Chapter 1: The Man and the Boy

Chapter 1: The Man and the Boy

Water is an essential part of human survival. Whole civilizations have built their foundations on rivers and coastlines, tying their fates together. Even in the distant lands of the western frontier, desert-trotters with brimmed hats, roped lassos, and bold horses would survive on canteens and waterholes. So, when water sources are endangered from ignorance, overuse, and abuse, it’s only natural that next to go is—

CRASH!

The boy was slammed by a wrathful wave. He tumbled across the damp sand, scraping his arms, his legs, and his whatever-that-was. Bitter salt water filled his odd-feeling throat, making him cough and spit as he fumbled his way onto his feet.

He whipped his head around, trying to get his bearings. Why had he been drifting off this close to the ocean? The tide must have come up and tried to pull him in. Shouldn’t he know better than to test the Earth’s lifeline?

On that subject, why was he alone at a beach in the first place? And a beach this dirty, too. There were bags, boxes, cans, shards of plastic, and loose paper prints with unfamiliar logos on them strewn around everywhere. He could only imagine what hid beneath that layer of bright blue going out endlessly until it met with the sky. Beautiful as it was, it surely concealed all sorts of its own pollution that put marine life in danger and how the heck do I know all this?

The boy took a step away from the shoreline and turned inwards. Now that he thought about it, he had no recollection of where he had learned all these things about water. He just…knew it. He was staring at a list of facts with nothing to attach them to.

What did he remember, then?

My name is Joey Johdaile.

Okay… What else?

I am sixteen years old.

Good. What was he doing before he woke up?

…

Where does he live? What school does he go to? What are the names of his friends?

…

Where were his parents?

…

Who were his parents?

…

…Well, ain’t that a problem.

Joey began heaving as nerves set in. He was alone, an amnesiac, stranded on a beach with no person or ship in sight, and what the heck was wrong with his face? He thought it was just dizziness from the saltwater at first, but this was something else entirely. The puffing of his mouth was so far away from his eyes, and the air in his nose felt like it was moving sideways? And what was that when he tried crossing his eyes? It was way too long to be a nose…and blue. His hands, if that’s what you’d call such thick, nubby things, were that same light shade of blue. Wiggling his digits felt natural, but so off, as if he was—

Wait.

Joey slowly opened his mouth. The thing in his crossed peripheral raised.

That’s not a mouth. That’s a maw. A crocodilian maw!

Now Joey was on a whole new level of dread. On top of it all, he couldn’t even call himself human now! That was the last straw. He needed to figure out what exactly was going here.

Grumble…

…and he needed to do it fast.

With his little legs, Joey hustled through large stalks of grass, approaching a forest that was sadly devoid of palm trees. A sea of trees. Maybe he could see some people around if he was higher up?

But before he could get any closer, Joey’s foot struck a green cowboy hat with a white knitted brim. It wasn’t buried into the sand like the rest of the garbage — this got here recently. Curious, Joey picked it up, holding the inside to his eyes. Awaiting him was a note.

Don’t forget.

JJ and MW

“JJ”. Was this hat…his? Joey carefully fitted it on, letting the rope strap wrapping under his maw keep it in place above his eyes. Even if a crocodile didn’t have skin to burn, protecting his eyes from the late-morning sun was a good bonus — if it wasn’t his before, it was now.

Joey pressed on, trudging through the dense brush as best he could. He got to the top and…huh?

He gawked at the sight. Was that another animal, sprawled out in front of him? He raced to their side, trying to get a look at them. This brown reptile didn’t resemble any animal Joey could think of. Over their head was a skull mask with a nasty, exposing crack on its right side. From his steady breathing, Joey could conclude that they were alive — from the burgundy tie on their neck and the gold ring on his ‘thumb’, sapient. Next to them was a long, slender bone club, one end blunt, the other sharp. What was this fellow doing wearing and carrying bones?

There wasn’t another soul in sight. This animal was all that Joey had to go off of. He bent down and began shaking them. “Uh, mister?” he guessed. “Are you okay? Mister?!”

