Chapter Text
Prologue: I am Stuck??!!
“We will be reaching Lumiose City Station in 5 minutes. Passengers, please prepare your luggage for the stoppage!”
A crazy mechanical sounding announcement woke me up.
Yes, I took a nap after barely getting any sleep over the last two days!
There’s a short tale behind this situation or a long one which can be told over time and space.
Technically I am not even from here.
Well, my name is Arka, a strange name in a way for these lands.
That should make me a Faller unofficially or someone who landed up in here due to some scientific anomaly based incident back in my home dimension.
But my entry to these lands was not peaceful at all.
It somehow started with my mind, soul and memories getting implanted or transposed in the place of a dead Pokemon kid with too many physical similarities to not make a notice.
Arceus always has to do something with these kinds of incidents with the metaphysical laws of different dimensions being strange anyways as well as other pokemons involved here possibly.
Whoever that idiot was, kind of faced a tragedy in relation to how he died and why he was here?
We will get to the simpler explanation first for this account.
He got stomped over by a bunch of rampaging dragon pokemons from different regions; all of whom were fighting over winning the favour of a shiny Alpha Female Garchomp.
No idea why they all strangely decided to do so within the deep forests beyond the boundaries of Nacrene City in the Unova region (maybe due to migration patterns).
My revival (in a way) came with a funny escape sequence thereafter despite no one apparently chasing me since those dragons were busy fighting amongst themselves.
It kind of showcased how dangerous the wild areas of the pokemon world can be to that deceased kid, whose soul has departed due to that danger.
He definitely had been foolish enough to come between a battle royale like battle between aggressive dragon type pokemons. Note that everything here happened when that kid was of 10 years old, which was way below the permissible age for being a trainer in Unova of around 14-15 years of age.
Now, moving onto why I didn’t get my sleep.
It came down to two words: Treasure Hunt.
That’s right as given that currently, I have been enrolled in Uva-Naranja School (both schools are combined here) in Paldea for over 3 years. But I am not a fan of the inhabitants of the great outdoors, which made me creative enough to find ways to avoid that exercise or at least not go outside the school boundaries for those earlier years of the Treasure Hunt assignment.
Headmaster Clavell unfortunately found an ingenious way to stop that since he felt that my experience of going through three Pokemon regional league circuits with tournament qualifications (earning eight badges for each region) at Unova, Hoenn and Johto, make it more prudent to do something more than staying cooped up in my room at the dorms.
In relation to the pokemon Journey fact, I did start my trainer journey a bit earlier at the age of 13 years.
The matter of the Treasure Hunt Assignment ended up with the headmaster ending up calling up freaking Diantha, the Kalos Champion.
I thought about how that even happened (or what kind of favours he owed to the champion whose battling status was on a decline after her disastrous showing at the Masters 8 Tournament against Leon) but it made sense as the regions of Paldea and Kalos literally share a border.
The actress+regional champion looked shocked at my presence and reacted as if she saw a terrifying ghost from her past.
Both I and the headmaster found her casual incognito attire even stranger as she wore a particular T-shirt with the logo of ‘Death to the Grookey Line’ in traditional Kalosian language along with trousers so old fashioned that it seemed as if it was transported literally from Hisui itself..
She uncomfortably looked at me with a strange sense of familiarity while they talked a bit about my circumstances at the academy and thus decided that my assignment would involve travelling to Lumiose City and noting down how things have been like in the city after the Kalos Crisis that took place 5 years ago.
There's a long story about why that work hadn't been done before.
Her explanation started further with why this treasure hunt assignment is important.
This comes on the premise of the fact that the Kalos League officially is running on stability of sheer fumes.
I recalled that after the Master’s 8 World Tournament, every league employee was fired and was investigated through trusted internal and external agencies to find whether any of them had any associations with the defunct Team Flare (like all the social or wealthy elites of the country before the crisis).
Only the Kalosian Elite 4 and herself as the champion stayed on but with that incident in mind and Kalos’s poor performance in the Masters 8, they were utterly demoralised.
Malva (with her ex Team Flare background) had volunteered for house arrest in Kanto before more serious charges can be handed to her, Siebold left his role to focus on his cooking career while Diantha herself would leave after the renewed Kalos league will be established (but she is unofficial champion in a way).
Most of the League employees and many central government politicians unfortunately had some level of association with Team Flare, the ones who were directly responsible for the Kalos Crisis with firing of the ultimate weapon and other ecological disasters within that region that followed thereafter.
