Author's Note:
The following is a non-canon "what if" scenario. It is being presented to show some more details on the characters, but does not need to be read to understand what happens next.
- What Could Have Been -
Jane stumbled as the blast hit them, and only the timely intervention of Pyre's wing stopped her from falling. Instead of a worried crowd there was simply the calm normal day to day life of Shade Cross. Strangely nobody seemed to bat an eye at their sudden arrival. "Jane, you okay?" her Charizard Starter asked cautiously.
"Yeah, Pyre, I'm fine. What happened?" she questioned quickly as she looked around to see what had happened to the enemy mage.
"That damn Alakazam hit us with a really big teleport," the Fire/Flying typed mage replied with a huff of flames. "Maybe a bit too big, I think we might be in another universe," he added sounding more worried, and trying to keep his voice down. His rare ability to talk having caused them some hassle in the past.
"That's a thing that can happen?" Jane asked horrified. "What do we do?"
"Maybe the storage company can help?" Pyre suggested a touch uncertainly. "I think I remember my mom mentioning that Effects' niece worked on something to do with that kind of thing."
"My life is definitely strange enough to cover that topic, yes," a voice said tiredly from behind them. A redheaded woman stood there giving them a dark look. "Come on, worst case scenario I grab Giratina and get him to help us get you two home."
"That's a little extreme isn't it?" Jane had to ask about hunting down one of the least known Legendary pokemon.
"I was literally in town to get something for him, so it is actually surprisingly simple," the woman sighed, as if this was a topic she felt was perfectly normal. "Besides, you probably want to talk to our version of you about whatever got you here."
"Wait, the other versions of us are here?" Pyre asked before Jane could.
"I am not up for this conversation," the woman said instead of actually answering.
The Jane from this world was different. She had a harsher look somehow, and there was no sign of Pyre anywhere around. It was even stranger than the team made entirely out of pokemon, or the trainer with eyes that should have been on his Serperior. "I really wish that this was still a strange thing to me," the other girl said dryly. "Nice to meet you." She held out her hand.
"It should be safe," Pyre whispered thankfully, and she hoped that nobody noticed how she waited for that before shaking her other self's hand. The local Jane's grip was notably stronger than her own.
"Nice to meet you too, although I'll admit I kind of wish it hadn't happened," Jane replied with a shake of her head. "We were in the middle of a fight and got sent here." She looked at Pyre to see if he could let her know what to say quietly enough.
Her Charizard friend looked over the pokemon present, and also paused at the sight of the device in the middle of the room, before speaking. "We've been trying to deal with some rogue magic users. My mother has taught me quite a bit of magic myself," he noted, and the other Jane's face got curiously blank at that statement. "So, we're kind of the only ones who really know how to stop them."
"I wish it wasn't the case," she told the group as they all failed to be surprised that her Starter could talk. "I mean, I've earned seven Badges," she proudly declared. "But if there were any Champions available then I'm sure I'd be better off helping them than trying to tackle this with just my team."
"Seven Badges?" the other Jane asked curiously, and she wondered how far her counterpart had gotten without Pyre's help. The lack of a counterpart for him was now quite obvious, and nobody had attempted to say why yet. "Huh. I really didn't expect that." The other Jane then cracked her neck, an odd thing to do with that topic. "So, Pyre is your Starter then?" her counterpart asked, and it was strange how it clearly sounded like the question wasn't who Pyre was, but rather how they ended up together.
"Our moms arranged most of it," Pyre said proudly. "Jane had a big thing for my mom's movies, and everything just went from there."
"I just wish dad had been able to see it," she told her counterpart sadly. "Mom always says he liked technology, and that's why we had all the video player stuff." There was a look of confusion on her counterpart's face. "Uh, my dad disappeared when I was really little, while he was on a trip to Lost Peak. We haven't heard anything about him since."
"Yeah," the other Jane said surprisingly darkly. "That would be the thing to explain this." She looked at Pyre curiously. "He is why Pyre wasn't my starter after all."
The bland way she said that hurt, but somehow the idea that her father being back could somehow ruin that moment was a bit worse than the tone used to say it. "Oh," she quietly said in response. "I guess I assumed having a dad would be better."
