In a different time, in a different place…
…but in a time inching closer and closer to the present…
Moon woke up.
She didn’t immediately know where she was. Harsh lights buzzed overhead, and she couldn’t move her arms or legs. The bed underneath her was thin and uncomfortable, and a persistent, dull ache ran through her back. Her mouth was dry, and her throat felt like cotton balls had been shoved down it one by one.
She felt simultaneously exhausted and like she had slept for years.
Not long after her eyes opened, people swarmed the room. Humans in long white coats, their faces unfamiliar, lifted her hands, strapped bands around her wrists, and stared at esoteric patterns that formed on nearby monitors. A thermometer appeared under her tongue and, after a few moments, disappeared just as suddenly. Moon’s eyes drifted towards the door of the room, where an egg-shaped Pokemon that had, appropriately, an egg in its pouch watched the proceedings with an expression of wide-eyed concern.
One of the humans ratcheted Moon’s bed into something approaching a sitting position, and her head swum. He opened his mouth, and noises crawled out like spiders. The lights above pulsed and throbbed in time with red-hot bullets that ricocheted around the inside of her head.
Moon clenched her eyes shut and visions danced in front of her.
A man, stern, with a face that was all sharp angles, binding her arms together, tinged with the colors of pain.
Snow, cold and biting, blowing in through a window, nearly obscuring a sign on a rusted metal wall. The only words she could see were ‘degree’ and ‘absolute’.
A bubblegum-pink Pokemon of indeterminate shape, looking up at her from her arms and smiling. Moon’s mind filled in the name: Pete. Longing filled her chest. What happened to you, Pete? Where did you go? I miss you.
Another pink Pokemon, nearly white, with an inquisitive cat-like face and a long slender tail. This image, this face, dwelled in front of her mind’s eye for far longer than the others, and the sight of it made her stomach turn. It knew, Moon thought. It saw me. It did nothing. It saw me, and it did nothing to help. She wasn’t even sure what it was that the Pokemon was supposed to help with, but she knew that she had been in pain, in trouble, and it had only disappeared after finding her.
Moon couldn’t leave the bed for what felt like another lifetime. She only barely listened to the people around her. “Dissociative amnesia,” one of them said. “Protracted fugue state,” said another. Moon didn’t know what any of it meant, and her mind distanced itself.
Eventually, Moon went home. At least, the two people with her called it ‘home’, but they also called themselves ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, so Moon didn’t know how much stock to place in them.
She didn’t know them. She didn’t know this place called home. She didn’t even know the name they called her – it wasn’t Moon, though that didn’t feel right either.
And so, with little fanfare, Moon disappeared from both their home and their lives.
Nobody ever saw Moon again.
***
A woman with no name wandered the streets of Vermilion. It was far away from where she had come, but she didn’t care. She was slender, almost gaunt; when it came to feeding herself, she didn’t care about that either. Her hair, once a shimmering jet black, was now pale white, well ahead of her age. She wore the same clothes she had arrived in town in, with only the addition of a ragged amethyst-hued coat and a pair of well-worn steel-toed boots that she had found at a shelter. They were enough to keep her warm during the long nights, and that was all that mattered to her.
Dark circles lined her eyes. She barely slept. Whenever she closed her eyes, that feline visage appeared in front of her, as if mocking her. She was no closer to understanding exactly what happened, but every time she saw the face, her teeth grit a little more. She had grown to hate it as time went on, that creature that represented the day everything was stolen away from her, right down to her memories. Even crueler, of the few memories that she had held onto, one was of Pete.
She wished she had forgotten him too. Remembering him hurt too much.
She had no destination, no goal; her feet guided her with no conscious input from her head. Still, it did not surprise her when she ended up in the town library. Very little surprised her anymore. The library was quiet, it was warm, and nobody there paid her any attention – which was how she liked it. She could pick a book off the shelves and read it cover-to-cover before leaving; it provided her with an escape from her own head that, while momentary, was still a welcome relief.