Shaking. He was shaking. Something was on top of him. He was going to die. He was going to get eaten. Fight. Fight fight fight—

“Get off!” Mathew reached around for something to grab and, once he found something, started smacking the blue beast with it.

“Woah! Ow, ow, ow!” The hat-wearing pokémon, which he recognized as a totodile, stumbled backwards.

Mathew rose up to run — and he fell. He stood again, walked — tripped. His vision was slightly limited by…a snout? A helmet? What was that?

“Where the heck are you going?!” the totodile exclaimed behind him.

“Away from y—shit!” This time, he fell straight into the side of a tree, smacking his hip against the bark. A few leaves gently glided down and landed on him.

“Mister!” Before he knew it, the totodile’s shadow was overtop of his aching body. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to get you more spooked than a girl at a graveyard.” A blue hand lowered down to him. “Are you okay?”

“Does it look like it…?” Mathew groaned, seizing his arm and pulling himself up. The totodile pulled him to his feet, giving him a moment to get accustomed to this off-kilter feeling. He glanced around, finding an empty forest on his right and an empty beach on his left.

“You ain’t got any reason to be scared of me, you know.” The totodile smiled at him. “I was just trying to wake you up.”

Mathew felt weary at the sight of his maw, loaded up with sharp teeth, but he supposed that this pokémon probably couldn’t help how those looked. “Okay, well that’s good. I thought you were gonna eat me alive or something!” he gave a lighthearted chuckle, trying to lighten the mood.

“Mister, I need you to ask you some questions. But before that…” The totodile picked something up off of the ground and put it in his hands. “You dropped this when you fell. This is yours, right?”

“Uh…” He looked down at the object. It was a—

a—

“Absolutely not.” He tossed the slender bone club into the woods. It hurled through the air a lot farther than he anticipated.

The totodile stepped away in surprise. “But it was right next to you! And it’s bone, like your mask!”

“Mask?” Mathew finally realized that he was no longer the man — he was the cubone. He rubbed his hands around his body, feeling out the damage. His burgundy tie was still around his neck, and his ring had somehow gotten onto his weird thumb-thing, but the rest of his clothes were gone, leaving only this new mask. He found a crack in it where his scaly skin was exposed on the right side. “What kind of sick joke is this? Cubone. Of course I’m a—huh?”

He felt something graze against his leg. It was the bone club again. It came back…? He tested it again, throwing it out as far as he could. After a few seconds, it rolled through the bushes and over the roots, until finally stopping at his clawed feet.

“Woah…” Joey watched this supernatural feat in awe.

Mathew just tried to shrug it off. Pokémon were magic, anyway — what more was a magic bone? Things were probably going to be weird like that here. He’d get used to it…hopefully. It was the least this world could do to compensate taking away his stylish suit, his well-treated pants, and oh god where was his backpack?

Instantly, he leapt for the ground, pushing his way through the flora with the same energy as his bone club had given before. There were too many things in that backpack for it to just have disappeared! If the powers that be had let him keep his tie, surely they’d have let him keep his essential belongings! Please, at least let him keep his scrapbook—

Behind him, Mathew heard the totodile chuckle. “You’re hounding that ground closer than a dog playing fetch!” He paused, mulling over that remark. “Well, you do have a bone…”

As demeaning as it might’ve been to get compared to a dog, Mathew laughed a little too. This totodile’s comments were weirdly nostalgic. It was good to remember that he wasn’t alone in these woods. “Hey, I brought a backpack with me. Brown, leather, has a dozen pockets… There’s some really important stuff in there. Like food. Can you help me look?”

“You have food?!” Already, the totodile was squatting down, seeming confident. “Alright. I reckon that, with two of us looking, we’ll find it real quick!”

They did not find it real quick. Minutes passed with only the sound of the rushing waves and the blowing wind to accompany them. The two exhausted every inch of the area with careful eyes. When the forest proved no results, they went out onto the beach. Turned out there was all sorts of trash out there to rummage through… Still, nothing turned up that even resembled his belongings.

