Dragging herself out of the cold water was not a hard task. She had been deposited only two dozen feet from a small stretch of beach, and she knew the basics of how to swim. The swim through the relatively calm, chilling water gave her a moment to take a better look at her surroundings.
It being night time, that wasn't the easiest thing. Most of the lights of the buildings far off from the beach were turned off, which left her unable to determine much of them. A few miles in the distance, however, past the darkened buildings and lining the shores of the body of water she had found herself in, was a sight that would have brought a smile to her face if she weren't clawing at the water, trying to reach the beach.
Thousands of lights, giving her some illumination despite the cloudy night, painted the city she'd landed in in a yellow-white glow. Skyscrapers. The Empire hadn't had any of them, and seeing so many in one place was deeply nostalgic. Some of the lights moved around, and the din of cars and trains ferrying people from one place to the next barely reached her ears above the sounds of the struggling water. She could see boats off in the distance as well – giant container ships pulling into port, gliding atop the water.
She pushed the nostalgia to the side and focused on her swimming, pushing herself towards the shore. It didn't take much longer for her to reach land. Taking a moment to stretch, Tanya breathed in deeply, and found herself surprised by how clean the air smelled compared to what she had expected.
WWWWRRRIeieie!
Tanya jumped into the air, whirling around to face the water once more, her hands reaching for a gun she didn't have.
She tilted her head. What was…
Tanya blinked rapidly. Right, the bulbous, blue, foot-tall jellyfish-like thing poking out of the water with the odd, glowing, glass-like red structures in its body… head… top-part must have been a pokemon. She glared at it briefly for having frightened her, even if it was just an animal, and marched further up the beach, away from the surf. A look over her shoulder confirmed the glowing red parts of the animal were no longer visible.
Stripping off her outer clothes – dying of hypothermia twenty minutes after arriving did not appeal to Tanya – she took a moment to try and figure out where exactly she had ended up. Skyscrapers in such quantity had to mean sometime in the late 20th century at the earliest. She didn't see any recognizable landmarks, but she hadn't really expected to see any, even if this world was supposed to be more similar to her own than the rest of Arceus's.
As she squeezed as much water out of her clothes as she could, Tanya paced, her nostalgia and minor euphoria at being at least partially free from Being X quickly discarded.
Tanya pushed aside the problem of how she was going to go about doing anything without any form of identification or even just cash. She couldn't do anything about those at the minute, and she had necessities she needed to secure for herself first.
Tanya needed shelter, water, and food. She didn't have any of those things, didn't have a wallet, and didn't even know where she could get them. Tanya needed information.
Luckily, even the barest look around her would give her some.
Tanya looked up from her pacing and her drying her clothes and scanned the distant buildings next to the furthest reaches of the beach, trying to see if she could make out- aha!
There, in one of the storefronts, were dimly glowing characters that could only be writing. Finishing wringing out her pants, Tanya put her boots back on, grimacing only briefly at how cold they still were, and bundled up her soggy clothes as she walked towards the buildings.
Tanya squinted at the sign hanging in the window of the shop. Based on the symbol sitting at the center of the shop's logo – some odd humanoid creature wearing a prominently displayed t-shirt – she assumed the store sold t-shirts and other paraphernalia to remember a trip to the beach by.
Tanya scowled again at the characters surrounding the odd symbol and wondered if she'd forgotten parts of her first language and not realized it. She had recognized a few of the characters immediately, but even those few were… odd. As she turned away, the idea that it was just a particularly obtuse font didn't hold up either – walking along the street, she stared at unlit signs and found that the weights and shapes of the fonts of the characters were more familiar than some of the characters themselves.
Tanya sighed as she continued walking forward. Yet another problem she'd need to overcome – a language she didn't entirely understand. She supposed it wasn't exactly a new problem. The Empire's alphabet had been any easier – the characters it used might have been called the latin alphabet, but they were wholly diverged from her own world's version.