Her hand moved of its own volition, tracing patterns across the spines of the books that sat on the shelves. She pulled one free at random and brought it to a nearby chair, one that threatened to swallow her as soon as she sunk into it.
She opened the book without even reading the title.
A familiar catlike face stared back at her from the first page. She nearly jumped out of the seat before flipping back to the cover.
It read The Mythological Mew, by Tertia Reus.
She blinked. A memory had just snapped into place. She remembered the name of the creature whose gaze she couldn’t hide from. It was Mew, she thought.
Eager to remember more, she delved into the depths of the pages.
Hours passed. The book zigzagged across a range of topics, from the scroll depicting runic illustrations of Mew surrounded by ancient symbols for birth and death to the theoretical studies suggesting that Mew could use any technical machine it would ever be possible to make. One chapter even focused on the violent clone of Mew that had killed its creators before disappearing into the darkness of Cerulean Cave.
Her eyes, though, fell most heavily on the chapter titled, simply, ‘The Mew-child’.
“Some will claim that the Mew-child is only a myth,” Reus wrote. “However, I know that its existence is factual – because I have met it. It was only once, and it was under circumstances that I never wish to repeat, but I can personally verify that the Mew-child is real.
“I was only a young girl when it happened. The war was reaching its zenith, and humans and Pokemon alike were dying every day. My father had long since been killed on the front lines, and my mother had disappeared – no doubt a casualty of the war as well. I was alone in our home, with no idea of what to do or where to go. Someone began trying to break the door down, yelling from the other side for me to open up or face the consequences. I couldn’t very well comply, of course, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to try to escape – I was paralyzed with fear.
“So I did the only thing I could think of. I screamed.
“Not even a moment later, I heard a blast outside, and the person trying to break into my home suddenly stopped. Everything fell quiet. Then the doorknob turned, and, as if the lock weren’t even there, someone slid inside.
“It was a Lombre. I had only seen that type of Pokemon once or twice before, and they weren’t native anywhere near where I lived. It closed the door behind it, and gave me what I’m sure was supposed to be a disarming smile. Then it spoke.
“‘Are you all right?’ it asked. It didn’t say these words out loud, mind you. It spoke directly into my head. Lombre’s only flirtation with psychic powers as a species is the move Zen Headbutt, so I immediately knew that this Pokemon was not what it seemed. I told it that I was scared but I wasn’t hurt, then I asked it what it had done.
“‘I only ensured that you would be safe,’ it said, and it almost looked rueful. It didn’t go into more detail, but frankly I was afraid to ask. It sat with me, and as odd as it sounds, its presence was calming. And so we began talking. I got the impression that it didn’t get much of an opportunity to just talk to others. That was how I found out that this Lombre was, in fact, the scion of Mew.
“Naturally, I asked it how a Mew gave birth to a Lotad, though since I was young the question was more akin to ‘your papa must have been a Ludicolo then.’ The Mew-child smiled – again, an unnerving expression on a Lombre – and told me information that I am certain it had never told anyone else.
“The Mew-child is an odd mix of legendary and mundane, born from one parent mythical and one not. As such, it spends its life in the form of an average Pokemon – with a few divergences – but upon its death, its spirit persists and it reincarnates in the form of a different Pokemon. From what the Mew-child told me, it could be any Pokemon at all; the fact that it was at that time a Lombre was proof enough of that. But no matter its form, it retained a few remnants of its parentage: psychic powers and the ability to transform. The transformation is no more impressive than that of, say, a Ditto, but its psychic abilities are incredibly potent. Make no mistake, this creature deserves the title of ‘mythical’ every bit as much as its sire does – but its close ties to the ‘mortal’ world, for lack of a better word, place it in constant danger, moreso than Mew itself. Invariably, people come after the Mew-child, trying to take its power for themselves; invariably, despite its resistance, the Mew-child dies as a result, though not without taking those who would threaten it down in the process. In short, when the Mew-child acts to the full extent of its powers, nobody – not even itself – lives to tell the tale.”
