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She had almost caught up with it. So close. Just a little bit further. How was this soul so adept at evading her attempts to capture it? Why was it so intent on evading her?

Mew had lost the trail of the soul shortly before taking the directions of a rather helpful little Pokémon. It only then occurred to her that the Pokémon she had taken the devout word of, didn't naturally occur in the wilds of the region she was searching, or even for that matter, exist in this timeline at all.

Ever since, she had been rushing around the wilderness searching for this one specific Pokémon, with no luck at all.

She had found a minor crater in the ground, up in the northern parts of Sinnoh. The snow had been pushed aside by the impact and there were footprints leading away. Unfortunately, those footprints led to nothing. They literally stopped in the middle of nowhere, which meant that Mew had to double back to search the crater impact once again.

As Mew returned to the site, there was the tiniest flicker in mid-air. A tear. The universes were still unbalanced. She needed to find this lost soul and fast, otherwise the repairs she had tried to make for Espir would be undone- with even more dire consequences due to there now being two unwelcome souls within this world.

She had done what she could to make sure Espir was welcome, but the scars of his entry still remained, and they were being eaten away by the effect of this second stowaway.

Mew flew across the snowy mountains, staying low enough to not be spotted by onlookers, but high enough to search a larger portion of the land at once. She knew that slippery little Pokémon would be around there somewhere. She was looking for the soul of a human, but if her suspicions were true, this soul had also taken refuge in the body of a Pokémon, much like Espir had.

Mew was not accustomed to being taken by surprise. It was usually her sneaking up on others. She never saw the Zorua coming.

Mew was so intent upon searching for this Pokémon, that she flew straight for what she thought were signs of that Pokémon, footprints in the snow that matched those coming from the impact site. Unfortunately, it was a decoy. The footprints, once again, led to a dead end. This time, however, Mew suffered deep gashes along her back as the Zorua burst out from behind a tree and unleashed a vicious attack on Mew.

For her part, Mew flew up, out of reach of another attack by the Pokémon. It tried to retreat out of sight, but she kept her eye on it this time, watching and following. It was only a Zorua, so the attacks upon Mew had already almost completely healed by the time she slammed into the Pokémon to knock it off its feet.

As Zorua pushed itself back up to try and fight once more, Mew shook her head.

"I know this may be frightening for you," she said, "confusing and disorienting. I can take all that away. I can take any memories you need taking. Don't you like the idea of that? No more fear of the unknown? You would be able to live as if you had always had this form. A second life, staving off the afterlife for even longer. Doesn't that sound… divine?"

The Zorua regarded her, mulling over her offer.

"Wouldn't that mean I would lose who I am?" He said, "forget myself? I would cease to be me?"

"You already have the body," Mew countered, "allow me to heal the discord in your mind."

"I think I would rather keep what I already have up here, thank you very much," the Zorua laughed.

"Be that as it may," Mew said, "it is less a matter of want and more a matter of necessity."

Mew focused her mind and lashed out with a powerful Psychic attack, hoping to put the Zorua out of action immediately. She needed the Pokémon calmer for when she tried to take the soul back to its own world. For a moment, Mew thought she had pushed out with her abilities too harshly as something exploded between them.

The air itself tore apart, pushing outwards and sending the Zorua rolling end over end as Mew, too, spiraled in the air from the force of the impact.

Failure.

"No!" Mew cried out, before remembering who she was talking to and her manners in doing so, "please, I am so close to fixing this for you. For everything. I can do this."

"It has been too long," her master said with a commanding monotonous reverberation, "you shall return now and bear witness to the consequences of your actions."

Mew was about to protest some more, as she saw the Zorua unconscious mere feet away from Arceus. Before Mew was even able to get a word out, she readjusted her vision and found that she was back in her observation area outside of the knowing universes.

She looked around and noticed far more was wrong with them than she had realized.

"While you have fretted over your specific pets," Arceus explained, "the rest of existence has unraveled at the seams. You have spent all your time working your attention on such minute matters that you forgot your role in keeping the wheel of life running. You have failed me. My longest ally, my most loyal servant, a failure."

"My lord-" Mew tried to say, but the words got stuck in her throat. Her master's words stung worse than she could ever imagine. She could never have dreamt that she would be called a failure, so she had no knowledge of what it would feel like when she finally was called one. It was as effective as raking knives across her body. She felt hollow. What was she to do?

