns, leaving the position vacant when Johto so desperately needed a strong leader to guide and inspire them. And the region descended into anarchy once more.
A few days later, a wave of blinding white light flew across the land, and all that was touched by it returned to what had been before the void appeared. The scientist's son was ecstatic to find that his trusted companion was a Rattata once more. Routes plagued with dragons that had made them near-impossible to cross went back to holding innocuous hordes of bugs and birds. Trainers across several regions woke up to find their Pokemon turned back into the forms they had so adored months or years earlier.
Researchers descended en masse onto Mt. Silver, the remote area proving to be the source of the healing light. Down from the mountaintop came Alice and Aurora, the two Champions chattering nonstop about other worlds and fossil gods and mysterious voices to anybody who would listen. They alone had their Pokemon remain transformed after the light's spread, their teammates preserved in the forms which had led them to greatness. And though the details of their story were garbled by the girls' sheer excitement, one fact remained clear: these two precocious girls, the Champions which had been reviled for abandoning their posts when their leadership was needed most, were the very ones who had managed to save them all.
In a brief moment between interviews, Alice and Bill embraced, both teary-eyed as they spoke to one another for the first time in years. Bill told her in surreptitious whispers about his working with and then against the Dome, and Alice told him in a similarly-lowered voice about her seclusion and the girl who followed her into self-imposed exile; both agreed that they had been foolish for letting their work consume their lives, and vowed never to leave the other's side again.
The void disappeared, replaced by the land that it had consumed. Residents of Sinnoh found that years had passed them by in the blink of an eye. Friends and family members presumed dead for years were reunited with their loved ones and told of all that had occurred while they had vanished. And, eventually, the hub-bub died down, and people returned to their usual routines. Slowly but surely, life moved on.
And in Twinleaf Town, Napoleon's mother held a quiet funeral for her son, mourning the young Trainer who would never know that his battle had been won at last.