Patrick opened the window, only to find a pink-furred and cat-like face beaming back at him.

"Hey, Pat."

Patrick's nearly dislocated his jaw from the speed with which it dropped. Juka climbed up his pajamas, sharp claws poking into his back through the fabric.

"Who are you and what are you doing here? Also, how do you know my name?"

The mew looked a little affronted at that before quickly waving the question away and grabbing Patrick's arm with one velvety paw.

"Someone wants to speak with you, so we're going on a ride! Also, you better get used to me, since we're going to be meeting a lot more often!"

"Wait, wha-" Patrick's words were swept out of his mouth as he seemed to fold and unfold upon himself in a split second. Blinking rapidly and massively disorientated, Patrick spun around in a circle trying to get his bearings.

They were now near the top of a grassy knoll overlooking Sinnoh City. It was at this point that Patrick's jaw decided to pack up shop and leave his face entirely. "This...this is the Sinnoean wildlife preserve! I'm not supposed to be here!"

The mew shrugged. "So? Not like you're going to get caught. Besides, I can always teleport you back whenever. That translator earpiece of yours still working?"

"Erm, still haven't told me who you are..." Patrick replied, absent-mindedly fingering his earpiece.

"Later. Come on, let's go! I'm assuming the earpiece is working, so I don't have to muck around with telepathy any longer." The mew lightly floated up towards the top of the hill, the night wind softly rustling through the leaves above. As Patrick dumbly followed, Juka leaned over and whispered into his ear.

"Say, isn't that a mew? The origin pokemon? I'm pretty sure that's what a mew looks like."

Patrick frowned. "Mew? I guess? All we got taught was that it was pink and nobody's credibly reported seeing it in the past five hundred or so years. Then again…I'm pretty sure mew was involved with the whole Jirachi fiasco, so maybe? I never saw it when I was in the past."

"Yeah, no one I know has seen mew either, but my mother told me that mew looked like a pink cat, and we also know that mew is a psychic pokemon, so…" Juka trailed off.

Catching the implication, Patrick shrugged. "I guess we'll find out soon enough."

Within a short period, they had reached a clearing at the top of the knoll, dimly lit by the light of the half moon shining above. Across the clearing, the pokemon that had teleported Patrick floated silently next to an oddly shaped silhouette, which Patrick assumed was another pokemon. Patrick took a tentative step forwards, all too aware of all the noise he was making as he crunched through the leaf-littered ground.

"Hello?"

Both pokemon turned around, and the second one beckoned him over. As it turned, Patrick soon realised that the reason for the shape of its silhouette was due to the number of tails the pokemon had.

"Ninetales, isn't it?" Patrick whispered to Juka as he walked over to where the two pokemon were waiting. Juka nodded in agreement before hopping off his shoulder. A soft breeze carried the smell of fresh grass into the clearing.

As he got closer, Patrick realised that the ninetales was completely silver-coloured, almost shining in the moonlight, as opposed to the creamy-white fur in the pictures of ninetales he had seen while at school. Patrick briefly considered the possibility that he was staring at a shiny ninetales, but dismissed it when he realised that even the ninetales' nine tails' tufted tips (now there was a tongue-twister) sported the same dull silver gleam.

"Patrick, it's good to meet again."

Patrick paused, extremely confused. He'd never met this ninetales before. "Again? I don't know you, or the pink cat guy."

The ninetales chuckled, a light bark that Patrick only just managed to hear. "The mew, you mean? That's Lucas. I can understand you not having recognised me; we barely talked. Yet, here I stand, talking to you once more. I've waited so long for this moment. I can tell you're still wondering who I am. Remember Morgan? I'm Adele, her ninetales."

Patrick took a step back. "Wait, but that was-"

"Nine hundred and ninety-nine years and 3 months ago to the day, yes." As Adele finished Patrick's sentence, Lucas had picked Juka up and was now giving her a ride, the pancham crying out in happiness.

"You've lived through the past thousand years? That's….just..."

"Hey, Lucas here has done the same thing, and it's a bit more than that, actually, since I was already fifty by the time I met Morgan. My species do live for extremely long amounts of time, but even we can't live for over a thousand years. A few can get past nine hundred, but that's about it. Only legendaries live longer than we do. Well, porygon too, but they don't really count."

