Chapter XXI

"What… happened…?" Blue asked, and then yelped as he was glomped by a sobbing Daisy and Lyra, Leaf piling in a moment later. "Ladies! Air! Please!"

"Yeah, girls," Gold sniggered. "I don't really think we're getting back in there…"

"Back… where?" Blue gasped, sitting upright and rubbing his head. "Hey, thanks," he added as Lyra handed him his jacket, which she'd been clutching for some time. "Last thing I properly remember… was in the Ruins of Alph. After that's a mess, but I think… I…"

"You died," Daisy sniffed. "Don't you ever do that again, you hear me? Never!"

"Never?" Blue asked, completely deadpan. Daisy just hugged him again, sobbing.

"You're only here right now because of Arceus," Lyra said, wiping her eyes, still hardly believing it. Then she looked at Leaf. "Wait, I thought Arceus was going to wipe our memories of that place. But I can remember…"

"That's…" Leaf looked confused too. "Wait, that's right. I wonder why he didn't…"

The protection to your memories was my doing, Mewtwo said aloofly.

"Can you do that?" Silver asked, crossing his arms. "Arceus' decrees can control Pokémon completely…"

And that has what to do with me?

Silver rolled his eyes, but Leaf burst out laughing at his tone. Gold held up his hand.

"Gimme five," he said solemnly. "Or three, or whatever. You've earned it." Mewtwo stared at his hand for a moment, probably taking the time to mindread what a high-five was, then shrugged and slapped Gold's palm. Blue stared at Mewtwo.

"Who or what is that?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. Daisy put a hand on his arm as he stood up, in case he was unsteady, but Arceus had remade him in top shape.

"Oh, you haven't met Mewtwo!" Leaf said, looking between the two of them. "Blue, this is Mewtwo. He was genetically engineered from Mew DNA by scientists on Cinnabar Island. Red made friends with him, and so did I. He's not very trusting of humans…" she looked around at everyone, smiling. "Or at least, he didn't used to be."

"I'm glad you are now," Lyra said, unable to stop smiling. "He saved your life, Blue. He's an incredible Pokémon. Mewtwo… thank you."

"Thanks," Blue said, grinning. "I've just met you and I already owe you my life!"

You're welcome, Mewtwo said, smiling a little. I am glad that this time, I could save a life…

"So're we," Lyra said, doing a little happy dance and hugging Blue again, before going red and letting go. Crystal winked at her, making her go even redder.

"You might want to split, Mewtwo," Silver said, looking at the horizon. "Wherever we are, we've been found…" he indicated a couple large figures which were rapidly flying closer. Mewtwo started.

"Hey, Mewtwo," Crystal said, before he vanished. "Even if you're nervous about other humans… you're our friend now. You trust us, right?"

Yes, Mewtwo said with a nod. All of you… are humans I trust. Thank you.

Then he teleported away before he was seen by the approaching Dragonite and Metagross.

-P-

"… of course I can't tell anyone anything about the Garden of Origin, but I've been able to suggest some of the things that we found out based on current data… for example, Mew being the progenitor of all Pokémon. It's been suspected anyway, and I pointed out that moves like Metronome couldn't work if the Pokémon didn't actually know those techniques somewhere in their brain, and that all Pokémon probably have the capacity to evolve into any other Pokémon if exposed to the correct stimulus that caused the right signals to be sent from their brains… Ditto's a Pokémon that seems to have conscious control over that process, so there are a lot of experiments going on with elemental stones and the like… this could be a huge breakthrough… oooh, take that, scientific community and your scepticism of "excitable little girls"!"

"As long as you're having fun, Leaf," Lyra laughed, listening to Leaf babble on happily and relaxing in the shade of the gigantic gothic castle. It was a couple of months after they had returned from Hoenn, having all briefly developed the amnesia that Arceus had intended when questioned by the various League authorities. They'd all gone back to Pallet Town to celebrate a little and be hugged to death by various worried parents and grandparents, before getting back to their lives.

Gold and Crystal were the first to leave, Crystal managing to escape her mother's grip and promptly deciding to flee back to Hoenn with Gold, who was dead set on getting his last two badges in the two weeks before the Hoenn League, which ended up being delayed anyway as the League was involved in helping repair the damage caused by the raging storms and searching for the three Orbs. Said Orbs had "mysteriously vanished" (as Crystal said, while slyly zipping her bag closed over something smooth and blue). They were currently hanging out at Ever Grande City, killing time by indulging Crystal and hunting every recess of Hoenn's Victory Road for rare and powerful Pokémon.