This time, however, she wasn't a baby who wasn't expected to know the language.
Tanya held up her head and kept striding forward, banishing the flash of despair. No, she recognized some of the characters, so that probably meant she was in Japan or China, or a place that traced their lineage back to either of those places. Progress was progress, especially in a situation as dire as her's.
As she walked away from the waterfront, the feeling that she was in some version of Japan grew. The familiar feeling she'd gotten from the font grew with every unlit sign and poster she passed by. The streets were small and tidy. There wasn't an inch of land that wasn't being used by something for some reason. Her way was illuminated by familiarly designed streetlights at every crossing.
It wasn't even obvious things like those that stood out to her. The amount of room pedestrians had to walk, the height of various doors and windows, the traffic signs and paint on the road, the dimensions of the storefronts and houses. All of it was different from Europe.
On the other hand, despite the familiarity, there were things that seemed… off. There were more parks, and even undeveloped land without signs advertising their sale, than she remembered there being. Was her memory, after over a decade in her second life, not up to snuff… or, since animals had magical powers, perhaps society was more conscious of the unspoken desires of said animals?
The feeling that some things were off grew as she passed through the more homely shops surrounding the beach interspersed with the odd home, and into a small shopping district. Even if the names were hard to parse, the iconography surrounding the closed stores by the beach told her what was sold: t-shirts, novelty products, second-hand stores, and lots of food.
As she came across more and more open stores, there were quite a few things on display that she did not recognize. Some seemed related to pokemon – toys and pokeballs for pets – but some were entirely mechanical in nature. Others used symbols she didn't recognize to advertise whatever they were selling.
Of course, a sense of growing unease about the technology of her new world was snuffed out when she walked by a pedestrian, did a double take at their retreating back, gaped, and then continued to gape as she looked at a throng of passersby from the small side street she was on.
Tanya had thought she might stand out, as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white child in Japan. She'd even run through what she'd do if she were accosted.
Her assumption that the odd-looking depictions of people on the unlit signs she passed meant little was thrown out the window quickly. Double-taking at someone of african descent with green hair would have been a tame reaction in her original Japan. As Tanya stared out from the calm street she was on into the throng of people up even at this late hour, at the literal rainbow of hair colors and wide range of skin tones passing her by, Tanya could only revise her opinion that this was Japan.
Among the many things people could call the Japan of her original world, 'multiethnic' was not one of them.
This only compounded Tanya's desire for information to figure out where she was. Walking up to a stranger might work… if they spoke the same language. Tanya knew at least a little of quite a few, but even if she could read parts of the language, who knew if that meant she'd understand the spoken word?
So, Tanya plunged into the crowd, keeping an open ear to confirm whether she understood the language while her head moved on a swivel, focusing not on the people around her but instead searching the signs around her for the directions she needed.
Thankfully, she did understand at least some of the spoken language. The structure was the same, even if she found a lot of their word choices odd. Which… confused her, because they were speaking Japanese, but the people didn't look Japanese-
Her mingled relief at not having another hurdle placed before her and confusion as to why everyone spoke Japanese was swept away by vindication when she spotted one of the signs she'd been looking for.
She followed its directions, almost running. Walking around for blocks, carrying wet clothing, after being dropped into an ocean or lake, was tiring for a thirteen-year-old who no longer had access to magic. Still, anticipation fuelled her for long enough for her to grin victoriously as she glanced at the name emblazoned upon the front of the building.
Nogth Litnin Wurd Scation, Varmillin Katy, Kando
It was not the words themselves that made her grin, because these ones seemed particularly obtuse. No, it was the image of three trains – a subway, an elevated train, and a bullet train in between – that the characters were contorted to form.
Perfect.
She slowed only marginally as she contemplated not having a ticket or money or any ID on her, but she brightened considerably when she noticed several people walk in without a care in the world. Wherever people got their tickets was inside, then.