Wheels turned in the woman’s head. She’d never heard of this ‘Mew-child’ before – though it wasn’t like she could remember much anyway. She stood and closed the book, but before she could shelve it, a paper slipped from inside the back cover and drifted to the carpet.
It wasn’t a loose page – it was a scrap of notebook paper, torn in half. On it, in blue pen, someone had drawn a quick sketch of a Mew floating in a bubble and written underneath it a few hasty sentences: “MEW is DIVINITY. MEW is the BEGINNING AND THE END. MEW is PAST AND FUTURE.” An address followed, almost as an afterthought.
The woman read the note a few times over. The feline image in her head superimposed itself over the drawing, and she grit her teeth. I wish I could meet the person who wrote this, she thought. They don’t know what Mew did. For all of its power, it left me to die. I may not know much, but I know that. The paper crumpled in the palm of her hand. Without knowing exactly why, she slipped the book into one of her coat’s inner pockets.
***
The woman found herself in front of a run-down hovel of a house not far from Vermilion’s port. The sea breeze stung her eyes with salt, but she welcomed it. She was feeling something again. It didn’t matter what it was, but she could feel it in her chest, a spark of life that, if protected, could swell into a roaring flame. Ideas bounced around the inside of her head, joining and rejoining each other as vague shapes of plans began to form.
She knocked on the door. After a moment, it opened just a crack, and a baleful eye peered out. “Yes?”
“I, ah.” The woman held up the crumpled paper. “I found the note you left.”
That was all the person on the other side of the door needed, and the door flung open. “You did? I thought nobody would ever see that!” he exclaimed, a smile lighting up his weathered features. He was ancient, with creases upon creases lining his leathery skin, and the amount of hair on his face more than made up for the lack of it atop his head. He was hunched over almost double, bracing himself on the doorframe for support. “Come in, come in!”
Everything in the house was coated in a fine layer of dust, from the yellowed windows to the spotty countertops. “Can I get you something to drink?” the man asked in a voice that belied his age.
“No! No. I’m fine,” the woman said, trying to ignore visions of dusty teacups full of dusty tea.
“Suit yourself.” The man’s grin gleamed in the dim light. “What should I call you, by the way?”
The woman opened her mouth, then closed it again. She didn’t know, exactly. None of the names that anyone else had called her had felt right. Then she remembered the words on the sign from her memory. “Degree,” she said. “Degree Absolute.”
“What a name! And, since you came here after finding my note…” The man hobbled over to her and knocked her playfully on the arm. “You must be very interested in Mew, yes?”
“You could say that.” It was the truth, after all.
“I see, I see! Mew must have really changed your life!”
“No question about that.” Degree wasn’t sure what it was, but she felt that it was important not to lie to him. She would answer his questions honestly, but it wasn’t her fault if he wasn’t asking the right questions.
The conversation continued into the long hours of the evening, though the term ‘conversation’ was generous – the man was more than happy to spin stories of his youth and his encounters with Mew with Degree only offering occasional noises of assent and confirmation.
“This has been quite enlightening,” Degree finally said during a lull, standing up and brushing off her coat. “I’m afraid I must be going, though.” She’d not told him about what Mew did to her; somehow she didn’t have the heart.
“Ah, well. Thank you for spending time with an old fool like me,” the man said. “Here. Take this with you.” In one shaking hand, he held a small black notebook, bound with string. “Contact information for other people like us. Those who believe in the divinity of Mew. It would mean the world to me, knowing that our mission continues.”
Degree nodded. “Thank you.” She gently took the notebook and flipped through it as she left the house. The wheels were spinning ever faster.
She could find these people – them, and more.
She could band them together.
She could sway them, over time. It wasn’t that much of a jump from ‘Mew is divine’ to ‘its offspring is not.’
