"I'M GOING NOW!" said John as he sat relaxing on the couch. "Why do I always have to take out the trash?" After placing his Nintendo DS on the nearby coffee table, he began putting on his shoes to head to the trash can a few meters away from the house, trying to hurry so he could continue the game he had started. "I only have a few floors left and I will have completed every single dungeon in the game," he thought to himself as he walked to the door. But as he reached the threshold, he heard a voice coming from the nearby living room, "and don't forget to get some milk, we're almost out." John tried to suppress the urge to curse, replying with a simple "okay" before rushing out of the house.
On the way to the supermarket, his mind began to wander, thinking about his current situation—25 years old, an ordinary job, living with his parents, every day the same, no prospects for the future. Overcome by a sudden sense of despair at these negative thoughts, John tried to clear his mind with something more exciting. "It would be fantastic if I could escape all this, if only life were as easy as video games," he thought as he neared the supermarket. But suddenly, a headache struck John, so severe it forced him to kneel on the ground to avoid losing his balance. A deafening ringing started in his ears, and a blinding light prevented him from even opening his eyes to see where he was.
"Hey, are you okay?" shouted a passerby who, noticing John's condition, ran towards him to help, but John couldn't produce a single sound, stricken by the excruciating pain in his head. "Call an ambulance!" shouted the person who had first approached John, addressing the small crowd that had gathered around him. Numerous terrifying possibilities manifested in John's mind as he was bent over in pain—brain tumor, aneurysm, heart attack—and other possibilities clouded his mind until only one thought remained as even that blinding light left his eyes, plunging him into total darkness: "I don't want to die" was his last thought before everything went black.
A light breeze brushed his skin, the sound of waves crashing, and a light very different from the blinding one before he lost consciousness began to filter through his eyelids. Slowly, John began to open his eyes, greeted by a clear sky and a smell of salt in the air that he hadn't noticed before due to his still aching head. After a few minutes and finally recovering, John struggled to stand up but immediately noticed something very strange. Where there had once been hands, there were now something resembling the paws of a dog. And the strangeness didn't end there. Once he stood up, he quickly noticed that his line of sight had drastically lowered. Panicked, John headed straight for the beach to try to see his reflection in the water, and what he saw was something very familiar to John: a Riolu, the very Pokémon he had chosen as his starter in the game he was playing before losing consciousness.
John's first thought was that he was in some kind of coma in an hospital after the severe headache he had and he was dreaming, which seemed quite likely given the thoughts he had before fainting. To confirm his suspicions, John headed to a nearby rock and punched it, expecting not to feel pain, but the previous panic returned as quickly as it had left when a sharp pain shot through his right arm.
John stayed there in disbelief for about an hour. "This can't be happening…" he said as he finally began to accept the incredible situation he was in. Once his heart had calmed down, he began to look around, realizing that this was indeed the beach where the protagonist and their partner first meet each other in the game. The Krabby, which he knew well, were there, blowing bubbles from their claws, and in the distance, a small cave entrance looked just like the dungeon where Koffing and Zubat had gone after stealing the relic fragment.
An incredible emotion welled up in John's heart, scared of the current situation but at the same time excited to find himself in such a place. "AHAHAHAHAH" a loud laugh escaped John's mouth, elated to have finally escaped the monotony of his daily life.
Once he had calmed down, John began to look for clues around the area that might help him understand how he had ended up in this situation, and after walking the beach a couple of times, he finally noticed a glimmer in the sand in front of him. As he approached, he saw it was a glass bottle sealed with a cork, containing a note. This reminded him of the bottles you could find on the beach in the game. After retrieving the note, the first thing that surprised John was how well-preserved the piece of paper was, as if it had just been put in the bottle, in stark contrast to the bottle itself, which looked like it had been abandoned there for a century.
Convinced that this was exactly what he was looking for, John opened the note, and its content was very simple, a single phrase that read: "keep everything in order." Confused by the message, John pondered for a few minutes before storing the note under a nearby rock, realizing he had no pockets to carry it with him. Convinced that the meaning of the message would become clear when the time was right. John began to think about his current situation and decide what to do next. The priority at that moment was to determine if the protagonists also existed in this world and when in the story he had arrived. Finally, with a goal in mind, John began to head towards that familiar crossroads.