"Then how are you still alive? And you know legendaries don't count either!"

Adele let out a long, drawn out sigh. "Jirachi. She ended up granting six wishes."

Patrick scratched his head. "So you guys rescued Jirachi then? I got hit by something after I opened the door and ended up back here. I wanted to go back but Lucas," He pointed at the mew, who was performing somersaults with Juka in the air, "teleported me here instead."

"He did, did he?" Adele smiled, baring twin sets of gleaming fangs. "That brings up a bit of a paradox, doesn't it? If he hadn't stopped you from returning back, would you have died? A lot of people died in that chamber after you left, and Lucas simply abused his knowledge of the past to keep you safe."

Realising that it was going to be a long chat, Patrick sat down beside the ninetales, still struggling to wrap his head around the idea that the pokemon next to him had lived for over a thousand years. The two sat in silence for a few moments, listening to Juka and Lucas playing above them. Patrick decided to voice the question that had been bugging him since talking to Adele.

"So, Adele, what happened to your fur? I don't remember you looking like that when you were with Morgan."

Adele tilted her head skywards. "Ahh...Morgan. I miss her so. I looked like any other Ninetales for most of my life, but once Jirachi's wish kicked in, my fur lost all it's colour over the space of a few weeks. My body still works as well as it used to, but everything's lost it's colour to the point that even my eyes are a dark grey now."

Patrick turned to observe the Ninetales' eyes, which were the colour of washed slate. "Woah...that's pretty crazy. What was your wish?"

"It was pretty simple. I just wished for the ability to choose the time of my death. Back then, it was simply because I didn't want to die young. Who wasn't afraid of dying young? Still, over the years, that thought has naturally moved on, and I started holding out so I could meet you again."

Taken aback, Patrick quickly responded. "Why? Like you said, we barely spoke."

Adele shook her head. "So? Your actions had a huge impact on the outcome of our rescue mission. Morgan always stressed your contribution whenever we talked about those few days in the Galactic base. Regardless, I want closure. Meeting you brings everything around full circle." She puffed out a cloud of smoke. "I don't know, but it feels like I've finally connected all the dots. Maybe I just wanted to see the future you live in, but even I don't really know why. I just knew that I wanted to endure."

Not knowing what to say, Patrick decided to change the subject. "I...I wonder, what were the other wishes?"

Lucas had landed on Patrick's other side and deposited Juka, who had fallen asleep "Thought you'd ask." Adele replied. "Lucas, would you do the honours?"

"Be glad to." The mew replied cheerily. "Your pancham is such a sweet pokemon! I put her to sleep so we could talk at length for a little longer."

Patrick rolled his eyes. "That only because you're a mew. She's frightfully mischievous at times."

Lucas snorted. "Why am I not surprised? Anyway, Jirachi granted six wishes. I was out cold when those were granted, so I didn't get one, which kinda sucks, but I can always try again when Jirachi comes back, eh? Let's see...Sean wished that everyone nearby got the ability to understand pokemon, which was probably the most impactful wish made out of the six. Rob, the raichu, wished for his old body back."

"Wait, wasn't Rob the trainer that we tried to file a missing report for?"

"Yep, that one. Apparently he got dumped into his raichu's body, so that wish fixed things right up. Gilly, who was Aron's gligar, wished for the ability to turn invisible at will. Oh god, did he abuse that ability…."

"Hmm...that's a very specific wish to make, isn't it?"

Lucas' huge eyes shone as he recalled times long past. "Oh yes, but it fitted him perfectly. The number of pranks he managed to pull off was insane. This one time he managed to convince Isrea's parents that their new toaster was haunted! Even psychic and aura pokemon couldn't find him if he wanted to hide. He was a genius." He shook his head twice before continuing. "Those three wishes were made out loud, so everyone knew about them. Two more wishes were made telepathically, one by Rush and one by Adele here. You already know what Adele's wish was, and nobody actually knows what Rush wished for. He never told anyone except Firael and Steven, and they didn't let on either."

"Must have been personal." Patrick mused.

"Probably. Finally, the wish that went so wrong. Oh Saturn, did you ever screw up."