Then, they could find the Mew-child.
The corners of her lips curled upwards. When they found the Mew-child, they would find Mew. And then…
And then.
…but in a time inching closer and closer to the present…
Moon woke up.
She didn’t immediately know where she was. Harsh lights buzzed overhead, and she couldn’t move her arms or legs. The bed underneath her was thin and uncomfortable, and a persistent, dull ache ran through her back. Her mouth was dry, and her throat felt like cotton balls had been shoved down it one by one.
She felt simultaneously exhausted and like she had slept for years.
Not long after her eyes opened, people swarmed the room. Humans in long white coats, their faces unfamiliar, lifted her hands, strapped bands around her wrists, and stared at esoteric patterns that formed on nearby monitors. A thermometer appeared under her tongue and, after a few moments, disappeared just as suddenly. Moon’s eyes drifted towards the door of the room, where an egg-shaped Pokemon that had, appropriately, an egg in its pouch watched the proceedings with an expression of wide-eyed concern.
One of the humans ratcheted Moon’s bed into something approaching a sitting position, and her head swum. He opened his mouth, and noises crawled out like spiders. The lights above pulsed and throbbed in time with red-hot bullets that ricocheted around the inside of her head.
Moon clenched her eyes shut and visions danced in front of her.
A man, stern, with a face that was all sharp angles, binding her arms together, tinged with the colors of pain.
Snow, cold and biting, blowing in through a window, nearly obscuring a sign on a rusted metal wall. The only words she could see were ‘degree’ and ‘absolute’.
A bubblegum-pink Pokemon of indeterminate shape, looking up at her from her arms and smiling. Moon’s mind filled in the name: Pete. Longing filled her chest. What happened to you, Pete? Where did you go? I miss you.
Another pink Pokemon, nearly white, with an inquisitive cat-like face and a long slender tail. This image, this face, dwelled in front of her mind’s eye for far longer than the others, and the sight of it made her stomach turn. It knew, Moon thought. It saw me. It did nothing. It saw me, and it did nothing to help. She wasn’t even sure what it was that the Pokemon was supposed to help with, but she knew that she had been in pain, in trouble, and it had only disappeared after finding her.
Moon couldn’t leave the bed for what felt like another lifetime. She only barely listened to the people around her. “Dissociative amnesia,” one of them said. “Protracted fugue state,” said another. Moon didn’t know what any of it meant, and her mind distanced itself.
Eventually, Moon went home. At least, the two people with her called it ‘home’, but they also called themselves ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, so Moon didn’t know how much stock to place in them.
She didn’t know them. She didn’t know this place called home. She didn’t even know the name they called her – it wasn’t Moon, though that didn’t feel right either.
And so, with little fanfare, Moon disappeared from both their home and their lives.
Nobody ever saw Moon again.
***
A woman with no name wandered the streets of Vermilion. It was far away from where she had come, but she didn’t care. She was slender, almost gaunt; when it came to feeding herself, she didn’t care about that either. Her hair, once a shimmering jet black, was now pale white, well ahead of her age. She wore the same clothes she had arrived in town in, with only the addition of a ragged amethyst-hued coat and a pair of well-worn steel-toed boots that she had found at a shelter. They were enough to keep her warm during the long nights, and that was all that mattered to her.
Dark circles lined her eyes. She barely slept. Whenever she closed her eyes, that feline visage appeared in front of her, as if mocking her. She was no closer to understanding exactly what happened, but every time she saw the face, her teeth grit a little more. She had grown to hate it as time went on, that creature that represented the day everything was stolen away from her, right down to her memories. Even crueler, of the few memories that she had held onto, one was of Pete.
She wished she had forgotten him too. Remembering him hurt too much.