"It is time for you to go," Arceus said, the golden halo beginning to glow brighter, "thank you for the service you provided, despite its unfortunate resolution."

"Wait!" Mew shouted out, closing her eyes to avoid the blinding light. Its intensity did not waver, but it did stop increasing in brightness as Arceus allowed Mew a moment to speak. "I will find someone."

"Explain."

"Whether you may admit it or not," Mew said, throwing her words out as fast as she could, "you need my help. True, I may be not long for this role, but I know it deeper than anyone. Allow me to find a suitable replacement. One that will put existence right. Someone true of heart."

"Do you really think it possible to find such a being?" Arceus asked.

"I do."

"Then go," Arceus said, "but next time we talk, it shall be our last time."

With a whipcrack of deafening sound and a burst of the light of the halo, Arceus left Mew to herself. To her silence and her thoughts.

Mew now had both a quest, a deadline and the problem of completing it successfully. She cared enough about existence to know she needed someone that excelled beyond most others in any of the worlds. Despite herself, however, Mew also knew that finding this person meant ending her own existence. Could she bring herself to cut short her eternity of life? She had never contemplated what the afterlife truly was, as she had never been threatened by the possibility of going there. Now, however, it was different. Mew felt the first fearful stab of desperation. An emotion only mortals in dilemmas received. Mew realized she needed to begin classing herself as a mortal too, considering the predicament she was now in.

She had three options, if she truly slowed down and considered the situation. She could do nothing. Existence would continue to crumble and Arceus would cease her involvement in existence. She could search for this replacement and bring them back to help with the breakdown of existence. Arceus would likely end Mew's involvement there and put his trust into his new disciple. Finally, Mew could find this replacement, but only reveal them after she had sorted out existence herself. That could either give Arceus a reason to spare her and allow her an easy life outside of her role here, or he wouldn't have her replaced at all- if she could fix the problem with existence.

So, with her decision in mind, Mew went about trying to find her replacement. She needed to understand how to fix reality along the way. For ideas on how to do that, she decided to go back to where it all began and work her way out from there. Hopefully, she would be able to find a replacement on the way and fix the issues fast enough to keep Arceus from returning and taking away her final opportunity.

Mew searched around to find the home of most of Espir.

...

...

...

Shane was aware of his death.

That was the first thing that told him things were a little strange, considering he was still walking around.

The funny little pink being that was shouting at him and getting quite frantic, Shane wasn't as much of a fan about that. If this was going to be Shane's afterlife, he had earned at least a little relaxation time before some supernatural entity wanted to drag him back to supernatural work so that he could end up with supernatural taxes to deal with.

When the aggressively loud rip in the air appeared near the both of them, Shane wanted to leave the pink thing to its own devices, but curiosity got the better of him. It was a flaw of his and he knew it. His parents always had to keep an eye out to keep him out of trouble. He acted before thinking and it appeared that the afterlife would be just more of the same from that personality trait.

Shane jumped through the tear behind the pink being, taking himself along for the ride.

The whistling air, that blasted him in the face immediately after he jumped, was a sign that he probably should have thought ahead. He watched as the pink being shot off in another direction, flying away, apparently forgetting all about him in the process.

He was unfortunate enough to be falling from the sky.

Much to Shane's disappointment, he had never owned any wings with which to fly; so, as he expected, he fell towards the snowy ground below. Fast.

Shane didn't panic. Why should he? He had already died once. For all he knew, he would just hit the ground pretty hard and then get up and start walking again. Was there an afterafterlife? He didn't know. He didn't worry about the concept of there not being one because he had no idea if there had been an afterlife the first time, so why worry about an afterlife after the afterlife?

These big questions were too much for Shane. He didn't like strenuous activities and that included mental activities. Instead, he let the winds rush by him, chilling his absent bones.

The impact with the snow was hard. Harder than he expected. For one, there wasn't much snow where he landed. He hit the rocks just underneath the snow layer. He did, to his credit, try a superhero landing. It didn't work and he slammed into the ground all the same.

He didn't feel the impact past the immediate contact, as he was killed straight away. Or, at least he thought he was. He didn't understand how a soul could be knocked unconscious- and that was the first thought he had when he woke up for the first time since his true death.

The second thought he had was that it was much easier to stand up than he had expected. It was the third thought that worried him- as much as Shane really could be worried.

