Chapter I

"OK, let's try again," Finn said. "Ready?"

I nodded

"Here, we, go!"

The cue for me to start running like a maniac into the tall grass, right outside of Pallet Town.

"I want to be the very best...!" I screamed from the top of my lungs. "That no one ever was...!"

The clunky device strapped to my head with it's cylinder-shaped goggles instantly messed up my coordination. I managed to avoid one Rattata that jumped out of the green, then stepped aside just in time to dodge a Pidgey.

"To catch them is my real test...!" I kept yelling. "To train them is my.. oh, shit..."

Despite a bunch of desperate hand gestures, I couldn't orchestrate the haptic gloves to help my avatar from falling to the ground once more. My head landed right next to the very upset Pidgey I just tripped over.

Backed by the sound of Finn's laughter I got up again. He had been taping the whole thing and couldn't be happier.

"You, you..." my little brother cackled, "you didn't even get fifteen feet from town!"

"Shut up," I muttered, pulling up the goggles and witnessing the sad truth. "I'm done for today."

"Awww, come on Leo. You want to be the very best, right? Like no one ever was?" he kept laughing before getting hit with a Poké Ball to the head. That managed to shut him up.

"I'm eighty percent sure now that we're wasting our time here", I told Finn. He only answered with a sigh, expressing both frustration and agreement.

We stood there for a moment of silence while contemplating our next move. For the past six weeks we'd been trying to solve a riddle on Satoshi. The planet in the OASIS where players can experience the world of Pokémon. Our favorite place in the whole simulation.

Few players had spent so much time on Satoshi as Finn and I had. We were already playing Pokémon when I was six and he was just three years old. After the divorce the most fun we had with our dad was when he took us with him playing Pokémon Go, an early augmented reality game you had to play in the real world, back when it was still a place you could take a careless stroll.

That was 27 years ago. We spent our childhood and teenage years playing every game, watching every anime episode and movie. It was only after Tencent acquired Nintendo that Pokémon finally came to the OASIS. By then, the year 2030, the franchise had already become a bit of a niche, especially outside of Japan. But my brother and I went berserk.

The world of Pokémon seemed endless in the OASIS. While the mechanics on Satoshi were based on the video games, it felt like a more realistic version of the anime. We realized that after it took us two long afternoons to get through Viridian Forest. In the early games that was just a ten minute trip.

Training our Pokémon for their first gym fight took another week or so. To find more powerful and rare Pokémon we had to go on actual expeditions that would only succeed with expensive rations and a lot of time and patience.

We loved it. In the following decade, Finn climbed the ranks as a Ranger. I managed to become the gym leader of Azalea Town. A bit of an honorary title for true die-hards. Other players had to fight a NPC based upon my avatar that would bring out a selection of bug Pokémon, tailored to their progress.

We made our livelihood in and outside the OASIS from breeding and selling rare Pokémon with competitive stats and exclusive moves. When these little creatures also had a different color or other distinctive characteristics, they were extra valuable to players in the OASIS that just wanted to run through a couple of Pokémon quests without sinking their life into it.

They were probably right. The game was too repetitive, too grindy and once you got a decent team it became too easy as well. The OASIS offered countless alternative worlds that were better designed, more engaging and simply more fun.

Lately even I had a hard time returning on a daily basis when months went by without any fresh content and the player count dropped to a couple of thousand a day. Still, nothing matched the cozy feeling I got from camping in a forest with the creatures I had trained and traveled with for over a decade.

On new year's day 2046 things changed. The OASIS was still recovering from the Battle of Castle Anorak, but someone had decided it was time for another easter egg hunt.

When players on Satoshi entered a Poké Center and talked to the nurse behind the counter, she would give her best wishes for the new year and tell them to check the PC next to the counter. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Pokémon franchise this year, players could compete to win a big prize.

It wasn't the first time a company emulated James Halliday's famous hunt. There had already been a wide array of knockoffs. But the reward in this one was unexpectedly good. The winner got a chance at capturing Mew, the mythical Pokémon from the very first games.

Unlike regular and legendary creatures, the OASIS didn't give players the opportunity to capture mythical Pokémon. They did show up in quests and flicksyncs, but were supposed to be one of a kind beings that couldn't be owned by just one player. It would break the lore and also ruin the balance in competitive fights.

But now there was an exception. That made Mew instantly one of the most wanted artifacts in the whole OASIS.

The first clue was a little rhyme, to make the homage to Halliday's quest even more obvious. It went like this.

To find the one you must face,

get a broader scope of things,

grab gold in a rainbow chase,

perform the song everyone sings.

Finn and I instantly figured it out. At least, we thought so. The scope had to be the device I was wearing while running through the tall grass. The "Silph Scope" from the original Pokémon games that allowed players to identify and beat ghosts in the Pokémon Tower. A vertical graveyard where people buried their dead pocket monsters.

We were pretty adamant about the gold grabbing in a rainbow chase too. In the very first episode of the anime series, Ash Ketchum sees the legendary bird Ho-oh flying towards a rainbow. Symbolizing destiny has a lot in store for the show's protagonist and his Pikachu. But the game Ho-oh premiered in, was Gold, a sequel to the original Pokémon games. Easypeasy.

But six weeks into the contest we didn't manage to trigger anything yet. We checked the graveyard tower, nothing happened. Then we thoroughly investigated another tower. The one where Ho-oh was encountered in the video game Pokémon Gold when players would bring a Rainbow Wing. No results.

For the past few days we tried to reenact the first episode of the anime, hoping we would unlock something. Our latest failed experiment made us realize that the hunt for Mew might be more complicated than we expected.