When the two of them regrouped where he had woken up, Mathew collapsed in defeat. “Damnit… Couldn’t they have dropped me somewhere other than the middle of nowhere?”

The totodile looked down at him curiously. “Dropped you?”

“Oh.” It hit Mathew that this stranger had wanted to ask him questions and he’d just spent the past fifteen minutes blowing him off. “Sorry. I should really explain myself.” He turned himself over into a sitting position. “Name’s Mathew. Mathew Walker. I’m an engineer for all sorts of things, and I’m good at selling them to an audience, too. To make a really long story short, I was given the instructions to build something that would…send me here. But they didn’t tell me what ‘here’ actually was.” He gave a sweeping look around. “I thought it’d be, like, their headquarters or something.”

“So a machine brought you here?” The totodile sat down next to Mathew. “Is that what happened to me…?”

“You don’t know?”

“No. I woke up on the beach over there a bit ago as this weird crocodile-man.” He pointed at his belly. “I can’t remember anything before that besides my name, my age, and some other things. I could tell you two plus two is four, but you ain’t gonna get the name of my kindergarten teacher out of me…”

So he was another former human with some kind of amnesia, then? Mathew suddenly felt a lot more sympathy for this stranger. “Damn, that’s awful! I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat if it meant you remembered who you were.”

“I dunno know about that. This is about as fun as a sabertooth tiger tearing you a new one!”

Mathew couldn’t keep himself from laughing at that one, too. It reminded him of slightly better days, back when his friend’s son would come to visit. It was like he’d come back to him in the form of a totodile. “Well, I appreciate you putting that on hold to help me out! Makes me a feel a little less, uh, bonely.” He spun the club between his mitt-like hands.

The totodile squinted at him. “You can do better than that,” he graveled. “I know it.”

“Hey, I’m working with new material here!” Mathew retorted. “I gotta stretch the puncles out. I’m a cubone, you’re a totodile… What’s your name, by the way? I need to find a good pun to make of it.”

He leaned back, looking comfortable. “It’s Joey!”

All comedy Mathew had been planning stopped dead in its tracks. “…What?”

“Joey,” he repeated, looked to him nervously. “Did I say something wr—”

“Give me your hat.” He thrust a hand forward. “I need to look at it for a minute.”

“Okay?” Joey slowly, awkwardly pulled it off his head and handed it to him. Mathew turned it over.

Don’t forget.

JJ and MW

When Mathew thought Joey had come back to him, that was supposed to be metaphorical. Evidently, it was literal. “Joey Johdaile,” he mumbled in amazement. “What the hell are you doing here…?”

“How do you know my last name?!” When the realization hit Joey, he gawked at Mathew. “Oh. You know me. From when I was human.”

Mathew rose, handing Joey his hat to put back on. “It’s been more than a year since…” He was reminded of the last place he had seen Joey and had a horrible realization. “Shit, if you’re here, then where the hell are Greg and Cathy?!” He began pacing around. “Did they get visited too? But there’s no way they could build a portal on their own! But they’re not here, Joey is, but Joey doesn’t have his memories, and—”

“Mathew.” Joey rested a shoulder on him, and that took him out of his panic. “What’s going on here? I don’t remember a thing about who I am. Can you fill me in?”

“Well, your parents are named Greg and Catherine. They’re family friends, and…” Mathew felt his throat constrict. The only way he could tell Joey about himself is if Mathew told him the full story. That meant he’d have to tell him about that, and about that, and about that.

He couldn’t do this. Not now. He just couldn’t.

“That’s…all…I can tell you.”

“Can?” Joey said. “You mean you know more? Why the heck did you stop?”

Mathew desperately racked his brain for a way to explain this lightly to Joey. “Have you ever ripped off a bandage really slowly?”

The totodile looked at Mathew as if he was a dunce. “If I have, I ain’t remembering that anytime soon.”