Like the main Team Flare members, they were arrested with isolated life sentences.
That's the most merciful of the punishments since for serious cases, those could end up with the inclusion of torture, starvation, execution (for the most serious cases) and much more.
With all kinds of pokemon present in hands of the Kalosian League and the abilities they possess, none of those could not have been pleasant.
Any attempts to deal with these traitors didn't take place right after the Kalos crisis, since the regional rebuilding and economic stabilisation was the focus with the assistance of Paldean Pokemon League and others (barring Galarian groups for historical reasons).
Also many ‘non Team Flare’ aligned companies or groups like Quasartico Inc., etc took over a lot of those processes with the company taking over Lumiose City Redevelopment Project.
But all these breakdown of the general Kalosian League functions and its current downsizing meant that no one knows officially what’s going in Kalos at both regional & local level at least and the ones who survived the Kalos crisis, are focused on regional recovery which was a lot of work with how the Ultimate Weapon ripped the region like a metaphorical knife.
This meant all of the different subregions of Kalos dealt with all the troubles of the region on their own with no League support and no Centralised supply chains or economic systems to assist them in their functioning and survival.
Diantha suspects there is a lot of political secrecy and tomfoolery going around, which is enabling suppression of info about how Kalos is recovering or what was even going on in Lumiose.
Thus, I need to note down and inform what officially is going on in the city that the Kalos League will use that data to develop a renewed version of themselves without the corruption of a deep seated genocidal organisation like Team Flare or ancient nobility which had been a greedy stain in much of the history of Kalos.
This work turned out to be totally necessary, as according to the Diantha and the league, the companies or groups responsible for redevelopment in Lumiose City and many other major cities there, have not given any proper official update for the last 5 years.
The shifting of the city's gym had not been a pleasant situation as it has been shifted to an empty field beside a national power grid substation system due to the Prism tower itself going through renovation.
What a terrible demotion to Clemont - who should deserve better due to being the face of modern communication in the Pokemon world!
He did develop the rotom phones as well as updating the poryphones to current technological level - both of which everyone uses now along with developing the modern mobile internet infrastructure sometime after the Kalos Crisis.
It's possible due to these reasons, he is focusing a lot more on his research rather than pokemon battles as per the official rumours.
Moving to my case; given the pressure from two very official and well-connected figures in the pokemon world, how can I even refuse that task for my treasure hunt assignment?
Right now, I feel mentally tired already and hope that it would be a nice place to go as a tourist. Nothing bad will happen at all, right?
I have kept two long-time pokemon with me for safety reasons as well. Anything more would have been more expensive under my student budget as the rest of my other pokemons are with my parents or Professor Juniper.
It helped with mobility as I only carried around a small backpack with some clothes, random items and pokemon essentials. For the stay here, maybe some cheap hostel should do since I would be here for a week or so, right?
It seems like my internal questions are sounding more and more doubtful here.
Let’s nap for a few more minutes rather than even getting into the general habit of the modern youth here, which was to watch more short form videos on an app which has evolved from the video casting functions of the Holo-Caster (Clemont acquired the entire product line itself and changed it to function with the modern internet) though not in a good way (showcasing the addictive features similar to the social media apps of Earth).
Someone woke me up with some spilled water.
In a normal world, this would be a prankster’s doing. But here, if you have a water pokemon, the responsible party would be easier to gauge.
It turned out to be my Swampert, who I named Hyde and was also my starter pokemon (in the form of a Mudkip) when I began my Pokemon journey though back in Unova, though not the first pokemon I owned.
I ended up with him due to the fact that my dad is from Hoenn or more precisely Sootopolis City.
He had acquired him for me due to the fact of not liking the Unova starters at all. Hyde is what I would consider as more pragmatic & intelligent than most kids (also possibly most adults too) and preferred to relax and read books on geopolitics or global economics while not fighting(he can be battle hungry under the right circumstances).
My first pokemon as I mentioned above was met shortly after I ended up in this world in the place of the deceased boy.
He was known to be a notorious Karrablast (most likely abandoned by a Team Plasma Grunt) patrolling that part of the forest alone.
But back then, he found something unique about me (most likely the soul being that from another world) and joined me without any issues as I was making the run back home.
Now he's an Escavalier named Pierce and his role is making sure that I don’t do anything foolish on my mum’s order. But usually he’s busy resting in the pokeball unlike Hyde.
