The story of why the spacefaring Elgyem have increasingly landed and settled on this world, contrary to popular belief, has nothing to do with a spaceship crash, at least not if the term "crash" is understood to mean an accidental landing. Elgyem spacecraft are in fact designed for one-way trips, much like the majority of those on our own world; it is far easier to build a new machine for takeoff and landing from materials on-planet, while leaving the mothership in order, than to make one which is effectively reusable. And the Elgyem who have landed on this world, despite their efforts to disguise it, have come here with a purpose.
Elgyem come from a mighty, galactic civilization, with brainpower and technology that far surpasses our own, and for twenty million years had paid no mind to our isolated, backwards world. But their society was one riveted by philosophical debate, until a group of their top scientists (disguised as Pikachu-like creatures in some reported versions of the tale, which is kept secret under penalty of death but other Elgyem have leaked that this was simply what their ancestors looked like twenty million and fifty years ago) devised a grand computer to settle their debate with the ultimate answer of life, the universe, and everything.
The answer, as everyone knows, is 42. But efforts to find the actual ultimate question from that computer were stymied by its destruction, and a new one was built to find what "42" meant. Fifty years ago, the Elgyem learned that 42 was the level when they evolved – and indeed what levels, and for that matter pokemon battles, were. And anxious to experience this critically important transformation, yet raised in a world free from strife, they landed on this little planet where pokemon battles reign.