“Ah, right.” Mathew sighed, backing away from Joey. “Listen, Joey, I do want to tell you, but I just…” Despite it being a warm morning, he felt himself shiver. “Besides, we shouldn’t do this while we’re in the middle of nowhere, and I need to find the people who brought me here, and it was already hard enough when—”

“Well, we ain’t doing anything but sitting around right now, are we?” Joey pointed out, raising his voice. “These all sound like some real thin excuses to me. Could you at least tell me why you can’t tell me?”

“No! That defeats the whole point!” Mathew snapped back. He immediately regretted it when he saw Joey falter for a moment, taken aback by Mathew’s volume. “…Sorry.”

The totodile seemed even more miffed. He whirled around, taking his gaze away from Mathew. “You’ve got the memories. I already tried to help you you with your problem today. If you’re really sorry, then you should go ahead and just—” As he looked upwards, he went silent, and the anger in his tone dissipated. “Hey. I found your backpack.”

“What?” Mathew pointed his snout to the sky, and… “Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. What is it doing up there?!”

Joey was right. All along, the backpack had been high over their heads, dangling from some high-reaching branches in a nearby tree. The layer of leaves made it hard to see at a glance, but Mathew could see the straps blowing in the wind and the strain it was putting on the branches. How could it have ended up there if Mathew had awoken on the ground? Had he fallen from the sky or something?

Joey played with the brim of his hat before straightening his stance. “Well, how about I give you a good reason to talk. You wanna know a fun fact about crocodiles, Mathew?” Before he could answer, Joey stomped up to the base of his backpack’s holder. “They can climb trees!” He leapt towards it and grasped the bark, clinging on tight.

“Wait, what?!” Mathew’s agitation gave way to panic. He ran up to the tree as Joey shimmied his way up. “Slow down! If you drop the backpack from that high up, you could break something in it!”

“Figure something out, then!” Joey called back, not slowing down. “You said you’re an engineer! I reckon you can think of something quick!”

“I could make a cushion or something, but I’d need actual parts for it!”

“Well get sear—”

Splat.

A ball of water, like a water balloon with no balloon, burst against Joey. He cried out as he was knocked away.

“Joey!”

He hit the ground right on his back. Mathew could hear the sharp gasp of breath when Joey’s maw opened wide.

Some droplets from the ball landed on his arm. He winced in pain, his scaly skin stinging at the point of contact. This wasn’t normal water — the shoreline hadn’t done this to his legs.

Someone was responsible for hurting Joey. “Who did that?!”

Answering his call, two birds leapt from a nest in the tree and glided down towards them. Both were white with blue highlights on their wings and tail feathers. A “Screeeeeeeeeeee!” emanated from their orange bills tipped by black.

Mathew was intimately familiar with the species — they were a huge nuisance in the beach areas of the McDonald’s crossover. Wingull.

“This is our tree, so buzz off!” one called.

“Yeah! You loud-mouths buzz off! Screeeeeeeee!” said the other. Both of their words were as shrill as their squawks.

Mathew slowly approached the prone totodile as the wingull flew around in wide circles, weaving through the trees like they were nothing. “You assholes… All Joey wanted is that leather thing that’s in your tree! All you have to do it let us take it back and we’d leave you alone.”

“That thing is also ours!” one of them exclaimed. “Screeeeeeeee!”

The audacity… Mathew was new to this world, so he was willing to give these birds one last chance. Only one. “You can’t just claim something that fell out of the sky is yours because it landed in your tree,” he said firmly. “It belongs to me.”

One of the wingull looked down upon him. “Fell? Fell? Screeeeeeeeee!”

“It was a gift and you can’t have it!” the other said. “So can it, bonehead!”

“Bonehead! Bonehead!” they both cried, cackling to themselves.

The cubone clenched his teeth. They were sticking to their guns, then. That made them thieves.

He felt his grip around the club — his club — twitch.

“Listen here you little shits!” he yelled, swinging it out. “If you don’t give me my stuff back, I will knock you out of the air, pluck every feather out of your sorry asses, and sell them back to you at an inflated price!”

“Screeee, screeee! Those are some fighting words for a bonehead!” one wingull said.

