Surprise, readers! If you thought I was done with Team Poképals, think again! Since I like this piplup and chimchar duo so much, I've decided to write a three part AU "what if" story in which an event after the entire Explorers of Sky story basically allowed the team to "travel to the future" to the story of Super Mystery Dungeon. To find out what that exactly means, read this story. Enjoy it!

SPOILER ALERT: Contains spoilers from both Explorers of Sky and Super Mystery Dungeon games.

Pokémon and the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series belong to Nintendo, Game Freak, and Spike Chunsoft.

Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon

Team Poképals – A Reunion and Apology Years in the Making

Chapter 1

The Unexpected Disbandment and New Beginnings

For the first couple of years, Team Poképals was a successful exploration team in the Grass Continent of the pokémon world. Blaze the chimchar, and Leon the piplup, who was formerly a human, were the founders of the legendary and heroic team that saved the world not once, but twice, from the destruction of time from one point, and from preventing the distortion of space on the other. It seemed like their friendship and the legacy of the team would continue for several years to come, but it suddenly ended on one fateful day...

According to an unknown witness, Leon and Blaze got very angry at each other over the disputed ownership of Wigglytuff's Guild, since Team Go-Getters, a team formerly from the Air Continent, and also famous for saving the pokémon world once, was allowed to take control of the guild themselves. Despite the two teams having reached the guildmaster rank, the highest rank for any exploration team in the Grass Continent, Team Poképals unexpectedly opted out of sharing the guild for an unknown reason. This made the leaders Leon and Blaze furious at each other to the point where Leon wanted to quit the team and run away from his best friend. Blaze was understandably left devastated and heartbroken once the unthinkable occurred.

Once he knew that his best friend Leon was not going to come back anytime soon, Blaze conducted a desperate search for him, hoping that the human-turned-piplup would be around the Grass Continent somewhere…

Meanwhile, the witness went on over to Leon, who was overwhelmingly sad over making the difficult choice to disband Team Poképals. Noticing his intense sadness, the pokémon asked him if he wanted to go to a new land in order to save the world again and get his mind off of the terrible event. The piplup agreed, and he traveled with the pokémon off to a new land called the Water Continent.

Once they arrived there, Leon himself asked the accompanying pokémon to transform him back to a human in order to completely forget about his recent painful experience on the disbandment. The pokémon accepted, and it transformed the piplup back into a human. For the many years that followed on the Water Continent, they researched details on what was to be a new threat to the entire pokémon world...a negative entity called the Dark Matter.

The Dark Matter was made up of negative feelings and emotions that threatened to destroy the whole world if it was not stopped. Standing on this knowledge, Leon and his accompanying pokémon made a resolve and long journey to defeat Dark Matter. On the way, they managed to discover a long lost civilization that was buried underwater to gather crucial information on where Dark Matter would attack to turn pokémon into stone and cause the end of the world. Leon and the pokémon then went to the Tree of Life, which was located on an archipelago on the Sea of Wonders, indicated by the underwater ruins' writings.

When they arrived at the Tree of Life, they confronted the Dark Matter itself, and they managed to defeat the negative entity. It was, however, not defeated successfully, as it would spread its remains throughout the pokémon world, hoping to be reborn in the distant future. Realizing what it meant, Leon agreed to the pokémon to have his own memory erased so that they would formulate a different plan to destroy Dark Matter later.

Leon and the pokémon went back to the Water Continent, and in a forest within the outskirts of a certain village, the pokémon wiped Leon's memory clean as promised. He also lost consciousness and was transformed back into a piplup. The pokémon then left him and was not seen again.

Leon, now back to being a piplup, woke up and went with a new pokémon named Nuzleaf into the peaceful town called Serene Village. He volunteered to look after the piplup, and during one day, Leon ran into a young chimchar boy who was named...Blaze. The name felt strangely familiar to Leon, but he could not recognize who he really was, due to Leon's recent memory loss. Blaze also had a different personality than he did back then, being that he was more mischievous and rash than what he was before he came to the Air Continent. They eventually formed a team named Poképals, which was also faintly familiar to the former human.

Leon and Blaze, both unknowingly reunited with each other, and sporting mysterious scarves called Harmony Scarves, went to Serene Village's school for a month or so, then they had to eventually leave the village in order to get away from a pursuing group of Beheeyem. While Leon left from Nuzleaf, and Blaze left from his adoptive carracosta father, they escaped to Lively Town, which was a bigger town than their old village, in order to join the Expedition Society, led by Ampharos. Leon and Blaze then became a fully-fledged exploration team dedicated to completing missions worldwide.

What they did not know, was that they were indeed back with each other again, but more importantly, that the endangerment of the entire pokémon world was about to return once more.