He looked down, to see what could possibly be the problem with his height, as his thought was that his perspective was off. He knew, instinctively, that he was standing upright, but he was looking around as if he was far shorter than he knew he was.

Shane decided that he was best off getting to grips with whatever was going on, so that he could then figure out what his next moves would be. He felt like what was going on was worth getting concerned about, but that would only cause a little wasted time as he coped with the worry, instead of the issue at hand. For people that didn't know Shane, they would have thought this to be a pragmatic approach, but for those that did know him, they knew that it was closer to nonchalance than any practical sense.

Shane looked down and saw paws, four of them. They were small paws, dark gray, and appeared to be almost like the points to the four tiny legs that held up the rest of his body. He nodded respectfully at the fact he now had no hands, but more legs. His paws may have been darker, but the main color of his fur coat- he realized he had fur covering his body, not clothes- was a pale gray, almost white; it was also tinged with pink at the ends of the longer curls and tendrils of his hair.

As Shane looked down, admiring his new limbs, a tuft of pink fell down in front of his eyes, forcing him to flick his head back to get the hair to rest naturally backwards, away from his face. At some point, he figured, he would need to find something reflective to look at the rest of him. He could feel a slight tugging from what he assumed to be a tail and he had a bushy collection of more white and pink fur around his neck, almost like a mane.

He felt odd, knowing that he wasn't wearing any clothes. He didn't feel like he was naked. The natural embarrassment someone would feel from being outside without anything covering them up wasn't there. Instead, he was mildly surprised and content with how the temperature of the snow felt. Perhaps it was his fur, or something to do with his skin, but he didn't feel the intense chill that snow would normally bring his human hands. He had all four limbs planted in the snow and yet, he didn't feel any sort of freezing sensation at all.

The landscape around him, snow-covered with intermittent evergreen trees, was harsh to his eyes. They must have been stronger, better at seeing, than his human eyes and the unexpected intensity of the sun glinting off the snow pierced through him sharply. He closed his eyes and waited for the overloading of his senses to calm down. As his eyes were slowly adjusting, he noticed he could hear incredibly well too. His ears twitched at the influx of sounds. That's something new, he realized, larger and more alert ears. He lifted a paw to try and feel them, like he would a hand, but the loss of the support caused him to pitch forward into the snow.

Now that he was lying down- unintentionally albeit, he took the time to feel his ears anyways, not needing his legs to stay standing for the moment. His ears stood up, almost as large as the rest of his head entirely. He passed his paws over the rest of his face, to get a better idea of what he was now working with. A small, pinched snout, thick whiskers and two large eyes.

Speaking of his snout, it wriggled and twitched also, taking in smells he didn't even know existed. He had an innate idea of where they were coming from, too. His perception of all senses was far more impressive than it had ever been. Perhaps this afterlife business wasn't so bad after all.

And then, of course, the pink being had to come flying back.

It came shooting across the sky and spotted Shane as he was absentmindedly exploring the area. Enquiring about whether or not Shane had seen a human fall from the sky, he realized quickly that the pink being didn't realize he was the human. So, Shane simply kept the charade up and gave the pink being the wrong directions, in order to avoid being pulled away to wherever his actual afterlife was meant to be. This was much more interesting and he didn't want to let it go so shortly after getting it.

He watched the pink being fly off and immediately began running in the opposite direction, thinking up some sort of plan of how to throw it off his trail. He darted through the snow, trying to make his path jerky and erratic, sometimes having it trail off into nothing and backtracking on itself. It would be hell to try and follow it.

Shane then waited in the shadows and hoped that the pink being wouldn't show up. He wanted to keep this second opportunity at life, even if it didn't make much sense to him yet. Maybe this was what it felt like to be reincarnated, but if the pink being was tracking him- maybe he wasn't meant to be reincarnated into this form? Was he meant for something worse, like a slug? He didn't want to find out. He wasn't a very violent person, but he knew he would have to fight for the chance to stay as he was, if it came to that.

He enacted his ambushing plan as the pink being found him and tried to do what it could to take him back. He fought as hard as he could, even getting in some nasty looking scratches on its back. Now that he had been found, all he could really try was to run as fast as he could away. It wasn't the most hopeful of plans, but it was all he had.