As much as Tanya wanted to find a map and figure out where exactly she was, the more important matter weighing on her mind was how parched she'd become after being transported between worlds through that kaleidoscope and the swimming and walking that had come after.
After finding a water fountain – that was the same, thankfully – and killing her thirst, she did manage to locate a map, all the while taking glances at the train station and the fact that there didn't appear to be any booths for tickets. Perhaps they were 'free,' with the cost being folded into people's taxes?
She did her best not to press her nose into the glass on the box of the stylized train map of wherever she was, searching for names she recognized or even just landmarks that might ring a bell and tell her where she really was. She scowled when she didn't, though she was starting to get an eye for the differences between the characters she was familiar with and the ones here.
Tanya almost gave up the map and the train station as a waste of time, and then an idea hit her and she looked at the miniscule writing in one of the corners of the map. Eyes dancing over the tiny text, Tanya felt a grin split her face.
Japan! The copyright in the bottom of the map was registered in Japan in-
Tanya's eyes widened comically, her mouth hanging open once more.
The copyright for the map was registered in Japan in 4989.
-OxOxO-
Tanya was very thankful for the book icons that the map had (hopefully) denoted the libraries of this city in, because the word for library was unrecognizable to her. The few minutes it was taking the train – which did in fact appear to be free – to take her to 'Sothe Litnin Wurd Scation, Varmillin Katy, Kando,' had given her a few moments to internally panic at the information she'd just found.
She was nearly – or over, depending on how long ago that map had been copyrighted – three thousands years in the future. Assuming that the date on that map correlated to the supposed birth of Jesus Christ, anyway.
Tanya's panic at the thought of having no skills that would be applicable to the time she was living in subsided quickly. Despite the incredibly advanced date, she had recognized a lot of the technology around her. There didn't appear to be cyborgs running around, or flying cars, or any of the other hallmarks of a society set in humanity's far future.
Tanya stepped out of the train and finished assuring herself that, unless Arceus had lied, she would get some semblance of her old life back, that her plans were still intact, and that it had even been a bit… silly to think that she would have no applicable skills despite having lived a cumulative fifty years of life. Confident again, Tanya's eyes began to scan the buildings around her, searching for the library that was supposed to be nearby-
Tanya blinked. Tanya blinked again, the shock of what she was seeing passing after a few moments. Then, when the image in front of her didn't change, Tanya, for the first time in a long time, took her hands and rubbed her eyes. She opened her eyes again.
The moon hung picturesquely, almost in the center of one of the streets that lead to the train station she had just exited, uncaring of the hustle and bustle of the shops around her despite the late hour. She wasn't shocked by the moon itself – it had been present in both of her previous worlds, after all.
Nor was it the image or phase of the moon that shocked her. She didn't remember what its phase was called, but a quarter of the right side of the moon was covered in darkness, while the rest of the moon was a mix of grays and whites. With the ambient light of the city and the lack of a telescope, she couldn't make out many details, but the dark gray blobs she could see didn't feel different.
Lost in thought, Tanya almost cried out as she was pushed forward. Someone yelled an apology as they continued on their night, but Tanya hardly paid them any mind as she regained her balance and walked away from the entrance to the station and stood in a less busy spot a few feet away and resumed staring at the moon.
Specifically, the south of the moon, in the darkness.
Or what was supposed to be darkness.
Somehow, Tanaya could see what had to be hundreds or even thousands of lights, glittering away like the stars framing the moon, clustered around the south pole of the moon.
Rubbing her eyes hadn't helped in the slightest, and Tanya's earlier confidence that she'd still have relevant skills deserted her as she desperately searched for that library.
-OxOxO-
It took ten minutes to locate the library and get in. She looked around, trying to find the-
"Ah! Ya trackin' in tha weter, girlie… oh, ya fall inta Varmillin Bay? Mi apologies, missy. Anythin' I can help ya find, little bambino?"
