"Whee," Whitney said, stretching, then walked into her gym. "It's been a long time away, but I'm back and ready to have cute Pokémon come to me instead of going to visit cute Pokémon!"
She patted Wyrdeer on the invisible back. "And I'm really glad you decided to come back with me, you know!"
"It should be interesting to spend a few years at least in the middle of a big city," the cervine Pokémon replied. "I might go back to Sinnoh eventually, but it's the same way you've come back here eventually."
"A change is as good as a rest, and that trip was both," Whitney confirmed. "I'm sure Rapidash has a lot to say about that, he's always good with summarizing what we know about how we've spent our time… and our new friends are just a phone call away."
"I'm still trying to assimilate some of the details of that," Wyrdeer confessed. "I'll get used to it eventually, I'm sure."
There was a cough.
"Excuse me?" asked Ambipom, leaning down from a perch by the light and pushing some goggles up off her eyes. "Do you have a Pokémon who can translate for you available?"
"I'm doing it," Wyrdeer said.
"Thanks," Ambipom replied. "I thought I'd just hang around for long enough to give you a quick update – Jessie, James and Meowth left this morning and did what they called stealing about half the gym Pokémon."
"They did?" Whitney asked. "Huh. About half…"
She counted under her breath. "Is that counting the ones I took with me to Sinnoh?"
"No, just the ones that were left here," Ambipom replied. "I'm not sure they actually noticed that they only took Pokémon they caught for the gym in the first place."
"Huh," Whitney said, again, then shrugged. "Oh well! No harm, no foul! And you can visit any time, too – do you need a lift?"
"No, I parked the Mecha Giratina on the roof," Ambipom answered, replacing her goggles. "I was going to stay behind anyway to fix the hole the escape left, they missed the special hatch. Always a pleasure."
"Absolutely!"
"So, here's an idea I had," Dawn began. "You know how there's that move, Soak, which changes a Pokémon's type to Water type? And then there's moves like Forest's Curse which add an extra type to a Pokémon?"
"I am familiar with those, yes," Azelf replied. "Not in the sense of actually knowing them, but in the sense of knowing they exist."
"Right," Dawn agreed. "It's working, by the way, Nickit."
"I'm glad someone can tell that," Nickit mumbled. "We should find a better solution."
"I'm sure we will," Dawn assured her, then returned her attention to Azelf. "As I was saying, uh, what I thought was – maybe I could speak to May and see if her Skitty can make us an Electric-typed version of one of those moves, and pass it on to Cyndaquil or someone like that? That way, with a bit of prep work, the whole team can be Electric-type one way or another."
"This sounds like the kind of thing that needs total determination," Azelf said. "I am absolutely on board with this."
"Great!" Dawn smiled, then nodded to Nickit. "Okay, we're done."
With a huff of relief, Nickit unstole Dawn's inability to understand Pokémon.
"So... I assume Azelf agreed?" she asked. "You know, because I couldn't actually understand them back there…"
"Pardon?" Dawn asked.
Azelf giggled.
"I hope you don't take this the wrong way, Ash, but I'm almost relieved you lost to Cynthia," Professor Oak said, looking up from his desk. "It's nothing against you, it's just sort of a relief to know that some things still go the way I expected the world worked back when you began your journey."
"That's okay," Ash replied. "That Lucario she's got is really good, my side still hurts."
Professor Oak processed that, then visibly decided to unprocess it.
"Well, my boy, where do you think you'll be going next?" he asked, instead. "To Kalos, perhaps, for Zygarde?"
"I know we will be going back to Kalos eventually, but I am not going to insist," Zygarde said. "I will be happy wherever we end up going."
"He's fine with whatever we choose," Ash summarized.
"In that case… well, perhaps you could come with me on my next business trip?" Oak suggested. "I'm going to Unova to meet with Professor Juniper, and it would be helpful for you to come along just to show that I've not been making everything up – and if you end up liking Unova, then you could stay there."
Ash glanced at Pikachu, who shrugged.
"Honestly, the only reason I'd object if we went to another planet is that it might get a bit monotonous only fighting the half-a-dozen Pokémon species who are from space," he said. "It's whatever you think is right, Ash."
Ash frowned. "Why would we be fighting the Pokémon from space, not the Pokémon who are in space?"
"In a month or so that question will keep me up all night, but for now let's just ignore it," Pikachu requested.
Ash nodded, then snapped his fingers.
"Oh, I just thought," he said. "I should probably register my phone."