"Oh yeah!" Patrick yelled. "What happened to Saturn, anyway? I heard him declare his wish and then he just went snap!" He complimented his statement with a snap of his own fingers.

Adele nodded. "Arceus later told us that he had figured out what Saturn wanted to wish for before Saturn made the wish. He teleported into the trap just so he could get to Jirachi and tell her how to interpret Saturn's wish."

"Huh?" Patrick asked, a little confused.

"How would you define perfection?"

"Err…."

"Exactly. If you looked in a dictionary, you'd find something talking about flawlessness or completeness. Some argue that perfection is actually imperfection, as if something were 'truly perfect' you wouldn't be able to add to it, and that in itself was a flaw. Paradox aside, the other generally held philosophy is that something is perfect cannot be improved even if you wanted to improve it. In essence, the only thing you could add to something that is perfect is, in fact, nothing. Follow me so far?"

"Yeah, so far."

"However, everything in the world could be improved by adding something to it or taking something away, which is essentially negative addition. What does this mean? It means that nothing fits the criteria for 'true perfection'. Nothing is the only thing that you couldn't improve, even if you wanted to. What is truly flawless? Nothing! What is wholly complete? Nothing!"

Comprehension slowly dawned upon Patrick. "So you're saying that Saturn literally became nothing?"

Lucas clapped both paws together, making a muffled sort of noise. "Exactly! Without Arceus' involvement, Jirachi's wish would have probably failed to go through, since we're all imperfect, so we wouldn't be able to make a perfect being. Denying Saturn while he was a mew would not have turned out well."

"No, it wouldn't. Arceus took a big risk, though." Adele said.

"Yeah, it did, but it paid off, didn't it? How did Arceus figure it all out?" Patrick shook his head in astonishment.

"He said he went off a hunch, but it was an educated one. He knew Saturn wanted him from the incident at Spear Pillar, but Saturn's relentless pursuit for a wish even when he had Jirachi and the fact that he didn't even try and ransom Jirachi for Arceus except to gloat meant that Arceus had a pretty good idea that Saturn didn't just want him. He wanted something more, so Arceus gave it to him."

"Huh. I wonder what happened to everyone else? Sorry for asking so many questions, but I wasn't there and well.,.I guess I'm just curious."

Adele spoke again, chuckling. "It's fine. We'd anticipated you'd ask us a lot of questions about the past. Who do you want to know about first?"

Patrick looked at the mew to his side. "Let's start with Lucas. Weren't you the Champion when I was in your time?"

"Yeah, he was. After Saturn became 'nothing', so to speak, the world was short one mew and the previous one didn't want the job back, so Lucas got chosen to fill the spot, having already done so a few months prior to that as the old mew decided to...um, retire. I'm pretty sure she managed to wrangle some psychic abilities out of Arceus and she went around the world doing whatever she wanted before she just vanished, much like Lucas did. None of us saw her ever again."

Something clicked in Patrick's head. He turned to face Lucas. "That's right! Your encyclopaedia entry said that you disappeared under mysterious circumstances."

Lucas smiled. "Well, yeah, if you count 'mysterious' as me teleporting away from a nationwide address and never appearing in my human form again, sure! I had to go though. Now that I was a mew, my human disguise wouldn't age, and people would have inevitably asked questions. I could have made a killing off skin cream ads though."

Adele chuckled again, but the laugh was laced with a hint of sadness. "Always one for the dramatic, Lucas was. He didn't have to bring you here, but he said he liked the 'atmosphere'."

"Well, in his defense, it is nice out here." Patrick flopped backwards from his sitting position to stare at the sky. "You can actually see stars from here. What about Aron and Isrea?"

"They both went on to become competitive battlers. Sean's wish proved to be a huge advantage for all the humans in the Sanctum. Well, all of them except for Lucas, I guess. Aron and Isrea finished the Gyms, something which made Vaulkner very happy considering he gets barely any challengers. Unlike Sean, who ended up defeating the Elite Four and breaking the record for the shortest amount of time spent as a member of the Elite Four, Aron and Isrea joined the professional battle circuit and enjoyed a lot of success, especially on the double-battle circuit. For some reason, their pokemon worked really well with each other. Aron actually bought a really expensive yacht and crashed it the day after. We had a few laughs about that, but all in all they lived relatively comfortable lives after retiring."