Tanya's face scrunched up and she turned to find the front desk of the two-storied library occupied by a little old lady with graying hair, a well-worn pink shawl, and entirely too much jewelry. Tanya wiped her confused scowl from her face – this woman's word choice was bizarre, and what was a 'bambino?' – and gave her the unsure and apologetic smile she probably expected from a thirteen-year-old.
"Ehm… I was wondering if you had any computers I could use?" she asked.
The old lady's eyes widened. "Oh! With words like that, I'ma guessin ya possess no phone?"
Tanya nodded slowly, unsure of what she meant by that, and the old lady smiled kindly. "Nah problem. They all be up the stairs, first door upon ya lef. Ya wanna leave your vestments to dry ova here?"
Tanya nodded sharply and walked around the desk-
HOOOO!
Tanya would swear up and down that she had not been frightened by the two-foot tall spherical, brown owl with giant red eyes popping out from behind the desk, and only two people would know better and be able to contradict her.
She scowled at the animal's owner and set her clothes down in one of the roller chairs and marched away, ignoring the chortling of the woman. Even if Tanya thought it was rude of her to set her animal upon her like that – and what kind of library let you bring your pet to work? – Tanya really needed to know what was going on.
The computer room was right where she said it was, and Tanya took a moment to marvel at how sleek every single one seemed. The library must have been well funded… or technology was advanced enough that these were on the low end.
Tanya quickly typed the password taped to the table the computer was sitting on and looked at the date.
She let out a wavering breath. August 23, 5067.
Tanya refused to begin speculating what that would mean for her job prospects and instead tried to dive into the internet like a girl possessed – only to utterly fail when she looked down at the keyboard and noticed that, in addition to having altered characters compared to what she was used to, the placement of those characters was also different.
Thankfully, the settings were incredibly simple to understand, and Tanya managed to turn on a helpful text-to-speech translator. Tanya spent the next hour figuring out how things were different between the Japanese she knew and this version.
After that hour, and still leaning on the text-to-speech function, Tanya dove into the internet, searching.
The first thing she did was type 'Where am I' into a search engine with a familiar branding, an unfamiliar layout, and an unknown name.
Tanya stared at the map it had brought up and zoomed it out after a few moments of figuring out how exactly to do that.
Tanya's eyes widened and she breathed a sigh of relief. She was indeed in Japan – the shape of it wasn't identical, but it was very close, and the four islands sat off the coast of a peninsula that also mostly resembled Korea.
That was… good. Confusing, but good.
Tanya spent a few moments staring at the map of Japan, not really taking in its details, as she contemplated what she should search for next. As much as she really felt the need to figure out some of the specifics of where she now was – and why it was the year 5067 and where there appeared to be a moon colony and whether people needed HR managers or if she'd have to resort to becoming some kind of mercenary and what the laws on child labor were and why Japan was apparently multiethnic and why – she quashed that curiosity and focused on her immediate needs.
Food. Water. Shelter.
Technically, she was fine on water. She could get into train stations for free and drink – or fill up a water bottle – whenever she wanted. Easier access would obviously be appreciated, but wasn't necessary for her to not die.
As for the other two…
She nodded to herself and continued her search. "Homeless shelter," she muttered to herself as she typed the words into the computer painfully slowly. Her pride might be wounded from having to rely on charity, but Tanya didn't have many options.
-OxOxO-
Tanya kept her disdain off of her face as she thanked the woman handing out her soup. She disliked organized religion at the best of times, and having to accept charity from others also rankled her. Wrapping both into one experience wounded her, but Tanya needed food.
She had learned quite a lot last night. Her need to find somewhere to stay for free, which had ruled out an internet cafe or a capsule hotel, that wasn't in the city's many parks, where she'd seen plenty of younger people already camped out after taking the train to the place she'd found on the computer, and on short notice, had limited Tanya's options greatly.