"That's more something you need to do with a phone company, I think," Professor Oak chuckled, as Ash reached into his pocket. "I know that I handle a lot of things for you, but-"
The Pokédex on his desk went beep.
"Arceus, the Alpha Pokémon," it said. "It is said to have emerged from an egg in a place where there was nothing, then shaped the world."
"That might be right for the other one, but this one emerged from Mew's pocket in a place where she was a Kangaskhan," Ash said.
Professor Oak looked at the phone, then at Ash, then at the Pokédex.
"This is my life now," he said, with a sigh.
The journey to Unova was on a big flying-boat, one with two decks of seats and with each deck seating six people per row.
"This is pretty cool," Ash said, not for the first time, as he and Pikachu looked out the window. "How close are we to Unova now?"
"Calculating," Zygarde announced, from their perch on Ash's lap. "Based on flight speed and location, we are technically in Unova now. We will likely be landing in under thirty minutes."
"That's good to know," Ash decided. "I think this is the furthest I've ever been from home."
"I don't know what to say," Pikachu admitted. "Because I just realized I literally cannot even remember if we've been to the moon or not."
"The moon would be further, I guess," Ash agreed, then his phone went bing.
He pulled it out, and read the message on the screen.
"New time zone detected," he read. "Adjust clock time? Oh, right, because we're somewhere it's a different time of day… you mean adjust your internal clock so it says the local time?"
Another message appeared on the screen. Yes. That is what I meant, and not the other way around.
Professor Oak's colleague Juniper met them at the airport, and said hello to both Professor Oak and Ash's Mom before turning her attention to Ash.
"And you're the Ketchum boy," she said. "What's that Pokémon you're carrying?"
"Do you mean Pikachu, Zygarde, Ibid, my phone or Marshadow?" Ash checked.
"Well, I do know what a Pikachu looks like," Juniper replied. "We may have different Pokémon here in Unova to Kanto, but I'm not that unclear on Kantonian Pokémon… I mean the one you're carrying in your arms."
"Oh, this is Zygarde," Ash introduced. "I can probably let them down now."
"That would be appreciated," Zygarde said.
Ash crouched, setting the Dragon-type's paws on the ground, and Professor Oak sort of waved his hands.
"You see what I mean?" he asked.
"I see he's able to carry a canine Pokémon," Juniper replied. "Beyond that, I'm not sure what you're expecting me to suddenly realize."
Oak rubbed his temples.
"Ash, do something ridiculous," he requested.
"Like what?" Ash replied.
"He has a point," Pikachu said. "It's not that Ash does this kind of thing deliberately, it just happens around him."
"Pikachu says that I don't do it deliberately, it just happens around me," Ash relayed.
"Processing request for something ridiculous," Zygarde said. "Ahem. It would be useful if we could have a shorter journey to Professor Juniper's Lab which was also a scenic route through lovely Dahara City."
A golden wormhole appeared next to them.
"Hoopa heard you," Hoopa said, folding Hoopa's arms. "Hoopa wants to know how you are planning to journey in the first place. Does Hoopa need to handle moving a car?"
Professor Juniper did have a car, and so Hoopa set up two hyperspace holes which took them past a dried up riverbed and to Professor Juniper's lab in about four hundred metres.
"Hoopa is disappointed that the river didn't stay after Hoopa stopped supplying water," Hoopa told them, looking down into the riverbed as they floated alongside the car.
Then they reached the lab itself, and Ash spent a while just looking around – finding out how it was different from the labs he'd seen so far on his journey.
"Do you give out starter Pokémon here, like Professor Oak does?" he asked, once he was back to where Professor Juniper was. "Or, I know that any Pokémon can be a starter Pokémon, but the ones that people always seem to mean when they talk about starter Pokémon."
Ash paused. "Unova has some of those, right?"
"That's right, we do," Professor Juniper agreed. "We have the grass-type Snivy, the water-type Oshawott and the fire-type Tepig."
She sent out an Oshawott to demonstrate, and the lutran Pokémon waved at Ash a bit shyly.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi!" Ash replied, crouching down. "I remember hearing about Oshawott before. I think Mew said that there used to be some in Sinnoh, back before it was called Sinnoh."
"...Mew?" Oshawott asked, baffled. "Isn't that a really rare Pokémon?"
"A lot of the Pokémon I meet are Mew," Ash said. "In fact, I've caught Mew more times than I've caught any other Pokémon, mostly because you only catch most Pokémon once but I've caught Mew several times. I do have a lot of Dragonite though so if you count them by Pokémon species then I've caught more Dragonite than Mew."