Silver was officially listed in the Dragon Clan registry, as Lyra'd heard from Lance, and had taken to wearing a cape, which seemed to be mandatory for powerful dragon trainers. It looked a little pretentious (okay, this was Silver: it looked totally pretentious), but it was hard to deny that anyone dismounting a giant dragon with their cape flowing around them looked pretty cool. Lyra wondered if it would be bad form to ask if the capes were common for this reason rather than any ancient dress.

He was commuting frequently to scientific conventions at the moment, quietly comparing the Dragon Clan's ancient legends with scientific discoveries, mostly Leaf's. Leaf herself was investigating with gusto, coming out with several earth-shattering theories in a matter of days. She innocently claimed that she'd been "inspired" by what she saw at the Ruins of Alph.

Mewtwo went… wherever he went. Lyra had seen him just once since, when he'd randomly appeared one night when she and Blue were camping on the slopes of Mt Coronet, apparently just to say hi. As Leaf had said, he'd revealed himself to be full of questions- "as curious as a child," as Leaf put it. With an immense knowledge of Pokémon and broad and varied world experiences between them, Blue and Lyra were more than happy to answer them. Lyra sincerely hoped that it wouldn't be long until he found the answers he really needed.

Daisy was in Sinnoh, to Lyra's surprise; as a teenager, she'd been a top coordinator of the Hoenn-style Pokémon contests, but had never turned her hand to the Sinnoh-style contests. Leaving her Pokémon care service in Mrs Ketchum's able hands (and those of Leaf, who was spending a lot more time at home lately and doing a lot of her work from there), she'd purchased a few outfits and taken off to Sinnoh with Blissey and an abandoned Mr Mime she'd adopted. She was winning ribbons all over the place, too.

The contests probably weren't the only reason she wanted to go to Sinnoh; after all, Blue was in Sinnoh as well. He'd spent three days dealing with backed up challenges, and then, to Lyra's surprise, she'd walked out of Candice's gym covered in snow and shivering and he'd dropped a coat around her shoulders, chastising her for coming so far north without a proper coat. She might have hugged him a little too enthusiastically on seeing him, but, hey, he hugged right back.

And now he was lying on the grass next to her, napping in the sunlight, having watched her shoot through the rest of the Sinnoh gyms, travelled with her, and generally been with her almost the entire two months since he returned from the dead, and Lyra was starting to wonder if she hadn't been left behind in the Garden of Origin somehow. After all, it was meant to be paradise.

"So, speaking of fun, how're you and Blue doing?" Leaf asked wickedly, causing Lyra to glance at the napping Leader to see if he'd noticed her blushing. Thankfully, he remained asleep, occasionally shifting a little in his sleep. He developed good habits quickly; if he fell completely still when asleep, Lyra tended to have panic attacks and have to poke him awake, though that hadn't happened for a few nights now.

"It's brilliant, Leaf!" she squealed once she had confirmed Blue wasn't listening. "It's sooo much fun travelling with him! Oh man, you should have seen how we destroyed these two mouthy kids in a double battle! And…" she couldn't help giggling. "Gue-ess what happened the other night!"

"Lyra!" Leaf gasped, giggling. "Wow, girl! Was it fun?"

"I so hope you're not speaking from the gutter, Leaf," Lyra laughed. "We're keeping to our own sleeping bags, even if those sleeping bags are getting pretty close together. No, I mean we were just getting to Victory Road, and we were on our own, really gorgeous night, so many stars… and he kissed me!"

Leaf whistled over the phone line. "Good! You better look after him!"

"You have a serious brother complex going on there," Lyra said. "Now, your turn. How're things with Silver?"

"Wh-what… hey, y'know, wanna hear my theories about the Missing One?" Leaf stammered. Lyra could hear her going red and tutted. Leaf carefully ignored her. "I'm certain it came here through some distortion in reality. No idea what caused it or how yet, but that thing came through, and it came through from an alternate reality where the very basic physical laws were different from our own. It couldn't get back, it just got sealed off by the Unown into its own pocket dimension… Unown can travel between dimensions but it's unlikely that they can travel between realities, or at least all realities… Anyway, it was drawn to human settlements because it could tell that we were a little out of place. It was marginally more comfortable with us than Pokémon. Marginally. It's kinda pitiful, really…"

"You're pitying it?" Lyra said incredulously. "Did you miss the whole destroying-the-world thing, not to mention…" a lump rose in her throat as she glanced as Blue's now-peaceful face, and she was driven to poke him in the arm until his grunted in annoyance and rolled over in his sleep.

"How could I forget?" Leaf said softly. "But… I keep thinking how that thing's pocket dimension, designed to imitate its universe, looked to myself and the others who ended up there. Our world looked the same to the Missing One. It was just as terrified, just as confused. And it wanted to destroy everything in the hope that it could rebuild something it could understand. I think that was its motivation, or probably something similar. Its thought processes or whatever might not be something that conforms to our logic or sensibilities, again..."

