The Origin and History of the Immortelle in Brief

Hundreds of thousands of years ago humans first walked upon this world. There was already life here, much of it, and it was beautiful and flourishing. And then something happened, an event known as the Shattering because of the way it splits Dialga's timeline. Humans evolved. Not evolution as we think of it, we were already sentient and had mastery of fire and stone. Evolution as it can only exist in this marvelous world.

I am told that today there are many who would draw lines, saying that humans are better than pokemon. I have also seen pokemon who hate humans or consider them to be lesser being than pokemon. Even the best people I have met say simply that humans and pokemon are equal, similar, without difference, the same, or just friends. Not once since the day our civilization fell has someone stumbled upon the truth of the matter.

Humans are pokemon.

I say that nobody has stumbled upon this truth. I choose my words carefully in this. The concept that humans are pokemon has been shared throughout the ages with a select few. The revered Professor Samuel Oak is one of these few, and in a bout of ironic humor he actually programmed his pokedexes so that if you look up entry #0 in the national pokedex you will find the trainer information of the pokedex's owner.

Given the fact that the Shattering coincides with our rise, I would have to assume that the realization by someone at some point that humans are pokemon is necessary for the survival of existence.

Humans were separated near their creation. Around the creation of what is now known as the Lake Trio, some humans were affected severely.

Azelf, Uxie, Mesprit. They were so young for their powers.

Too young it turns out.

They weren't able to completely control them and accidentally gifted some with knowledge, willpower, and emotion far beyond the rest, and so while most of humanity was figuring out the finer points of fire, our ancestors were de-bunking quantum physics. Under the instruction of Arceus the affected were gathered together. They formed the world's first human civilization, an absolute utopia, humans and pokemon living and existing together (this was before he realization) they created a vast empire, completely in tune with the world, technology beyond belief, marvels of arts, literature, and engineering, enormous places of study, sciences thousands of years ahead of anything existent today.

But irony and fate can be cruel. For every light there is a shadow cast.

For every utopia, there must be a dystopia.

There was such a place, on the far side of the world. It originated as a colony, or more accurately a prison. It was where we sent our criminals. It was also a hive and breeding ground for an infectious evil. Eventually this place was all but forgotten to us, we preferred to think about more pleasurable things, and then one day we opened our eyes and found that they had taken independence, broken ties with us, and even swayed some of our other cities and colonies to do the same. We had no quarrel, how could we, no word came from them, they left us alone, we had no idea what was going on inside this corrupted kingdom.

Then came the day when one of our greatest scientists found a special circumstance that created a heretofore unseen and strange anomaly. Under the correct conditions humans could evolve. Some could even learn to use pokemon powers in their human state if the circumstances were right. Together these two facts formed the basis for a theory that was rapidly tested and proven and that shook out world to its core: Humans are pokemon. Some particularly kind-hearted soul remembered our "brothers" on the far side of the world, and quickly a diplomatic/scientific research team of 50 scientists, ambassadors, engineers, writers, and scribes was formed and dispatched to share this important new finding about the nature of human beings with them.

13 came back. 7 of them were even alive at the time. 3 survived their wounds long enough for the war to arrive.

The rest of them were received in varying amounts in our other cities and colonies.

We later found out that they were still alive and conscious when they were torn apart. Most of them. Two succeeded in dying before their dismemberment, one bit off his tongue and drowned in his own blood, and the other used the stone wall behind him to sharpen the edges of his manacles to the point where he was able to slit his own wrists with them.

All of this was told to us by the ones that were permitted to survive until the war took them.

They attacked us with impossible strength, their entire empire was based on the belief of humanity's dominance over pokemon. We had just become the ultimate threat to them.

Where our society was largely academic, theirs was very much militaristic. They had weapons we could have never believed possible, not that we couldn't believe in the device itself, indeed in most cases it was simplistic, nearly primitive, and we didn't even have to see it to know exactly how it worked. No, what we couldn't imagine was anybody actually being vile enough to use them.

When we realized that we couldn't possibly win, we settled into our only available course of action. We had no weapons so we became them. 2563 of the applicants were able to pass the requirements for induced evolution. We became soldiers in a world that had never needed them. We fought the first war. In our evolved state we were powerful, more powerful than we could have possibly comprehended beforehand. But we were also weak. We lost so many to their own weaknesses…pride, greed, laziness, vanity, lust, hate, naiveté…so many, so many. I still remember their names, all of them. I have hidden away the device we used to store them, erected a memorial to them, to us. When we realized exactly what this war was, then we knew…the war was not about dominance, or justice, or even about survival. Our fight became the eradication of that evil that threatened to envelop the world.

Ultimately we won, but then came the harder realization. Our enemy had been our brothers all along. The seed of evil that they possessed had ultimately come from us. They were a part of us that fell off, and ultimately it was realized that our own civilization was flawed, straight to the core. And so we, the survivors of the first war, went about with our final mission. We erased, eradicated, razed, and destroyed any and all evidence that our civilization had ever existed. And so no, there are no memorials to our fallen civilization, only to those 2562 brave soldiers who gave everything for our survival. And my name is there as well.