"Can't say it wasn't all worse," the other Jane admitted after a moment. "He really did get us lots of electronic stuff, and helped us out with it a lot. Actually, as a dad he always seemed alright." The other girl looked away sadly. "He just wasn't a very good person."
"You're saying it all in the past tense," Pyre pointed out grimly. "What happened?"
"He's in jail now for being a terrorist," the other Jane said simply. "The leader of an offshoot of Team Plasma in the region. Gave me and Jim a bunch of stuff laced with harmful programs, gave away my Starter when I sent him home for a while, and got the whole family cursed to top it off."
Jane looked at Pyre with horror. She had never even considered the option that her father could have been a bad person. It had always simply been easier to assume that something bad had happened to him instead. "He gave away your Starter?" she managed to ask, unclear on how that could have happened, but with that terrible concept that she understood now why Pyre wasn't this Jane's Starter.
"Honestly? Magmar and I did not actually get along the best," the other version of herself admitted nervously. "I prefer close combat too much for his species, and he couldn't adapt to it. As for giving him away, Pyre's dad even mentioned that mine seemed likely to do it, although apparently they thought that was an exaggeration back then."
Jane now remembered that Pyre's father had come along as a human that first time, when the young Charmander had been left with their family for a while. The thought of someone who gave away Starters having him scared her almost as much as the possibility this all was really what could have happened to her.
"Close combat, huh? Weird," Pyre noted, he mostly succeeded at sounding glib instead of worried and clearly making an attempt to change the subject. "How far did you get in the League?" he asked, and Jane had to smile at how quickly he got along with people once they knew he could talk.
The smirk the other Jane had was strange though. "How about a one on one fight to show you? I can field a Charizard myself, and I'm interested to see how that stacks up to a Pyre that actually wants to fight," she said, and that qualifier was so very odd.
"I'm sure it will be fine," Pyre tried to reassure her when the far too strong looking Serperior and his strange red eyed trainer set up a small clearing for the match outside. "We should have time to rest before we get back, and honestly we either will get back right when we left, or will be too late anyway."
"You really need to stop trying to make things sound better," she once again told her Starter, and then turned to look at her counterpart. Her counterpart who had started to take off gear instead of just selecting one of the pokeballs on the belt that had just been set aside. "Uh?" The other trainer was now just wearing her outfit and the suddenly horrifyingly familiar necklace her counterpart had around her neck. The exact same kind of necklace getting distributed to particularly badly hit victims of her current foes.
The other Jane then transformed as she removed said necklace, her body growing outward into another Charizard. There was a smirk on the now pokemon that had a chilling similarity to the Nidoking that led her enemies. This sight immediately reminded her of his words the only time she had met the evil former human. "I'll show you exactly what this gift can do for you!" he had declared happily, as if she should want to be a pokemon.
"Well, let's see how you do," the new Charizard said, and Jane hoped that she would learn why this other Jane didn't seem to like Pyre very much. Then to Jane's relief the Charizard clearly waited for them to be ready instead of just attacking, like some of the more hot blooded Chars she had met would have done. "Hey, piece of advice, take this entirely seriously," the Fire/Flying pokemon said without any amusement.
"Right, give her a serious battle then, Pyre," Jane told her pokemon, and then she nodded to let him know that magic should be okay here. After all, she felt she wouldn't have wanted this other Jane to hold back in her position.
Her Starter quickly moved forward, and she could see his tailflame flicker in the way that indicated he was trying a heat illusion. "Take-" he started to say just before a claw slammed him into the ground, despite the fact that he had actually been a full body length to the side of where he looked to be. Pyre quickly got out of the crater and countered with a blast of flames to cover him as he got some distance.
"Try the air," Jane quickly said, now aware that this was a fight she couldn't talk fast enough to handle normally. Her advice quickly became useless however, as even with flight Pyre was more dodging than actually fighting. The pokemon Jane then let out a purple plume of dragon fire. "Speed up!"
"Trying!" Pyre shouted back with a wince as he barely slashed at the wing of the other Charizard. Then he hit the ground again as the other Jane simply grabbed him out of the sky, the arena cracking heavily around the impact site. "Can I give up now?" he said faintly from the resulting crater.
"Heh, better than I had expected actually," the other Jane laughed, and then helped the other pokemon up. "Glad to see that you really did end up a good fighter if you got the chance to go with me from the start."
