The skies were blue, the clouds were white. The sun shone down merrily, though it wasn’t unpleasantly hot and there was a very refreshing breeze. Leaves rustled on trees in the lazy silence, a breeze stirred from nowhere… and then there was a flash of light and five shapes appeared.

  I stumbled, breathing hard, before slumping to the ground.

  “Oooh, that was quite a trip,” I said, trying to keep my insides inside. I took deep, calming breaths until the world stopped spinning and I no longer felt the need to barf up the chili I’d recently eaten. Eventually, I had recovered enough to stand up on all four paws and we started walking, though not in any specific direction.

  We were in the countryside, that much was obvious. Farmland surrounded us on all sides.It should have been the picture of any lazy afternoon and yet there was something wrong, something that grated on my nerves in some way I wasn’t used to. I said as much, as the five of us strolled along the hard-packed mud of the ramshackle highway.

  “Something’s wrong?” replied Guy, quite sarcastically. “Whatever gave you that idea? Oh yeah, maybe it was the transporting us through time and space you did? When in the reverse world are we, anyway?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I retorted, swatting the gengar with my tail as he grinned exceptionally wide at me. “Still, I can’t quite put my paw on it, but something’s definitely up in a way that’s not… normal. Even by Celebi standards, I think.”

  We wandered along past rows of dusty, weed-choked fields that had been neither plowed nor seeded in I-didn’t-know how long. Not that I was any sort of farmer — at least not as far as I knew — but I was sure this wasn’t normal. We had traveled back in time to escape an angry Celebi, probably, but I had perhaps overdone it a little bit when I’d been told to aim as far back as I could. I’d expected things to be a little bit… simpler, maybe, but this was something else. There were signs of civilization all around us, but it was all… wrong. Very wrong. And not just because we hadn’t seen a single other creature so far. There weren't just no recognizable modern vehicles, there was almost nothing that looked like technology at all.

  “Could we have gone forwards instead of backwards, and now there’s some sort of weird shift in the way the planet works and Pokemon and humans have been replaced by… I dunno, some sort of, umm, hairy… stupid… stupider, versions of humans?” I pondered. I looked up from my inspection of the hard packed earth beneath my paws to find everybody looking at me angrily.

  “You don’t know?” grumbled Shadow, the manectric, his fur bristling more than usual.

  “Hairier and stupider?” said Bart, pausing for a moment in confusion, before continuing on his way. “Why hairier? Why stupider? What, like Mankeys?”

  Suddenly I twigged what was bothering me; it wasn’t just that there were no signs of life, it was that there were no signs of life at all. I stopped, so fast that Guy phased halfway through my body before floating up, grumbling, to hover around us ground-bound folk.

  “How many creatures do you see here?” I asked suddenly, softly.

  “Um, four? I mean there’s five of us…” offered Bart.

  “How about you?” I asked Shadow, “or you?” I turned to Lucky and Guy.

  “I’ve only got eyes for you, Princess,” said Lucky. I gave him a withering glare, which he cheerfully withstood. I tried my best to ignore him.

  “What are you talking about? There’s five of us, we’ve gone through this!” Shadow eventually proclaimed, loudly.

  “And?” I asked him.

  “And what? What? There’s nobody else here!”

  I held Shadow’s gaze, until his eyes widened, then I slowly nodded. “You see it too now, don’t you? No pidgeotto, no pidgeys! No swellow, no braviary, no metapod. No galvantula, no joltiks, no combees! No weedles or beedrills or… or anything! It’s not just that the humans have abandoned this place, it’s that everybody has left!”

  “Yeah, there are no humans at all, but there’s no pokemon either,” muttered Lucky, amidst intakes of breath and strained exclamations from the rest of our group. “That’s… that’s not even slightly normal.”

  “Though there obviously have been humans here, days or maybe weeks ago,” I muttered, my brow furrowing and my tail flicking anxiously. “Maybe longer? Months? Years? What do you guys think?”

  Oddly enough, as luck would have it, I was wrong. Something hit me — hit each of us — in the side and there was a brief flash of light before I was enveloped in darkness. It was an oddly familiar feeling and yet also a strangely different experience. The darkness was more… fetid, organic. There was no voice, just an idea of attention. The entity or entities watching us were bemused at best, confused at worst. It or they also somehow recognized that I was a caught pokemon and spat me — all four of us, I noticed — right back out again. Not that I couldn’t have broken free, it would have taken a lot of repeated attempts to capture me without the traditional fight.