"How did Sean break the record for staying in the Elite Four?"

"Well, Lucas went and did his disappearing act, and since Sean was the next best trainer, Sean became the Champion instead."

Lucas spoke up. "I may have planned that between the two of us. Or maybe not. THE WORLD WILL NEVER KNOW."

"Yeah right," Adele grinned, but it didn't reach her eyes, which still gleamed dully in the moonlight. "Rob finished the gym challenge, more out of principle than anything else, and it took him several years to do so. Still, once he did, he ended up spending the rest of his life catalouging the pokemon language. His work on the parsing and syntax patterns of the pokemon language laid the foundation for that earpiece you're wearing right now."

Patrick held up a finger. "Wait, what? But couldn't Rob also understand pokemon? That's kinda cheating, isn't it?"

"Not really. Jirachi's gift was an instinctive thing; knowing what your pokemon are saying is not the same as knowing how you know what they're saying, if that makes any sense. it took several years before Rob finally managed to find a good way to tokenise the information he had. In the end, he had an advantage that nobody before and after him had, but out of everyone, he used Jirachi's gift to contribute towards the future the most."

Touching the earpiece, Patrick nodded in agreement. "Yeah, you've got a really good point. I guess there's only one more person left, right?"

"Yeah." Adele sighed, lying down on the ground and staring off into the distance. "Morgan. After the fiasco at Galactic, all four of us—Morgan, Rynka, Sonata and I—took off back into the wilderness to pursue her dreams of becoming a world-class photographer. Of course, wildlife photography is a lot easier when you can just ask the pokemon to pose to you when they ask you why the hell you're trying to kick down their nest. She's also the only person to have gotten mew on camera."

"Ha!" Patrick laughed out loud. "Now THAT was definitely cheating!"

"I won't deny it," Lucas laughed. "But Morgan was probably the person I spent the most time with out of everyone who made it out of the base alive. The amount of time she spent away from urban areas meant I didn't have to be so discreet, and we spent many nights just talking about stuff. Good times. She was the last out of everyone to pass away. When it did eventually happen, I gathered their remaining pokemon, including Adele and they spent the rest of their lives here. I like to think that their spirits are still with us, even though I know I should be the first to discredit such things."

"Yeah. What I'd give to be back with her." Adele said, voice wavering a little. Patrick glanced over and was surprised to see a tear trickle from the ninetales' eye. It slowly made its way down the steel-coloured fur, a glistening track of past memories shining bright in repose. Overcome by an urge to comfort the stricken ninetales, Patrick moved over and hugged the gray fox, Lucas forlornly watching on. Soon afterwards, Lucas drifted over to Adele's other side and placed a paw softly on Adele's flank.

Nobody moved until the sun started rising, not even when the body started turning cold.

There we are. I really liked the idea behind this chapter and thought it was a nice way to end the fic, and I hope you do too. Below are just some thoughts I have on the fic as a whole. You don't have to read it, but I felt like I needed to write it.

Wall of text warning (there is a TL;DR at the end):

Well, I hope you enjoyed the fic! I don't really have any words with which to describe how I feel upon completing this fic. If you had told me I was going to have a finished 200k+ word fic when I first started writing my first chapter, I would have thought you crazy! Partially because 200k is a whopping amount to have written and partially because I was only aiming for a 100k fic in the first place. It felt good to finish, but I must apologise to all of you who followed this fic from the start to the finish (Tsaukpaetra, Pichufan, thewookie1, potayto and ValeforXD are the names that come to mind the most) for my lengthy hiatuses from this fic. I don't think I would have finished without all the encouragement everyone has provided me over the course of the last 43 chapters, so I have to thank everyone who reviewed once again.

That being said, this fic is quite heavily flawed (pertaining to its title, haha). I'm the first to admit that I bit off WAY more than I could chew with the ambitiousness of my plot. Maybe the fic would have been a lot more boring (it probably would have been), but I didn't really have the writing prowess to pull this off really well. I think I've done the story a decent amount of service, but I let things spiral out of control extremely rapidly. The loss of focus on who the main character was (it was Steven, then Firael, then even I don't even know) may have been a strength of the fic, but I ended up flailing around aimlessly because I didn't have an anchor with which to properly pace the story around. This lead to multitudes upon multitudes of plot lines surfacing, reducing the pace of the plot fivefold or worse.