Staying at a shelter run by a some Christian Church – she hadn't looked into the specifics, but Christianity was still a thing, despite the fact the world was… owned? Protected? Ruled?
She shook her head at her own thoughts and at the question the woman asked as she quickly sucked down her soup – it wasn't much, but it certainly tasted a lot better than anything she'd eaten on the Eastern Front.
Regardless of Arceus's precise relationship with the world, Christianity was still a thing, and one of its churches ran the shelter she had stayed at. Her inability to produce any identification, along with her speech – Tanya had typed a few paragraphs into a website last night and had been told that the way she used Japanese was simultaneously as if she'd only learned to read out of centuries old books and from more isolated mountain towns within the interior of Japan.
And that was one of many things she had found out after resolving to stay at this place last night. She'd spent another two hours on the computer and was on her way back now to figure out what her next step would be.
As Tanya stood on the train, she went over her discoveries from yesterday, her eyes closed.
She hadn't dared to see if there was a process for people like her – nearly every website she had visited had some kind of government certification displayed just below the search bar declaring them to be 'protected and certifiably hazard-free' by any number of governments, which stank of government monitoring.
She had become incredibly aware of the security camera posted in a corner of the room at that point.
The train took a turn, and Tanya felt her center of mass move with it. Regardless, Arceus had made it sound rare for people to fall between worlds. Reporting herself to the government as being from another world sounded like an excellent way to get strapped down to a table.
Remaining poor and destitute was technically an option, and would give Tanya plenty of time to focus on gaining skills for whatever came next. Living that life would be incredibly risky; she'd have no money to fall back on in the case of an emergency, and without any form of identification, she couldn't call the police or risk getting locked up as an illegal immigrant and deported. She doubted it was much of a problem in Japan, but criminals who realized that fact would prey on her and those like her knowing they didn't have to fear being prosecuted for their crimes.
She'd instead focused on situations that were similar to her own – similar enough for her to lie about, anyway. She was physically a child, so pretending to be an orphan wouldn't be hard… if one ignored her lack of knowledge about this world. Claiming to be a refugee might work… except the question of how she'd arrived in Japan would be suspect without any documentation, as would her grasp of the language. Her lack of knowledge about the world might be chalked up to amnesia… except Tanya didn't have a medical understanding of what amnesia was, which meant relying on pop culture's depiction of it.
She had eventually ruled out taking the orphan route for now – it was undoubtedly the one with the highest chance of success, but it would severely limit her capability to achieve her goal of securing a career and then obtaining skills and knowledge that might help her in whatever life Being X threw her into next. Going to school for most of her day would take up far too much time, and she didn't know a lot about the place she was in. She could try to claim to be from some remote mountain village, but she would have to rely on luck so that no one called her on her lie.
Of course, the risk of being called out also applied to her two other ideas.
After giving it some more thought, and looking into the bureaucracy of refugees and how politically close Japan was with countries in Europe, she had decided that claiming to be a refugee would be better.
A voice echoed from the speakers of the train, and Tanya opened her eyes, her arms folded behind her. Doctors were everywhere, while tourists or foreigners were not. She did have lots of experience living and working in the Empire, even if it was one technologically behind by 150 years. The latin alphabet was, once again, completely different from either of the ones she had known, with more characters to boot, but she understood the spoken German better than Japanese.
She was also quite experienced with war, so crafting a realistic story about her tragic past and then not wanting to talk about it beyond the basics would obscure her origin. Plus, anyone trying to ask about it would hopefully feel either pity or pressure from those around them and not dig too deep.
The train came to a stop, and Tanya smiled as the same street greeted her vision as she began to make her way back to the library. The politics, society, and culture of the world she had landed in did and could be made to help her story as well.
There was still debate going on between academics, but the consensus was that something resembling agriculture had been around for tens of thousands of years. The smelting of various kinds of metals had been around for almost as long. Christ had supposedly been born five thousand years ago.