  The pop as I escaped was louder than usual, more destructive, a sound followed by the pitter patter of falling pieces of… were these pokeballs made from some sort of gourd? I’d heard stories about the first pokeballs being made from apricorns, maybe that’s what those were? They didn’t look quite the same as the pictures I dimly recalled from sometime before my four legged adventures had begun, they looked a lot more primitive than I’d expected.

  The four small, scattered piles of vegetation that surrounded each of us clearly used to be some sort of plant-based pokeball, and the balls’ failure to capture us meant their destruction. Guy was nowhere to be seen. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising at the sight of something that went against everything I knew, technology which was so ancient it was legendary at best and conjecture at most. I’d have spent more time examining the impossibilities, if the otherwise silent countryside hadn’t erupted in screams and shouts.

  I spun to confront the charging humans that had started moving the moment they’d thrown their pokeballs, coming face to face with three scruffy, scrawny looking boys dressed in a ragtag assortment of armor and hand-made clothing, not a stitch of designer wear amongst them. They’d obviously been stalking us through the long, scrubby grass, right up until they thought they had us.

  They froze as they realized their attempts to capture us had completely failed — had they really thought to capture pokemon without weakening us first? They might have normally had a chance with more pokeballs, but maybe they’d not expected to see so many pokemon at once? — but then they brandished some poorly made, archaic weapons before taking a couple of hesitant steps forwards.

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  I growled, lowering my body to the ground, fluffing my fur out and raising my hackles. I glanced back over my shoulder at my companions, snarling out a warning to them whilst keeping my gaze on the humans who I knew wouldn’t understand a word.

  “Lucky, Shadow, Bart, get out of here. Follow me and the humans at a distance if you have to, but don’t be seen!”

  “Lux, what are you—” Shadow began.

  “Do as I say!” I growled, surprised at myself even.

  “Guy, are you there?” I called.

  “What? Sure, why?” the ghost-type asked. His voice echoed from somewhere above and behind me; the gengar had become invisible moments before or after the humans had acted. Whether they’d seen him or not, they seemed to have forgotten about him now they were faced with a snarling eevee.

  “Because there is something very wrong here and the only way it’s going to be sorted out is if I allow myself to be captured. That’s where you come in. You can do, uh, ghostly things, right?” I asked the empty air.

  “Yeah?” Guy’s voice floated down to me.

  “How about my shadow, can you hide in it?”

  “Sure, I’ve been practicing that with our trainers.”

  I thought quickly, trying to put some sort of plan together. That might be enough! But if not… “Can you possess someone?” I fielded.

  “I… I think so? I, uh, kind of wanted that to be a surprise… but only if they’re knocked out? There were some other ghost dudes who—”

  “I can manage that part of it. Just be ready.” I cut him off and snarled again at the humans, mostly for effect, then reiterated that the other three make a run for it. “Get in my shadow, Guy. I might need your party trick, but if I can pull this off we’ll need more of them.”

  I felt a cold shiver rush up my spine as Guy dived into my shadow, disappearing from the normal world in a way that mere invisibility only hinted at. It was go-time. I bared my teeth, making myself look as big as possible, as the croconaw, sandslash and manectric finally, reluctantly, turned on their heels and ran. I circled warily as two of the boys made to follow my friends, blocking off the humans’ advance.

  “Guy, be ready, Ho-oh said he made me immortal, but I don’t want to have to find out exactly how far that goes. I’m going to get one of them to try and capture me. I’m going to knock him out, and you’re going to possess him, alright? If this fails… go find the other three and then come and help me, if you can. I’ll… I’ll try to escape.”

  From somewhere in the back of my mind, like somebody looking over my shoulder, I felt Guy’s consent.

  Turning my full attention back to the humans, one of the three was a little further away from the others. His blue eyes looked desperate and sad, but resigned. Yeah right, pal, you do what you gotta do, I’ll do the same.

  I ran and leaped for the boy, snarling and growling. My attack caught him off guard and he flailed, trying to grab onto my small body. I ran up his reaching arms and slammed my head directly into his. I saw stars, but he fell like a sack of potatoes. However, once we were both on the ground, he rolled over on top of me, grabbing with vice-like fingers. I yowled and fought for my life, for all I knew he’d ring my neck—

  “Let me catch you!” the boy hissed in my ear, with Guy’s voice.