The multitude of plots meant a lot of characters, especially considering the fact that most trainers had multiple pokemon. It was difficult keeping track of who had who travelling with them, and as a result, character diversity really suffered. Most of the characters in this fic are extremely bland, possibly barring Rob, Firael/Alexa, Gilly (probably a little overdone), Myu, Jirachi (the two were extremely similarly written) and Vaulkner (who I really enjoyed writing). The rest didn't show a lot of personality at all, except in little spurts, like Rush around the middle of the chapter. Most of the major characters were actually the worst exponents of this. Earlier on, Aron actually used the word 'blithering'. What kind of kid would use that word? If I do work on my next fic (and I do have 2 ideas floating around - more on that later), the number of characters is going to have to drop dramatically, because it just becomes impossible to handle. I now have a newfound admiration for authors who have a large number of characters in their books, because keeping your characters varied and exciting is absurdly difficult.

The bland characters were part of a somewhat stale writing style, something which I've tried to spice up a little towards the end. Writing still feels a little plastic, but it's an eternal hope of mine that I'll be able to start being to feel like I'm writing smoothly instead of 'he said she said' dialogue with very little in between. My descriptive powers are pretty terrible, but hopefully better than they were at the start of the fic.

Another side effect of a complicated plot is that certain things got dropped. The two biggest things of note were the fates of Alexa's human body (still resting in Sunyshore in a vegetative state) and Rush's mother. You probably don't even remembering those being big things, and while I could have addressed them in chapter 42, I decided to just leave them be. If you were wondering, Rush's wish was pretty simple: he just wanted to know what happened to his mother. This and a few other remaining ideas floating around might see a few extra chapters being added onto the end of this fic as bonuses. Then again, you might not see anything at all.

This fic does have several directions it could go if a sequel were to be written, where Sinther could take over Team Rocket and launch a revenge mission, Aron and Isrea go on NEW AND EXCITING adventures (pls no) or an exploration into the future world with Patrick and Lucas as a mew. However, while these are all possible, I would say that it is extremely unlikely that I will continue along those lines. The fic is finished, and barring the odd oneshot, I doubt I'll ever revisit it again. I'm moving on to fresher and greener pastures. But first, I'm going to power through the 90 or so chapter backlog that has built up in my reading list over the past 1.5 years.

So yeah, looking to the future has never been so refreshing. Both of my two ideas for my next fic are ambitious in different ways, and I'm still undecided as to which I'll take on next. I do, however, have a feeling that after these three fics are written...that'll be it. They say every person has a novel in them, and I feel that's kinda true. None of my next two fics are going to be as long. I don't think I have it in me to write another fic of this length. People like Digital Skitty, ScytheRider, Ri2 and Burawo are actually superhuman to have fics of a much larger size AND of a higher quality. I really don't know how they do it.

Finally, before publishing these last two chapters, I went back over the past 41 and tried cutting down on the amount of author's notes in there. A lot of them pertained only to people who were following the story as it was written then, so I deleted it. I think I deleted about 10,000 words worth of stuff, and some chapters STILL have a lot of words at the end of chapters. I still kept the review responses though, even though they probably should have gone.

TL;DR: Thanks for reading the fic and sticking through my hiatuses! Your reviews really helped me through the lows of the fic. While I'm really happy with the fact that I finished the fic, it's still pretty flawed. (Multiple) Sequels are possible from this kind of ending, but I won't be writing anything else in this universe save the odd oneshot if I feel like it. Before publishing these two chapters, I went back and trimmed some of the older stuff as well.

In the end, I don't really care how bad you think you are at writing. Give it a go. I didn't really think I was any good, and now I think I'm even worse, but you WILL take so much out of finishing a fic (anything more than 30k words) that it will be worth it.

Rush: That's it?

Vendel: Yup. That's it.

Rush: Well, what happens to us? When everyone leaves this page, what happens to us? Do we just stay here for the rest of our lives?

Vendel: You can if you want. But me? I'm going off on a new adventure.