Oddly enough, this didn't seem to clarify the situation for Oshawott.
A few minutes later, while reading about the Unova Pokémon League on his phone – who had said that they didn't like the name Noah, but hadn't yet decided if they wanted a different one – Ash heard someone cough.
"Yes?" he asked, looking up.
"Are you waiting to get a starter Pokémon here as well?" a boy asked.
He looked about Ash's age, maybe a bit younger, and Ash shook his head.
"I've already got several Pokémon," he clarified. "This is my starter Pokémon, Pikachu! I'm here to see if the Unova League is a good one to challenge."
"Oh, really?" the boy said. "Where are you from?"
"Originally, Kanto," Ash replied.
"Kanto," the boy snorted. "That's the boonies."
"...what does that mean?" Ash asked.
"Boonies," the Arc Phone said. "Short for boondocks. A derogatory term for somewhere that is the countryside, or isolated."
"Wow," Ash blinked. "How big are the skyscrapers here in Unova?"
That didn't seem to be the reaction the boy was expecting.
"Huh?"
"Well, I was wondering about how you'd be able to tell where was boonies and where wasn't boonies," Ash said. "And it's not to do with having cities versus not having cities, because Kanto has Saffron City and that's really big, so I thought maybe it was about how tall buildings are… but wouldn't that mean that it's relative? Because obviously when the first skyscraper was built, not having any skyscrapers would be necessary to be in the boonies."
"What are you talking about?" the boy asked.
"But then I realized that because it's all subjective then that means you have to base it on everything, not just stuff on Earth," Ash went on. "And I'm pretty sure by now my nephmew has built lots of really big skyscrapers… hey, can you call them and see what they think?"
A phone icon appeared on the phone screen, and began ringing.
After a few seconds, Ash glanced up. "Sorry, uh, it looks like they might be busy? Or this lab might not have good signal, or they might be on the wrong side of the moon. Is it okay if we have a bit of a wait to get an answer?"
"I have no idea what you're even trying to say," the boy muttered to himself. "Look, if you're not in the queue to get a starter Pokémon then I'll just go and get one, and then we can have a battle."
"Sure, a battle sounds great!" Ash agreed.
The boy – whose name turned out to be Trip – only took a couple of minutes to choose a Snivy, then came right back out to Ash.
"Okay, now pick your Pokémon," Trip said. "You'll see."
"Who hasn't had a battle recently…" Ash mused, thinking to himself.
His phone went ping.
Me, the screen pointed out. You did register me.
"Oh, yeah, that's a good point," Ash agreed. "Then I'll send you out for your first battle!"
He put his phone down and stepped back, and Trip leaned in to get a closer look.
"That's a really pretentious case to put your Porygon into," he said.
"No, actually-" Ash began, but was interrupted by a notification sound.
"Hello," Mirage Mew's squeaky voice said. "It took a long time for me to reply because I was mostly focused on a critical issue that needed solving. Is there a problem?"
"Hi!" Ash replied, speaking clearly in case that helped. "I know this conversation's going to be awkward because you're so far away, but how big are the skyscrapers you've made so far and how many of them are there?"
"I thought there was supposed to be a battle?" Trip's Snivy asked.
A couple of seconds after Ash finished speaking, Mirage Mew replied again.
"In the weaker gravity, I have built large numbers of tall buildings," they said. "What makes something a skyscraper?"
"This is awkward timing," Ash's phone added. "I can probably multitask this by using phone mode for the call and battle form for the battle."
There was a flare of brilliant golden light, and when it faded a Shiny Arceus was hovering just above the lab floor.
"What do you think, Trip?" Ash asked, picking up the still-extant phone. "How tall does it have to be before it's a skyscraper? And don't worry if Mirage Mew goes silent for a couple of seconds after you say something before replying, that's not being rude, that's just lightspeed travel time."
"Holy Arceus that's an Arceus!" Trip's Snivy said, looking very much unsmug.
The Shiny incarnation of the Creator waved their hoof vaguely. "No, that's not right… sorry, I keep nearly dropping the call. I'll figure out how to do an attack without dropping the call, just give me a moment."
"Let's just say five hundred metres?" Ash guessed. "How does that work, Mew?"
"I've changed my mind," Snivy said, turning towards his new trainer as Mew began replying that by that definition there were seventy-three skyscrapers on the moon and only zero in Unova, and Ash mused whether that meant that Unova was also the boonies. "Can we please concede this battle before that Arceus works out how to do an attack?"
AN:
And welcome to Unova. Trip's got the full Ash Ketchum experience, which is efficient.