Heights and worlds and opposable thumbs.

For a long time, Noibat didn't move.

Then he was up again, stumbling over his own limbs, trembling with frenzied energy. TUTUMTUTUMTUTUM. He pressed his forehead against the ground in spite of the pain, just to feel the cool, solid rock on the bridge of his snout. He pressed and pressed until the worst of it had passed.

Is…

Is it over?

Noibat stood up—properly, this time, on all fours.

There was an empty plain, the sighing wind, a cloudless sky, and the noonday sun. Only one place in the whole world could be so perfectly blank.

He was back on the caprock of the yellow plateau.

Oh my god.

Is this what happens when I die?

He didn't remember dying. There had been a battle, a flight… hunting, survival… a journey across the desert, through the caverns, off a cliff.

Before, he was a human. Now, he was a Noibat. All of it had really happened.

But… there was something else—something I did, after Mandibuzz attacked me—no, something I saw…

What was it? He couldn't think straight.

…Did I fly all the way back home?

Noibat tried to collect himself. TUTUMTUTUM. That was his heartbeat, all right. Some alien equivalent of adrenaline was coursing through his veins. How long had he been out? The sun said that it was noon, and yet… didn't it look wrong? There were flickering stars in the sky and the clear blue was rippling slightly. Everything looked a bit dimmer than usual.

Right, I remember! The bottle exploded in my face!

Noibat tried to rub the dazzle out of his eyes, then did another double take. There was something caught on his claws. What he held was not his net, not even a scrap of it, but instead a ragged square of cloth. He must have picked it up by accident in his mad rush to escape. Or had he snagged it from the walls of the Vullaby nest before he smashed the bottle? It was all a blur. He had jumped into the canyon, and then… nothing. The stretch of time between then and now was totally empty.

Both the bottle and the net were gone.

It was all too much to take in, so Noibat just stared blankly at the cloth. More human garbage. It clearly used to be something more than a rag, maybe part of a shirt? Noibat picked at the frayed edge of the cloth with his talons.

How'd you end up in Mandibuzz's nest? Maybe somebody had an even worse day than I did.

The cloth might have been white once, but now it was yellow…

…and purple?

Suddenly, the true weight of Noibat's exhaustion caught up to him. His wings were stiff and achy, he was cut and scraped all over, but nothing came close to the raw pain that arced from the crown of his skull to the tip of his left ear.

Noibat touched his forehead. The cloth came away with fresh purple fluid. There was purple on the ground, too.

Oh.

Before, there was fear.

Overwhelming fear.

Tata-boom, ta ta ta-boom.

Heavy bass pounded through the walls. Fresh blood drained down his throat as he looked up at a city sky almost devoid of stars. He let go of his aching nose and checked the tissue in the porch light—it was soaked red, so he grabbed another. He'd taken the whole box with him.

The music peaked as the front door swung open.

"Jesus, [ ], do you need me to call the hospital?"

A familiar silhouette was propping open the screen door.

"I got bumped, it doesn't matter."

"Yeah. If you say so…"

The door swung shut. He couldn't see much from this angle, just yellow light reflecting off of medium-length brown hair and what must have been a big white dog on a jersey. Malamute was normally a pretty tall guy, but he was leaning against the door now, practically doubled over with tension. That silhouette was like an open book: distress radiated off his knotted shoulders, shame projected out of his back, and anger poured forth from his downturned face.

"But wipe that fuckin' blood off. Please. You know I can't deal with that kind of thing."

"Sorry."

"Jesus, you look like you've been in the ring."

Five more tissues were ripped from the box, covering his face in a papery mask. He turned away from the porch toward the student houses and apartments, the patched-up sidewalks and chained-up bicycles.

"Well?"

"Well, what? I said I'm fine."

"Don't play dumb. I saw what happened."

He gripped his nose tighter.

"Picking fights. Acting macho."

"I don't know what you think happened, but I was just doing what anyone else would. I didn't start anything."

"I saw what I saw."

"Yeah, but if you heard what I heard, you wouldn't be saying that."

Both young men fell silent. Tata-tata-tata-boom. Ta boom-boom.

"I thought I knew you better than this. I thought we promised we'd tell each other everything." Malamute's voice dripped with hurt and accusation.

He looked down from the black sky, back to Malamute, forgetting all about his bloody nose. Malamute's eyes were closed. They probably had been the whole time. He could sympathize with irrational fear. Fear of blood. Fear of heights. But there was something else at play here. It was mean and childish, that other, deeper, see-no-evil attitude, which transformed and perverted everything it didn't understand.

Still, when he saw the pain on Malamute's face in that feeble electric light, he wanted to smooth things over, even if he had to be the bad guy.

"Wait. [ ]. This doesn't have to be a big thing! I never have to come back here again—tell them we broke up, I don't care! Things can go back to the way they were. Losing you over a… misunderstanding… That's the last thing I'd want."

Taaa-boom. Ta ta boom.

"You know what, [ ]? I will tell them we broke up. 'Cause we're fucking done."

'We're done?' "Crrrk?"

Noibat was back on the caprock, blood seeping from his ear. He was lost, injured—and inevitably, afraid.

No amount of trickery, or bargaining, or positive thinking could wash that kind of fear away, nothing but time. After that memory, though, the fear was infused with a new, bitter intensity.

Noibat was absolutely furious at the world.

'Fuck all of this! Everything I do is pointless! What am I doing, living like a caveman, like a wild animal, feeding the birds so I don't feel lonely?'

"Crrrrk Ceeek Rurrck!" Vmmmm. "Eeeeekeek?"

On an ordinary week, you could probably fit everything Noibat said out loud on a postage stamp. But he was ranting now, and the way his words turned into senseless chittering was only making him madder and madder.

'I don't belong here! So I make it out of the desert. And then what? And then what? Am I going to settle down in a nicer cave? Get caught in a Pokéball? Live as a freak of nature? Never lead a human life again?! The people I remember, they don't fit here, they don't belong anywhere in this world! Pokémon aren't supposed to be real!'

He hated his name all over again. After months of living in the wilderness, he was back on the caprock, convinced he was trapped in a nightmare.

Another hard-won lesson about himself: he was not the kind of person who found it easy to cry. Up there on the caprock, Noibat had a long overdue crying jag. At least his tears seemed normal. It might have sent him over the edge if they were purple, too.

"Charmander!"

"What is it, uh, Mentor Diggersby?"

"Come on, Charmander, you don't need to use titles with me."

"But you call me 'rookie' literally all the time."

"Fair point, fair point. Anyways, tough luck with that whole Bouffalant thing, eh? Vivillon made it sound like we lost our entire supply of grass and everyone's going to run out of scarves!"

"Ah. Yeah. She—I mean, we don't want to disappoint the guild."

"Well, pick yourself up, rookie, 'cause here—is the mission you've been waiting for:

"One Swadloon, some sort of exotic merchant who lives out in Raging Coast, needs an escort to the city. You'll be headed east through the Great Desert, across the mountains, and through Desolate Tablelands. Think you're up for that?"

"Are you kidding?! When do I start?"