4/15/2017: I did some editing of chapter 1, and I'm going to try to actually continue writing this now, since I finally feel like working on it, yay!

"I'm sorry, Mars. I can't come to Sinnoh with you. I have friends and family here, I can't just leave them to go on a crazy excursion to find your old boss. And to be perfectly honest, my advice to you is to find a new direction. The past is... well... the past, and it's not going to come back. I mean… people drift apart, that's just a fact of life. Besides, who knows, even if your old boss is alive somewhere, he might not even remember you now. Or maybe he moved on. There's plenty out there for you, don't let one delusional man from your past keep you down."

This is one of the last things that Mars had heard from her Unovan "friend", to which she had responded that fine, she was going to go find Cyrus, and that she didn't need help from a jerk like him. Which was true, she really didn't. Even though she had once thought him the sweetest, kindest, and wisest young man she had ever met.

No, Mars could handle herself well enough, and she was going to prove it. She had come all the way from Unova back to Sinnoh by herself, and if anybody was going to break Cyrus out of the Distortion World, it would surely be her. The red-haired former Team Galactic commander put the pokéball (which contained Redshift, a Zoroark; a Pokémon that her old friend had given her as a gift when it was still a Zoura) she had been looking down at away and stood up. It was time to search the dilapidated old Team Galactic Eterna base, which had miraculously not been knocked down yet, and look for any sort of hint that may lead her closer to finding Cyrus. Preferably before somebody caught her here and had her arrested.

Footsteps echoing on the rusty metal flooring, Mars made her way up a set of stairs and over to a disarray of forgotten boxes and overflowing storage cabinets. She then set the flashlight she was holding down and got to work on pulling out pile after pile of paper and sorting through the mess of information that the papers contained. Most of the information was completely irrelevant and quite frankly beyond Mars' comprehension, but a few hours into the search she came across something vaguely promising.

Mars had found what seemed to be a manila folder containing some research Charon had done on ghost-type Pokémon around four-and-a-half years ago- half of a year before Team Galactic had come to an end on Spear Pillar. With the report in one hand and her flashlight in the other, Mars poured over the report, looking carefully for anything mentioning Giratina, the legendary antimatter Pokémon that had appeared to take Cyrus away.

Most of the report was about ghost-type Pokémon and their unique ability to possess people and other Pokémon, and Charon's experiments regarding that. Reading further through the rather dry text, Mars stumbled across a small blurb that lifted her spirits slightly. It read:

Although it is, at the moment, impossible to know for sure, it is extremely likely that the legendary antimatter god Pokémon, Giratina, is also able to possess humans and Pokémon. However, due to the legendary nature of Giratina as well as the fact that it is primarily composed of antimatter (however stable said antimatter may be), it is thought that being possessed by such a Pokémon would be severely detrimental to both one's mental and physical health. Of course, the chances of this actually happening are very slim, seeing as Giratina remains sealed in the Distortion World to this day.

The report then went back to droning on about other ghost-types, but this small patch of text was certainly a start. While the report itself didn't tell Mars too much that she didn't already know, it confirmed something important- Charon had been aware of Giratina before the incident at Spear Pillar. This meant that Charon may have a clue as to how to get into the Distortion World.

Of course, there was also a major problem here- Charon had been arrested around three-and-a-half years ago, and Mars had no idea where he was being kept, let alone if he was even still alive. Still, this had to be an effort worth pursuing, so long as there was even the slightest chance that it could lead to getting Cyrus out of the Distortion World.