"I think I'd feel better about losing if it wasn't to someone who should be human," Pyre complained, luckily only getting a laugh from the other Jane.
"Now, now. There's nothing embarrassing about a seven Badge Starter lasting that long against a Champion's strongest pokemon," the Serperior said with quite a bit of humor.
The other Jane laughed at that statement. "Quite true," the female Charizard said happily. "I suppose I should have started off with that. Flameheart Champion Jane Felsic, local Champ that apparently is in charge of problems with other universes. So, with that out of the way, what is the situation you're dealing with right now?"
"Not having me means you become a Champion?" Pyre asked faintly, and Jane cringed at how sad he sounded about that.
"Hey, don't think of it like that," the other Charizard huffed. "You two apparently like each other enough that you were happy with just seven Badges." The Champion looked rather sad about that. "Here we both wish we got that instead of what we did."
"What happened to your Pyre?" Jane asked, still uncertain she wanted the answer but sure she needed to know before they got down to the real problems.
"Right now he's stuck trying to be a trainer on his own since being on my team did not work out for us," the other Jane easily answered without actually explaining anything.
"I do not think I would like being a trainer myself," her Starter cautiously responded while moving away from the other pokemon.
"I didn't like learning exactly what it was like to be the Charmander that didn't get picked from nightmares, but he put me through that," Champion Jane bluntly replied.
"He wouldn't," Jane said immediately about such a horrible concept.
"I, maybe," her Starter said nervously. "Might have?" She looked over at him in horror over the admission. "You remember how stupid I was about magic back then, right?" That was a good point. Pyre might not have learned how to respect magic at all if her mom hadn't caught the two of them messing with it, and Shinespark had not really had the free time to keep track of him back then. That was the main reason he ended up staying with her family after all. "If I didn't get to stay after meeting you I might have done something that stupid." Her long time friend shook his head. "That would probably mess with my own mind pretty badly from trying it too."
"He spent the past month deliberately not evolving because he didn't want wings," the other Charizard agreed sadly. "Although we have kind of gotten off topic. So, let's try again, what is the bigger issue that got you sent here?"
"Can we head inside first?" Jane reluctantly asked. She was still curious about this world, but she was also now sure she wouldn't like the answers.
Jane really wished her local counterpart had turned back into a human for this. "I think I know why we ended up here specifically," Pyre said after a moment where the two of them were just silently considering how to explain everything. "This is somewhere where you have already been turned into a pokemon."
"'Already', huh?" the other Charizard replied thoughtfully, then turned to look at her seriously.
"We're up against a rogue mage and his minions. He was human once, but now is a pokemon obsessed with turning every human into a pokemon too," Jane admitted. "We've been trying to track down and stop his minions for a while now, but I've only seen him once."
"He's a nasty Nidoking that honestly thinks humans are so inferior that it's hard to remember he used to be one," Pyre added with an angry huff. "This was probably his minion showing off how strong you could be if you turned into a pokemon yourself. The poisonous bastard seems obsessed with-"
"Nidoking?" her counterpart cut off any more discussion harshly. Then the Charizard flexed her arms and wings angrily. "My father is currently stuck as a Nidoran, who is still ranting about the superiority of pokemon," the other Jane said with an icy coldness that didn't match her types. "He is under tight security because he's been fairly adamant about trying to do just that."
"You, you can't," Jane said with complete horror, barely able to talk about the implication. She turned to her Starter, and found Pyre half clinging to her. "He would have-"
"Jane, our town is the first one he attacked," Pyre said softly. "It might actually be-"
"He really turned into a Nidoran?" she cut off her old friend. "That, that's what happened to him?"
"Yeah, he's one of those, mom ended up a Venusaur, and Jim is a Greninja right now," the other Jane informed her. "Dad got the Mismagius that used to be the owner of our house mad enough to curse all of us to be pokemon for a little bit, and that didn't work out quite right."
"We were going to meet with a Mismagius that said she knew what was going on," Pyre said darkly, and Jane realized this was real. Her father was alive, but he was the monster that they were fighting. "I don't suppose you have an easy way to get us back home?"
"You were going to DSS, and specifically to talk to that Ghost pokemon?" Effects' redheaded niece asked from where the actual employees had simply continued working. "Then it should be really simple and extremely confusing for us."
"I'll let Giratina know," the red eyed trainer sighed.