There were those among us, soldiers, who survived the war, but the people on that list, the people who owned those names, they died when they went into the evolution induction chamber.

Once we finished the destruction of our civilization, we gathered together in the cave of origins, so that when we died we had that much less distance to travel before our spirits moved on.

And then we discovered Fate's cruelest trick yet.

We must have broken some great cosmic law set down by whatever power brought Arceus into being, because truly nothing short of such a transgression could ever have possibly earned us this destiny. That was all we could think at the time. When we found out. A few years after the destruction of our cities, somebody observed that a few of us seemed to be getting younger. We of course laughed at this, and then realized the cost of our evolution. We were as the legends. We had become legends. And like them we could not grow, could not sicken.

Could not die.

And so we were forced to watch as the last of our people, our friends, our families, one by one withered, grew old, sickened, and died. And we could not follow them.

Because we are Immortelle.

Eternal. Everlasting. Unchanging.

We had already erased everything else, we were the last remains of a fallen empire. We could not die, and the one time one of us tried to kill herself, the pokemon intervened. They saw it as a gift, and in time we came to as well. Immortality is a curse. But a second chance, that is the greatest of gifts. And we now had a second chance, this time we could fix things, do it right. But first we would need to fade into the background and bide our time. We would have to allow the humans who were just now beginning to enter the life of their race, the ones who had been unable to function and develop with our society in place, to take over. These humans who hadn't yet seen war, violence, or evil. We would have to let them develop and grow into this new world we had left wide open for them. We could guide them, a few, when necessary, staying behind the scenes invisible to most, quietly making sure that these new humans did not repeat our mistakes.

There were two final actions we had to take before our disappearance though, and I believe these may have made all the difference in how effective we can be without interfering directly. I may be the most active of the Immortelle, but even I know that the world is not yet ready to know of our existence.

First, we sealed our names. We each remember our names, and each other's, but we do not reveal these names, they are the only things that we have kept of our original lives besides the mew amulets that mark us as Immortelle. The amulets serve another function, but I can only pray that it never needs to be fulfilled.

The other thing we did was start a rumor. We passed to the pokemon the duty of keeping our story alive. Soon it spread throughout the world, all pokemon knowing who we were. And then the fact became rumor, the rumor became story, the story became fable, the fable became legend, and our legend faded into obscurity, taking our civilization with it. But faded is not gone, and when the sun sets or the moon rises and pokemon parents are shuffling their children off to bed, in nearly every forest, hill, river, island, ocean, mountain, field, lake, city, farm, cave, tunnel, and haven you can stand in nearly any place, and if you're quiet and listen for it, you can hear the young ones and their parents going through the nightly ritual of getting the children to sleep. And if you wait long enough in one of these places pokemon inhabit, you'll hear;

"Mommy, tell us a story, please."

"What one would you like to hear?"

"You know, our favorite, the one that always makes us feel safe and happy."

"Ah, that one."

"Yes Mommy, please, tell us the story of the Immortelle."

But maybe I flatter myself, it's possible that nobody remembers us and that you've never heard of us. Who knows, maybe I'm completely wrong and it was out of context when I heard that conversation taking place in a warm den on a stormy night as I stood outside in the rain and listened to those same words I wrote all those hundreds of thousands of years ago pour from the mouth of the cave were dozens of pokemon of all sizes, ages, type, and evolutionary stage sat around a bonfire stoked by a Dragonite and a Charizard with wood collected by a Rhyperior and a Tyranitar, kindled by the joint efforts of a Scyther and a Pinsir, and kept dry by the combined ingenuity of a Seviper and a Zangoose.

But I can tell you that the poachers who had been chasing this group of pokemon around the valley in question, even going so far as to collapse the entrance, and who were about to end their game of cat and mouse, would have succeeded that night with their nets and their guns, and their cages and their trucks. Not one of those pokemon would have had another free night, I saw the future, witnessed their fates, read their destinies. I could tell you all of them.

And when I had seen the future that I would be leaving them to I intervened. So yes, maybe I am flattering myself, and it was nothing more than a particularly well written bedtime story to those young ones. But those poachers definitely know that I'm no myth. And something tells me that there are plenty of pokemon, even humans, who have heard our bedtime story and know its truth too. And frankly as long as a single pokemon, even one, remembers us and believes in us, and has hope that we're out there, I'd say we're doing our job.

Because we can't be public, but we'll always follow our hearts. We'll always do what we can. We failed our world, so now we protect yours so that you can have a chance, and maybe, just maybe, then we won't have failed.

On a final and personal note because the rest aren't necessarily the same as me: I am immortal, unchanging, Immortelle. The rest of the world is not. I can't have a home, or a close family, and so all I have is the world and everything in it. And I will protect it.

I am Immortelle.

I am the sixth.

I am -

But if you look for me, you will find me by only one name

- The Boy in the Leather Jacket