She had no destination, no goal; her feet guided her with no conscious input from her head. Still, it did not surprise her when she ended up in the town library. Very little surprised her anymore. The library was quiet, it was warm, and nobody there paid her any attention – which was how she liked it. She could pick a book off the shelves and read it cover-to-cover before leaving; it provided her with an escape from her own head that, while momentary, was still a welcome relief.
Her hand moved of its own volition, tracing patterns across the spines of the books that sat on the shelves. She pulled one free at random and brought it to a nearby chair, one that threatened to swallow her as soon as she sunk into it.
She opened the book without even reading the title.
A familiar catlike face stared back at her from the first page. She nearly jumped out of the seat before flipping back to the cover.
It read The Mythological Mew, by Tertia Reus.
She blinked. A memory had just snapped into place. She remembered the name of the creature whose gaze she couldn’t hide from. It was Mew, she thought.
Eager to remember more, she delved into the depths of the pages.
Hours passed. The book zigzagged across a range of topics, from the scroll depicting runic illustrations of Mew surrounded by ancient symbols for birth and death to the theoretical studies suggesting that Mew could use any technical machine it would ever be possible to make. One chapter even focused on the violent clone of Mew that had killed its creators before disappearing into the darkness of Cerulean Cave.
Her eyes, though, fell most heavily on the chapter titled, simply, ‘The Mew-child’.
“Some will claim that the Mew-child is only a myth,” Reus wrote. “However, I know that its existence is factual – because I have met it. It was only once, and it was under circumstances that I never wish to repeat, but I can personally verify that the Mew-child is real.
“I was only a young girl when it happened. The war was reaching its zenith, and humans and Pokemon alike were dying every day. My father had long since been killed on the front lines, and my mother had disappeared – no doubt a casualty of the war as well. I was alone in our home, with no idea of what to do or where to go. Someone began trying to break the door down, yelling from the other side for me to open up or face the consequences. I couldn’t very well comply, of course, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to try to escape – I was paralyzed with fear.
“So I did the only thing I could think of. I screamed.
“Not even a moment later, I heard a blast outside, and the person trying to break into my home suddenly stopped. Everything fell quiet. Then the doorknob turned, and, as if the lock weren’t even there, someone slid inside.
“It was a Lombre. I had only seen that type of Pokemon once or twice before, and they weren’t native anywhere near where I lived. It closed the door behind it, and gave me what I’m sure was supposed to be a disarming smile. Then it spoke.
“‘Are you all right?’ it asked. It didn’t say these words out loud, mind you. It spoke directly into my head. Lombre’s only flirtation with psychic powers as a species is the move Zen Headbutt, so I immediately knew that this Pokemon was not what it seemed. I told it that I was scared but I wasn’t hurt, then I asked it what it had done.
“‘I only ensured that you would be safe,’ it said, and it almost looked rueful. It didn’t go into more detail, but frankly I was afraid to ask. It sat with me, and as odd as it sounds, its presence was calming. And so we began talking. I got the impression that it didn’t get much of an opportunity to just talk to others. That was how I found out that this Lombre was, in fact, the scion of Mew.
“Naturally, I asked it how a Mew gave birth to a Lotad, though since I was young the question was more akin to ‘your papa must have been a Ludicolo then.’ The Mew-child smiled – again, an unnerving expression on a Lombre – and told me information that I am certain it had never told anyone else.
“The Mew-child is an odd mix of legendary and mundane, born from one parent mythical and one not. As such, it spends its life in the form of an average Pokemon – with a few divergences – but upon its death, its spirit persists and it reincarnates in the form of a different Pokemon. From what the Mew-child told me, it could be any Pokemon at all; the fact that it was at that time a Lombre was proof enough of that. But no matter its form, it retained a few remnants of its parentage: psychic powers and the ability to transform. The transformation is no more impressive than that of, say, a Ditto, but its psychic abilities are incredibly potent. Make no mistake, this creature deserves the title of ‘mythical’ every bit as much as its sire does – but its close ties to the ‘mortal’ world, for lack of a better word, place it in constant danger, moreso than Mew itself. Invariably, people come after the Mew-child, trying to take its power for themselves; invariably, despite its resistance, the Mew-child dies as a result, though not without taking those who would threaten it down in the process. In short, when the Mew-child acts to the full extent of its powers, nobody – not even itself – lives to tell the tale.”