“Yeah! Let’s see if he can back those up!” The other wingull turned and dived down. His wingtips glowed, leaving a trail as he headed straight for Joey’s body.

“Damnit!” Mathew ran over and blocked Joey’s body using his own. Like a scene straight from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, the birds slashed and cut at his back using empowered wings. Mathew was amazed he couldn’t feel any blood in those wounds.

One of them fired another splash grenade directly at Mathew’s back. Mathew howled in pain at the splatter. It was like a furious acid was burning away his scales. His knees trembled, but he couldn’t afford to fall. Joey was only now catching his breath again. His eyes expressed something between horrified and apologetic.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mathew saw one preparing a third. He was aiming at his mask-helmed head, which hardly protected Joey. He threw himself forward in a dive, nearly smashing the snout of his mask into the dirt. Direct hit, this time closer to his hip. That was almost enough to make him pass out. He couldn’t even stand anymore, collapsing atop Joey.

Joey, reanimated after having the wind kicked out of him, pulled himself out of the pile and charged. But then, something sizzled through the air, and one of the wingull yelped. Mathew picked up the scent of that wingull’s singed feathers. Then, in his fading vision, he saw something reach out for his hand. Joey? No, that wasn’t him. This hand was darker. Sleeker. Fluffier?

It wasn’t a hand at all. It was a wing.

Mathew grasped the wing, and with a logic-defyingly strong grip, it brought him out of the dirt. Another wing reached around and held him steady. The cubone was met with a pair of red eyes. This wasn’t a species he recognized. Its coat of feathers was a dark blue, almost navy, highlighted with red on the insides of the wings and the tips of its broom-like tail. Atop its head was a large, hat-like thing. A raven, maybe?

“C-Can you stand…?” She seemed to immediately regret asking the obvious, shaking her head and chastising herself under her breath. Without waiting for an answer, she offered him a blue fruit with a spotty texture. An oran berry, if he remembered right. “Eat this and…let us h-handle it, okay?” she gently ordered.

Mathew immediately bit down on it. In seconds, he felt rejuvenated, and the pain from the slashes and the splashes began to fade. He pushed away from her, eagerly downing the rest of the fruit as he walked.

The tide of the fight had taken a turn. The wingull’s cocky tones were replaced by panicked screeches, weaving through branches and leaves to keep cover on themselves. Both of them were carefully trying to avoid the electric shocks of their other rescuer — a pikachu wearing brown goggles over his eyes and a pink bandana with a pattern of white flowers over his head. Despite having the birds on the ropes, he seemed more disgruntled than anything.

“Seriously, what do they get out of plopping the new recruits out here?” he mumbled to himself as his next strike blackened the bark of one of the trees. “We could’ve just had them jump on the job right away, but nooooo, let’s make them fight wingull first instead…”

“Screeeee! This isn’t your fight, rat—” one of the wingull could hardly belt out a retort before the raven leapt up into the air and tackled him to the ground. The pair broke out into a heated scuffle, slashing at one another as if their glowing wings were blades. The wingull fought with reckless abandon, lunging at weak points any time he saw them. The raven, however, moved with near-perfect precision, teasing openings, dodging, and then sucker punching him every time he fell for it.

Mathew was mesmerized by the raven. He didn’t have to know much about swordplay — wingplay? — to see her mastery. It looked like it was effortless for her, too. Her soft gaze was now flat and expressionless, as if she wasn’t even present in the moment.

“I reckon you should be all steady now.”

Mathew turned away from the fight at the sound of Joey’s voice. The totodile was some distance away from the fight, crouching down and propping up…something. It was green spherical object with a wheel at its bottom, a single arm that looked straight from a claw machine at its side, and an antenna with a red ball at its top. This didn’t look like any pokémon he knew. Was this some kind of robot?

“Thank you.” The robot’s voice, coming from within, was monotone and artificial. As he rolled away from Joey, Mathew could hear whirring, and the ball began to glow. “Unlike some others, I’m not one for theatrics. Allow me to get straight to the point.”