Then, the sky ripped open between the two of them and the pink being was pulled away by something else entirely. Shane saw a strange pulse of energy hit close to him right before the actual blast of the sky opening threw him aside. He had noticed the pink being look at him and appear to send some sort of mystical thing his way, which must have been the strange feeling. Shane, feeling a burst of power from the tear in the air opening up, wasn't sure what he did. He was expecting to be hit by the pulse of energy, but instead a being exactly like him looked like it got hit. He watched it go down with the blast too. It didn't really phase Shane, though, which made him a little concerned about what the pink being had tried to do to him, even as he was pulling himself back up from being tossed aside by the blast. He left the seeming replicate of him where it lay and hid behind a rock until the ordeal was over. Whatever it was, until Shane noticed any weird things happening to him, he would just continue on as he had planned.

The pink being was clearly out of the picture for the time being, so he just had to make as much distance between this place and himself as possible. Sighing at the prospect of the effort awaiting him, but happy at this new chance at life, Shane smiled and started to walk off in a random direction.

...

...

...

Mew flew down to the bedside of the body and mind of Espir. She remembered watching the light fade as she stood by Espir's new form. She watched as these two aspects of that human had died. She hadn't given it much thought, but now, looking down at the seemingly peaceful body, still lying in its bed in the hospital, she was confused.

Why?

Why was this body still here? If it was dead, surely the humans responsible for caring for it would have moved it on to its final resting place?

Mew moved down, closer to the body. There were beeping metal machines all around, but for all that Mew knew, she didn't understand the machinations of man- not all of them, at least.

She passed her eyes over the body, as close as she could without disturbing it at all. She saw movement. That wasn't normal. Not for a dead body.

Mew opened her mind and peered inside the body, searching for the mind that should have died alongside it. If the body was still active- somehow- then the mind might be too.

Hello? Mew asked, looking inside.

What? Oh, it's you, the mind of Espir replied, have you sorted out the problem yet? It's getting really, really boring in here.

I-I thought I already had, Mew said, I watched this form perish.

Apparently, not, Espir said, sarcastically, what's the plan now then? If you didn't expect me to still be here, trapped in this shell of darkness, then why are you here at all? And how are you going to stop this? I'm being very calm right now, but I warn you, as soon as I get the chance, I'm going to make your existence just as much of a living hell as mine currently is.

But- this isn't meant to happen, Mew stammered, this is all wrong. All of it. I need to go, I need to fix this.

That's what you said last-

Mew pulled back out as she heard the mind of Espir working itself up into a rage. She felt awful, to have some sort of mortal still suffering, unbeknownst to her.

Mew wasn't used to not knowing things. First, she messed up a simple experiment, trying to help a human achieve their dream. Then the screwed up trying to fix it. Then she altered the trajectory of a second human's afterlife- and how many countless others had she let slip through the cracks of reality in the past few days alone. Even the one human she had been focusing on was still suffering. On top of everything else, Mew faced the prospect of being deleted from existence, too. She didn't know what was in store for her afterlife, if she was even a being that could be granted one. She was meant to live forever, an eternal being. She didn't want to die, but it was too painfully clear that she had no idea how to fix any of these messes and that each one was only spiraling further out of control and creating their own problems on top of the original ones.

Perhaps it was time for her to give up? To find a replacement and hand herself over to her fate.

NO

That didn't make any sense. Why was she so eager to run along and please her master, so eager to roll over and give up on everything she had worked so hard to maintain for as long as time itself had existed?

She couldn't just give up, not like this, not now, when existence needed her the most.

You're the reason it needs help. You're hopeless. Give it up already.

What was happening? Why was she having such conflicting thoughts and why were they coming unbidden as they were? She had never been an indecisive Pokémon. This was not a feeling she liked. She was used to being free to do as she pleased, yet structured and direct with her actions. Now she was being pulled between the commands of her master, and the wishes of her person. What her mind was telling her was the correct route to take and what her heart was telling her instead.

She had caused all these catastrophes and had been commanded to allow herself to die. It made sense, in an emotionless way. But she could help fix things, she knew she could, but if she could why was it only getting worse the more she tried? She didn't want to die.

Which should she choose, in the end, her mind or her heart?

She fled the hospital room, so that she didn't need to look upon the consequences of her actions for a moment longer.

She didn't truly know where she was even travelling to, considering she couldn't return to her usual spot- for fear of running into Arceus once more- so she flew through the stars between stars. She didn't stop flying, afraid of her own thoughts catching up to her.

When she finally stopped, she looked down and saw others running too. Curious, she floated down to investigate. Perhaps, she could find inspiration among the trials of the mortals.