Hyde looked eager to go to this new region and thus he decided to wake me up. The train was mostly packed but got cleared out as everyone stepped out soon after reaching the stoppage.
He’s using a teary look to get me going. Clever but you are not a kid anymore and almost an adult.
Ages of pokemon can get murky but through Professor Birch, my dad told me that the Mudkip who was brought for me, was also of the same age similar to me.
This is because he refused to work with any of the local trainers in Hoenn looking to start their pokemon journey with regional starters for years, gaining a stubborn reputation by Birch's lab assistants.
This kind of makes me wonder whether both of my oldest pokemons chose me since I am a Faller (not confirmed) and knew a lot more than the average trainer through my foreknowledge regarding pokemons in general.
I am already 20 years old and will be turning 21 next month, which looks to be October(the calendar here is funnily the same as our world’s calendar) so my Swampert is an adult like me, looking to explore the world.
It can be confirmed that he inherited that knowledge gathering habit from me but just reading large books doesn’t cut it like the real thing to learn about the world on foot.
“Alright, I am moving out. Wait a moment!” I blankly said to him as he cheerfully moved out.
Like a certain legend decimating pokemon, he doesn’t like to be within the pokeball at all in comparison to Pierce.
Funnily enough, his pokeball is still located in some random cupboard of Professor Juniper's lab and never seen since I started my escape from my (this world's) home.
Otherwise they end up disrupting other trainers for prank based reasons - which is a sign that they are way too intelligent than the average pokemon and can also inform me about something even without speaking, which might be something to do with pokemon aura or something.
But there are only a few experts on that subject and they are too famous to approach or hard to search for. Thus no way to learn more about their intelligence for now.
Taking the bag out, I moved out with Hyde jaunting his steps and curiously going through the place. I need to exit the station to go to the city proper, right?
Before going there first, I tried contacting my dad or my mum to inform them that the trip went safely and I will be going to the city.
However strangely enough, none of their contacts are reachable or simply that cross-regional call is not working at all.
Panicking a bit, I also checked that even most social media content I had was Kalos or Lumiose based only, which normally doesn’t happen in this globally connected world with the special internet service that I have availed.
I looked and thought about the situation with some confusion. What is going on? Hyde also looked at my confusion with a similar expression. Not the time to be confused at this place!
Compared to me, the rest of the people on the station must be from Kalos mostly as they didn’t react much to this reality and must have come from other Kalos stations on the way or from some other line.
Trains have become popular in Kalos due to their range and reliability as the wilds of Kalos have grown too dangerous after the Kalos crisis.
The areas in between civilisation here are not suited to most civilians without an experienced pokemon trainer travelling with them though this trend from what Diantha had told, has increased further 2 years ago especially after the Masters 8 Tournament, which funnily acted as a distraction to reduce the Kalos’s populous incentive to worry more about their homeland issues.
A chilling announcement stopped everyone almost on whatever they were doing.
“Kalosian Government is announcing that the Lumiose International Airport has been attacked by wild pokemon and has seen extensive damage such that air travel to other regions has been shut down. Further updates about the recommencement of public airline travel will be announced in due time! Visitors of other regions except from Paldea & other parts of Kalos, are cautioned to report to the nearest Pokemon Centres for inquiring necessary information and arrangements that can be made for them to reside here until international air travel is operational. Communication methods are accessible on a limited basis as the public communication network towers have been damaged in the attack as well so be careful!”
Though it caused some murmurings, no panicked people were present. That might be due to all the people present at the station now, might be from Kalos or even Paldea in case of students like me.
But unlike most students, I had citizenship or passports of two regions: Unova & Hoenn.
For now, what can I do? It seems like things will get worse out there and it reminded me of something which I don’t like.
Let’s move out! Everything might get worse but we have to stick together!
Hyde cheered in response while Pierce launched himself out of the pokeball. He was most likely reminded of his duty.
His presence got some of the trainers nearby with grass-type pokemons a bit weary.
After all, a well trained Escavalier is a big threat in pokemon battling.
I had trained Pierce to parry attacks (especially fire attacks) that he's weak to and find unorthodox ways to move quickly since he inherently is not a fast moving pokemon(with all that armor).
We next moved towards the exit of the station.
Therefore our dischanted adventure of the famed city with a famous tower and with some connection with my mother (something to look more on) begins.
Here we come, Lumiose City!