In an instant, a ray of light, sparkling like a gem, blasted from the robot’s ball, shooting straight past Mathew and into the wingull the raven was fighting. The laser blasted him into a nearby tree, knocking him out instantly. The raven leapt back in surprise.

“That’s revenge for knocking me over. And for screeching.”

The other wingull wailed. With a burst of wind, he soared through the air straight towards the robot, abandoning all cover. That was a mistake — the pikachu shot him out of the sky with a ball of electricity. He crashed to the ground right at Mathew’s feet.

He was still conscious. The fried bird’s eyes were still open, slowly rising to meet Mathew’s eyes. “S… Scrrrreeeeee—”

Wham. Mathew shut the wingull up with his club. He splayed out, unconscious.

The thieves were done. They wouldn’t cause him or Joey anymore harm, and they’d gotten harmed in return. The thought of that satisfied him.

Karmic justice.

When the pikachu turned to Mathew and Joey, his disgruntlement faded, and he met them with a wide grin. “Whew! Sorry for being late to the party. If we knew you were battling birds, we’d have hurried up to come flip them for you.” He beckoned Mathew to approach. “I’m Jermy. You must be Mathew, right?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” The cubone stepped over the singed wingull as he came up to him. “Nice to meet you, Jeremy.”

“It’s Jermy.”

Mathew snickered a bit. When he was met with silence, regret followed. “…Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Thanks for coming to save us!” Joey exclaimed. “Y’all made it look real easy.”

“I w-wouldn’t say we’re all that great, but…we did get the job done,” the raven said. “M-My name’s Demurke. I’m a…murkrow, in case you didn’t know! It’s nice to m-meet you both.”

Murkrow. A crow? One step below a raven, Mathew supposed. “What about you?” he asked the robot.

“I made him a couple years ago,” Jermy explained. “His name is—”

“I can introduce myself,” he interrupted. “I am the Observational Recreation Buddy, abbreviated ORB, version 5.1. I serve a variety of novel assistive purposes, including, but not limited to, robotic design analysis.” He turned to face his round glass screen, the closest thing he had to an eye, towards Jermy. “For example: imagine being on version 5.1 and still designing me like a fat man on a unicycle.”

“…It’s cheap!” Jermy flung his little arms out.

“Not to mention ridiculous.” ORB focused on Mathew and Joey again. “I am equipped with a small pool of moves to help in a fight, but due to my brittle design, don’t expect me to take a hit. I can also track your life force, AKA aura, if you ever get lost. Most importantly, I have access to all information available on Earth’s Wikipedia up to the year 2061.”

All of Wikipedia?! That was a lot of data to have on-hand in such a small robot, even while compressed. “Damn, impressive for a robot on a budget.”

Joey suddenly erupted into excitement. “Can you look up Joey Johdaile?!”

ORB went silent for a couple seconds. “Nice try,” he said. “Apparently nobody thought to put you on Wikipedia.”

The totodile slouched over. “Aw.”

Why was Joey—Oh, right. He almost forgot what they had been doing before this. “Hey, Demurke, can you fly up and get that backpack for me?” Mathew pointed upward towards the backpack.

Demurke looked baffled. “I-Is that your stuff? How did it get up there…?”

“We ain’t sure, either,” Joey said. “I was trying to climb up the tree for it when those seagulls attacked us.”

“That s-sounds about right.” Demurke spread out her wings. “I’ll go get it for you.” A light wind coursed beneath the wings, and with a jump, she took flight. With concise, simple wingbeats, she rose to the backpack’s level. She picked up the thing with her talons. The weight of his stuff pulled her towards the ground, but she fought back, giving the backpack a smooth landing.

“There we go!” Mathew promptly grabbed onto it — now that he was much smaller, he stood no chance of wearing it on his back — and dug out a brown paper bag. “I brought some food with me!”

“Huh. We were gonna walk and talk, but…” Jermy peered at the bag in interest.

“That’s fine! We can eat as we go.” As long as they were on the move, Mathew didn’t mind to split his attention.