  I stiffened, then made a show of further yowling and struggling whilst not actually fighting hard as he unhooked a strap from his pack to fasten it around my neck in a makeshift collar, before attaching another, loosely tightened loop around my muzzle, and a another piece of rope to the collar. He stood up, grinning wide in that expression so many gengars are so well known for.

  “I got her! Forget the others, let’s go back. We should tell them more maiju are in the area, the boss will know what to do.”

  I growled and tugged experimentally on the leash — not enough to actually break free, but enough to get a feel that it was possible if I needed it — to hide my shock at being able to understand the possessed human. With Guy speaking for him, the human’s words were still that odd language they used, but I could fully understand what he meant, even with new odd words I’d not heard before. Maiju? Their word for pokemon? We really weren’t anywhere or when I knew if that was the case. The other two humans were skeptical at first, but Guy talked a good game. He strutted a bit as he took a few steps, like when he was just a gengar, but walking seemed to come naturally enough that the two hadn’t noticed anything actually wrong.

  The march as we finally continued was mostly boring and uneventful, for all my nerves were run ragged. I pulled and fussed at being leashed every so often, but for the most part I put my mental energy into trying to figure out what was going on as I fought to remain calm. Boredom eventually won out, but I could still feel the anxiety bubbling under the surface.

  I caught a rustle behind us every so often; thanks to my eevee ears I could tell we were being followed by Lucky and the guys. They stayed out of sight but kept up as close as they could. The rustling grew less and less as they were forced, eventually, to stay further and further out of sight as humans and other creatures once again began to dot the landscape. After long enough without anyone else in sight, the appearance of humans almost made them look out of place.

  Whilst the countryside seemed idyllic enough, if you knew where to look it was obvious that there was some kind of slow desperation at large. The workers in the fields, far from being industrious farmers, were mostly made of malnourished peasants who worked the land under the cold gaze of guards that were obviously there to keep the workers in place as much as to watch for wild pokemon, if not moreso. The worker humans were mostly dressed in rags and almost uniformly covered in mud and filth. I could smell them from the road, a litany of sweat and fear, I’d never smelled anything quite like it. They looked wretched; thin and malnourished, with a hunger that wasn’t all physical.

  Rarely, and to my surprise, I eventually started to see pokemon too. My breath caught in my throat as I saw the state of them though; mudbrays, gogoats and even tauros and the like, and all of them at least as miserable as the humans, if not moreso. They were harnessed with rude, uncomfortable looking gear and pulling ramshackle plows that looked in ill repair.

  Worse, the pokemon were clearly exhausted, not that the armed guards — replete with whips as well as swords — gave them any quarter. I grit my teeth as I saw how they were being treated. A quick look around showed the dead-eyed farm workers, who weren’t treated any better, they seemed to be inconsequential peasants at best, slaves at worst, paid little to no attention. The air of hopelessness was choking, made all the worse by how the young pokemon were clearly being used as hostages to keep the older animals in line.

  There was a distant lowing cry, and a tauros fell, crashing to the ground, exhausted. A guard approached with a whip, doling out futile punishment, before he drew his sword, swearing.

  Metal flashed in the sun.

  I looked away.

  “[We’ll eat well tonight, boys! You wretches had better be glad of our charity! Lord Marcus is ever generous! Cheer for us! Cheer you scum!]” Ragged, empty cheers came from the slave labor. Several were beaten when their ‘joy’ wasn’t deemed authentic enough. The travesty was echoed in furrow after furrow. Clearly, nobody believed that the probably-slaves would get any more than scraps from what was left after their guards ate their fill.

  The guard’s words were clearly not in a language I even used to understand, but it didn’t seem to matter to my eevee ears. I got the gist. My anger grew. Not at the killing, butchering and eventual consumption of pokemon — I’d be the world’s biggest, fluffiest hypocrite if I thought that — but at the cold, callous lack of regard for another life. Worse, these monsters knew exactly what they were doing by keeping hostages.

  A burning hatred grew in my core for everything these people stood for, as mile after mile of such horror drew us closer to a distant, walled city. The dead-eyed slaves were complicit, even if only in their fear. The guards were active participants. The pokemon, like me, were victims.

  With cold, crystal clarity, I suddenly knew why I was here, despite how much up until this point I’d regretted my action. I knew what I could bring to the table. More to the point, I had been tasked with this. This was my burden to bear, my reason to exist. And I would perform my duty, no matter how bloody my righteous revenge should need to be.

  For a brief moment, I was surprised at the vehemence in my internal monologue, but as whips continued to flick and cries from humans and pokemon alike rent the air, I swallowed it down.