"I guess…" Lyra said, frowning. "Hey… Leaf… something Arceus said has been bothering me…"

"What he said about us," Leaf confirmed. "About humans. That we're not from here. I have theories about that too."

"Fire away."

"You asked for it. It's possible that the distortion in realities that let the Missing One through isn't a one-off, that natural distortions between realties are not uncommon. Sometimes it lets through something from such a different reality that it dies or outright disintegrates quickly. I'd say creatures like the Missing One are probably rare, though obviously it's pretty much impossible to tell. Sometimes creatures wander through such similar realities that they don't even realize that they've gone through a distortion. Sometimes they come from different realities, but not so different that they can't survive. I think that's us. We're from somewhere with the same or similar physical laws, but developed biologically in a different manner from Pokémon. We're clearly not biologically related to Pokémon, which makes us a unique species on this world. Arceus himself stated that we came from "elsewhere"."

"There are legends in Sinnoh of Mesprit, Uxie and Azelf giving gifts to humans…"

"To help us become part of this world, perhaps. Whether they gave things or took them away… probably they'd decided that we could be assimilated into this world and took steps to make it smoother. I'm not sure, but I'm grateful for it. They could have easily decided that we were a threat like the Missing One, and destroyed us…"

"Is that why we survived as a species?" Lyra asked. "We had to have been fairly numerous at first, to have become a species, but there was only one of the Missing One…"

"Distortions between our reality, or similar realities, with humans, might have simply been more common. Or maybe it was a large distortion that took numerous people. Or you could be right, Arceus simply took a liking to us and created more like he recreated Blue. I couldn't say. The only one we could ask… well, we're not supposed to remember that he exists. Though since he claims to be omnipotent, he probably knows anyway and either doesn't care or trusts that we really won't get chatty about it."

"Yeah…" Lyra shivered at the thought of what might happen if Arceus decided they weren't trustworthy, and how abruptly and without warning such consequences might be. She shook it off. "This is all very interesting, but you know what phenomenon I really want to know about!"

"What are you talking about?" Leaf said, a little too quickly.

"Come on, Leaf," she chastised her. "Silver! I didn't skimp on the news, you'd better not!"

"We-eee-ell… he comes over a lot to join in my research," Leaf admitted. "He knows so many cool legends! It's fun having him around, he's got a pretty sharp sense of humour, but he's nice really… So not the jerk you said he was."

"Sooooo… nothing's happened? C'mon, Leaf, I'm here for the juicy details!" Lyra complained. "I shared!"

"Okay, okay… nothing's actually happened, buuuut… I'd like it to…" Leaf was cut off when Lyra squealed loudly, which finally woke Blue up. He started and sat upright, rubbing his eyes and staring at Lyra questioningly.

"Do I want to know?" he asked. Lyra held up her hand to tell him to wait a moment and giggled. He shrugged and looked at his watch.

"Well, good luck to both of you," she said to Leaf. "You'd better let me know if anything interesting happens!"

"I promise," Leaf said. "And I promise I'll tune into Sinnoh TV tonight, you can stream it over the internet. Good luck!"

"Ah, is it that time already?" Lyra yelped as Blue tapped at his watch with an amused smirk on his face. "Later, Leaf!" She snapped her Pokégear closed and jumped to her feet. "Agh, I'm gonna be late! Come on!"

"Can't you run any faster?" He teased, catching up to her pretty easily, being ridiculously tall as he was (was he always that tall or was it an Arceus upgrade?). "I skived my gym duties for the nth time to come see for myself that you kick as much ass in Sinnoh as you do in Kanto and Johto. You don't want to miss the League!"

"Aww, I could be the last one there and I'd still beat them all, just you watch!" Lyra responded. Blue grinned and rolled his eyes, taking her hand to pull her forward and into the Sinnoh League headquarters.

"Let's go!"

-P-

… I'm pretty sure that everything I said about alternate realities in this fic is bollocks, but… quantum. That's my excuse XD

Anyway, yeah… there's my first Pokémon serial, spawner of a hundred oneshots already XD Trust me, this fandom's probably not heard the last of me… though I should really get back to work on that DC fic… But first I'm away to London for a week, so I thought I'd upload the last chapter/epilogue before I go instead of leaving you guys hanging. (And congrats to everyone who went "Oh holy crap it's MissingNo isn't it?" Yes, yes it was. That thing gave me more nightmares than any horror movie… *shivers*)

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the fic, and please review to let me know what you think! Thanks for reading!

Gotta go catch 'em all!

I would never presume to claim Pokémon as my own. I bow at Tajiri Satoshi-sama's feet for its creation.