It was hard to split the contents of the little brown paper bag across four small animals, but before they got moving, they managed. Joey got a chicken leg the size of a baseball bat to chew on, Demurke got a simple salad, Jermy received borgar, and Mathew…well, he got perfection packed in a plastic baggie.

Relief! At first bite, the gooey goodness of peanut butter coated the tops, bottoms, and middles of his mouth. He didn’t care that his hand was covered in it, too — the small meal made his elongated mouth and throat so much easier to get used to.

“Um…” Demurke peered back at him as he divided his attention between dragging his backpack and experiencing his ecstasy. “Did you…put p-peanut butter on both sides of the bread?”

“Donmmm fucmmmg judmmmge!” Mathew took a second to swallow. “Look, I had a lot of peanut butter and I didn’t want to waste it. Anyway, you guys wanted to talk about something?”

“Right.” Jermy’s tone darkened a little bit as he finished borgar. “So, as you might’ve already figured out, we work for the company that brought both of you here to Solceus. We call ourselves the Scientific Activity and Engagement Society, or SEAS for short. The two of us are here to help you with being recruited into the company.”

“Both of us?” Joey noted. “So y’all are the ones who brought me here without my memories?”

“Unfortunately, m-most people from Earth in SEAS…don’t have their memories from before arriving on Solceus,” Demurke explained. “There’s n-no way we could…bring everyone h-here in secret and keep all of their m-memories. It’s no good, but…it’s a s-sacrifice we’ve gotta make to s-save the world.”

That one point told Mathew a lot about what he was getting into. It sounded like this ‘SEAS’ company had big ambitions — ones that aligned with his own. Still, making their members mostly amnesiac was kind of a dick move, especially when… “I still have my memories. Couldn’t you have done the same for everyone else?”

“You’re a bit of a special case!” Jermy said. “Because you were able to build a portal where you live, you could easily afford to keep your memories! You’re actually the whole reason I’m here, and not just Demurke.”

Next to Mathew, Joey was walking in silence. His hat tipped down to cover his eyes. “So, it’s because…”

“I-I’m sorry, Joey.” Demurke moved over to give him a pat on the back. “We’re t-trying to work on everyone’s memories, but…well…” she struggled to find the words. “If it m-makes you feel better, we a-always make sure to tell people the goals and…risks before sending th-them to join us. You k-know what they told you about Pokémon, right?”

“Well…” Joey began to ponder. “They’re a big franchise on Earth. And they’re all about these fictional animals that know how to fight. It’s…not like Solceus? I dunno how, though.”

“G-Good! That means—”

Joey kept going. “And one of them is a totodile. A blue crocodile-man…like me. And it becomes a bigger crocodile-man called a croconaw, and an even bigger crocodile-man called a feraligatr.”

Demurke seemed just as surprised. “Wow! I g-guess we…really outdid ourselves, then.”

How did Joey know that much about totodiles? Neither him nor his parents had been gamers the last he’d seen them, Mathew was sure. It’s not like totodile was a particularly popular starter…

Mathew’s confusion gave way when he noticed that Joey looked even more depressed than before. “All this, and I still don’t know a darn thing about my parents.”

The cubone could only look to him in sympathy. If only there was some way for him to help without… Wait a second! “Guys, stop for a minute.” He paused their walk to unzip the largest flap of his backpack. He dug through it until he pulled out something rectangular. The baby blue scrapbook was still in good condition, although it was still missing a photo for the plastic cover sleeve. “I can’t tell you more myself…but I can show you this.” He flipped to a particular page and handed it to Joey.

“Oh!” Joey’s eyes lit up. The photo Mathew had flipped to featured three people — a brown-eyed boy wearing a cowboy outfit next to a slender man wearing a vest and a well-rounded woman wearing a labcoat. A banner reading “Happy Halloween” ran along a wall in the background. “Is this…?”

“Yep! That’s you, Greg, and Cathy! It’s not much, but at least you know what they look like now. Does that make you feel any better?”