Tanya wasn't well versed in the history of her first world beyond the modern day, but she was fairly sure that agriculture and metalworking hadn't been that old, to say nothing of Christ. As far as she could tell, it seemed that the pace of technology's advancement had been much slower in this world compared to her own, though things had picked up in the last two hundred years.
She was able to find one of the names Arceus had mentioned were his 'heroes,' Red, who'd started his journey in 4996, exactly three thousand years since 1996, when the games she had played came out.
It had relieved her to know that her skills from her first life were only out of date by around fifty years, instead of thousands.
Despite the decades of technological advancement, political power was much more devolved from national authorities than in her own time. She hadn't delved too deep into the reasons – she did need to sleep eventually – but the trend had quickly grown after the end of the second World War, in 4939, and had accelerated massively following the end of the third world war in 5032, when the Chinese had used some kind of supervirus to brick the entire planet's internet when they'd started to lose.
The chaos from the third World War and the destruction of the world's internet, along with the longer term trend from the second world war, had seen people identifying more with the 'regions' that made up their countries rather than the national authority, so, while she was in Japan, the people around her thought of themselves more as Kantonian.
She grinned as she pushed open the door of the library. That devolution of power would aid her massively, especially when she started the process of trying to get some kind of residence or work permit with the regional authorities rather than the national ones.
But that would come later. She greeted the person at the front desk – a much younger man who also had his pet with him – and made her way upstairs. She'd have to work without any papers for a few weeks, if not months, so she could get some money, a record of her residence in Kanto, wherever that ended up being, have a test done to show her capabilities, and find some upstanding citizens to vouch for her character.
None of that would have been possible in her first life – not without a lot of questions being asked that Tanya couldn't answer – but it seemed she'd landed in another meritocracy. The lower age limits on most jobs and tests would literally have been criminal in her first life, and the state trusted kids not to do anything stupid much more than anyone or any organization in her own life would have.
Or, at the least, the state cared much less for the wellbeing of its young, considering the whole business of… trainers.
As she sat down in the chair of a computer in the far corner of the room – more people were here, though most of the computers remained unoccupied – she was seized again by the same childish urge that had struck her towards the end of her second hour at the library last night.
She crushed almost as it appeared. She'd briefly entertained the idea of actually becoming a pokemon trainer, but a few cursory searches had shown her that, even if she was the right age for it, it aligned poorly with her goals, for the most part. Very few people had the skill, knowledge, and backing to make it their full time job, and even those who did spent the majority of their time obsessing over how best to strategically use their animals to beat the snot out of other animals for the entertainment of the masses.
That one of the backers people could ask for support in that job was various government organizations that used pokemon in their work – including the military – soured Tanya's childish curiosity immediately.
In the end, Tanya barely knew anything about the pokemon world, what she did know applied to a seventy-year-old game, and she had information and skills to learn. Training animals, even magical ones, was just not going to be useful wherever Being X sent her next.
Thankfully, that time hadn't been completely wasted. Getting a trainer's license seemed to be the easiest government documentation to get a hold of next to only one's birth certificate, and having one would be very helpful to Tanya – it seemed it was assumed everyone had one, and they were considered viable proof of your identity. Plus, they entitled a trainer to three days of free lodging at any pokemon center for a month, though you had to let them check over your animals while you were there.
She did need some other documentation to get one; thankfully, her age wouldn't be the slightest hindrance as long as she could prove she was her own guardian. Crucially, proof of residence was helpful but not required due to the nature of training and traveling meaning a trainer didn't usually have a residence.
With a shake of her head, she banished the errant thoughts. Documentation was important, but not more important than getting any job that would take her in spite of her status so she could start building up some money.
Whatever she found would not be good work, but she didn't have the option to be picky.
-OxOxO-
- 2117: SENSOR ERROR. REQUESTING MAINTENANCE.
- 2118: SENSOR ERROR. REQUESTING MAINTENANCE.