Joey paused before giving a crooked nod. “I reckon it does a little.”

“And h-hey!” Demurke was eagerly studying the photo herself. “If you’re here, maybe…your mom and dad are here too? Whenever I g-get some time freed up, I’ll go and ask around to see if a-anybody knows them.”

“That would be real great!” This seemed to be enough for Joey at the moment. Mathew couldn’t be happier.

Jermy had been watching this without saying a word. When the cubone looked to him, he was rubbing his head, and his ears were pointing straight. “Anyway…uh…well…”

“What this pikachu-shaped bag of nerves is trying to say is that there’s more to the recruitment process,” ORB spoke on his behalf, which calmed Jermy. “When you’re not training with us at dawn, you’ll be working with us in a trash-cleaning job called the Pick-it Up Club. Not everyone there is a part of SEAS, and they don’t all know that you are from another world. We will help you with the cover story for the convenience of everyone involved.”

A cover story? “I can do that.”

Joey seemed more perturbed. “Weird…”

“Thanks, ORB. I think that about covers—” Jermy suddenly snapped his fingers. “Oh! I almost forgot! I wanted to show you guys something!” Jermy suddenly marched off. ORB trailed him, snapping twigs and leaves with his wheel. “Leave the backpack, we’ll come back for it!”

Mathew, Joey, and Demurke followed Jermy and ORB closely. As they moved, the ground below them got steeper and steeper and steeper. The beach gave way to a cliffside that kept growing with them, until they were high above the ocean. The exhausted Mathew was just short of complaining when the trees cleared, and that thought eroded away.

When the cubone had learned he was venturing to a world of pokémon, he pictured quiet villages with cute little huts and sparse populations. Mathew couldn’t have been more wrong. The cliffside gave way to a circular outcove populated by bright neon signs and busy dirt-trodden streets. Brick buildings with steel roofs gleaned the light of the sun towards his eyes. It was a big gorgeous town confined by rock walls on all sides. Modest houses populated the top of the cliffside at the alcove’s crown, tethered to the world below by the wires of a gondola lift.

“Holy shit…” Mathew couldn’t bring any meaningful commentary — the only adjective he had to describe the view was ‘beautiful.’ Joey was with him, gawking in silence.

“Right?!” Jermy exclaimed. He got in front of them and gestured an arm towards the town. “Welcome to Kalmwa’er!”

“It really is a b-beautiful place, isn’t it…?” Demurke said. “A-And this is just the beginning.”

Mathew kept his eyes on Kalmwa’er. If this was the site of his training, he could only imagine what other sights Solceus had in store after he fulfilled his obligations. Frankly, he was content with stopping here — this seemed like the town of his dreams.

…Well, now that he said that… There was one thing that stuck out to him.

At Kalmwa’er’s front, bordering its beach, was a pillar of a building, painted with a pale color resembling a shade of skin. It easily towered over the rest of the town — at five or six stories, it was almost equal in height to the cliffs. There was a sign plastered upon it that read Kalmwa’er Resort: Your NEW home for all things Kalmwa’er! Clearly it was some kind of hotel, which made sense — who wouldn’t want to cash in on tourism? — but something about the building gave him an odd feeling. He wanted to say it was just because it was so tall, but it felt like there was something more.

Joey had taken notice of the small skyscraper, too. “Jermy, what’s that building over there?”

“Oh, that’s where we’re going: Kalmwa’er Resort,” Jermy explained. “The Pick-it Up Club’s run by the owner, one of our business partners.”

“Why is it so…” Mathew asked almost absentmindedly.

“Unfortunately whoever was in charge of decoration has no marketing sense. Neon and the beach would have stuck together as well as your peanut butter sandwich,” ORB pointed out.

“Oh! That’s it!” Mathew almost mask-palmed at the realization. How had he missed the absence of neon? “It must look really ugly at night.” Quickly the strange thought faded away. It was just a sign. There was nothing to worry about! All that was in the way of paradise was a paradise in itself.

This was going to be great. Mathew could feel it.

And since when had his feelings ever led him astray?