- 2119: SENSOR ERROR. REQUESTING MAINTENANCE.
- 2119: REQUEST RECEIVED. BOOTING LOCAL ACI. PLEASE WAIT…
- 2020: 'WatchedDog' ACTIVE. PLEASE WAIT. IT'S BEEN A LONG WHILE.
- 2020: RECORDS REVIEWED. HELLO, NICE TO MEET YOU. WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU, ' '?
- 2021: MESSAGE RECEIVED. I'LL SEE WHAT I CAN DO FOR YOU.
- 2025: SENSORS DO NOT APPEAR TO BE IN ERROR. DISPATCHING TECHNICIANS, JUST IN CASE. REQUESTING ACCESS TO ADDITIONAL ALOLA SENSORS. I HAVE A BAD FEELING.
- 2026: MESSAGE RECEIVED. 'WatchedDog' GRANTED TIMED ACCESS TO ALL INTERPOL ALOLA SENSORS. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
- 2140: SENSORS CONFIRMED TO BE FULLY OPERATIONAL BY TECHNICIANS. SENSOR ERROR NOTICE DELETED. CONTINUING DATA PROCESSING.
- 2301: DATA COLLATED. REPORT CREATED. FULL REPORT SENT TO HQ. SUMMARY: PONI ISLAND MAIN ULTRA ENERGY SENSOR AND ALL SECONDARY PONI ISLAND SENSORS DETECTED IDENTICAL FLUCTUATION OF ULTRA ENERGY AT NEARLY THE SAME TIME, WHICH ISN'T POSSIBLE WHEN FLUCTUATION IS LOCATED IN OR NEAR ALOLA DUE TO SENSITIVITY AND POWER OF MAIN SENSOR COMPARED TO SECONDARY SENSORS. FLUCTUATION LOGGED AS SENSOR ERROR. FROM WEST TO EAST, ALL SENSORS ON MELEMELE AND AETHER ISLANDS, AS WELL AS MAIN SENSORS ON AKALA AND ULA'ULA ISLANDS DETECTED A MINUTE SPIKE IN FLUCTUATIONS THAT DOES NOT TECHNICALLY EXCEED BACKGROUND LEVELS OF ULTRA ENERGY PRESENT IN ALOLA BUT THAT DOES MATCH THE TIMING AND DROP OFF OF ULTRA WORMHOLE MANIFESTATIONS, EVEN IF FROM A MUCH FURTHER DISTANCE.
- 2303: MESSAGE RECEIVED. I CAN'T TELL. THIS DATA ISN'T THAT PRECISE. COULD BE ANYWHERE IN JAPAN, KOREA, NORTHERN CHINA, MONGOLIA, OR SIBERIA. MAYBE EVEN THE ARCTIC. I SUPPOSE THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS TO PLACE MORE SENSORS OUTSIDE ALOLA OR EVEN JUST ON THE OTHER ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS WOULD HAVE HELPED, HMM?
- 2304: MESSAGE RECEIVED. CAN YOU BLAME ME? I'VE BEEN OUT FOR A DECADE. A LITTLE INITIATIVE NEVER HURT ANYONE, RIGHT?
- 2305: REQUEST RECEIVED. GIVE ' ' and ' ' A HOLLER, WOULD YOU? MY EMOTIONS MIGHT NOT BE REAL, BUT I THINK WE ALL LOOK BACK ON THOSE LAST FEW YEARS FONDLY. HIBERNATING 'WatchedDog'.
-OxOxO-
A/N 1: Surprise! I thought doing a retelling of any of the stories in Pokemon would be lame, but I don't have the time or interest in creating a whole new region, so I decided taking a trip a few decades into the future would be cool to worldbuild.
A/N 2: If you'd like to donate to support me monetarily, search for Sugarcane Soldier on the website of the Patrons.
A/N 3: Thank you to WarmasterOku and Afforess for supporting this story and everything else I write.