Wheels turned in the woman’s head. She’d never heard of this ‘Mew-child’ before – though it wasn’t like she could remember much anyway. She stood and closed the book, but before she could shelve it, a paper slipped from inside the back cover and drifted to the carpet.
It wasn’t a loose page – it was a scrap of notebook paper, torn in half. On it, in blue pen, someone had drawn a quick sketch of a Mew floating in a bubble and written underneath it a few hasty sentences: “MEW is DIVINITY. MEW is the BEGINNING AND THE END. MEW is PAST AND FUTURE.” An address followed, almost as an afterthought.
The woman read the note a few times over. The feline image in her head superimposed itself over the drawing, and she grit her teeth. I wish I could meet the person who wrote this, she thought. They don’t know what Mew did. For all of its power, it left me to die. I may not know much, but I know that. The paper crumpled in the palm of her hand. Without knowing exactly why, she slipped the book into one of her coat’s inner pockets.
***
The woman found herself in front of a run-down hovel of a house not far from Vermilion’s port. The sea breeze stung her eyes with salt, but she welcomed it. She was feeling something again. It didn’t matter what it was, but she could feel it in her chest, a spark of life that, if protected, could swell into a roaring flame. Ideas bounced around the inside of her head, joining and rejoining each other as vague shapes of plans began to form.
She knocked on the door. After a moment, it opened just a crack, and a baleful eye peered out. “Yes?”
“I, ah.” The woman held up the crumpled paper. “I found the note you left.”
That was all the person on the other side of the door needed, and the door flung open. “You did? I thought nobody would ever see that!” he exclaimed, a smile lighting up his weathered features. He was ancient, with creases upon creases lining his leathery skin, and the amount of hair on his face more than made up for the lack of it atop his head. He was hunched over almost double, bracing himself on the doorframe for support. “Come in, come in!”
Everything in the house was coated in a fine layer of dust, from the yellowed windows to the spotty countertops. “Can I get you something to drink?” the man asked in a voice that belied his age.
“No! No. I’m fine,” the woman said, trying to ignore visions of dusty teacups full of dusty tea.
“Suit yourself.” The man’s grin gleamed in the dim light. “What should I call you, by the way?”
The woman opened her mouth, then closed it again. She didn’t know, exactly. None of the names that anyone else had called her had felt right. Then she remembered the words on the sign from her memory. “Degree,” she said. “Degree Absolute.”
“What a name! And, since you came here after finding my note…” The man hobbled over to her and knocked her playfully on the arm. “You must be very interested in Mew, yes?”
“You could say that.” It was the truth, after all.
“I see, I see! Mew must have really changed your life!”
“No question about that.” Degree wasn’t sure what it was, but she felt that it was important not to lie to him. She would answer his questions honestly, but it wasn’t her fault if he wasn’t asking the right questions.
The conversation continued into the long hours of the evening, though the term ‘conversation’ was generous – the man was more than happy to spin stories of his youth and his encounters with Mew with Degree only offering occasional noises of assent and confirmation.
“This has been quite enlightening,” Degree finally said during a lull, standing up and brushing off her coat. “I’m afraid I must be going, though.” She’d not told him about what Mew did to her; somehow she didn’t have the heart.
“Ah, well. Thank you for spending time with an old fool like me,” the man said. “Here. Take this with you.” In one shaking hand, he held a small black notebook, bound with string. “Contact information for other people like us. Those who believe in the divinity of Mew. It would mean the world to me, knowing that our mission continues.”
Degree nodded. “Thank you.” She gently took the notebook and flipped through it as she left the house. The wheels were spinning ever faster.
She could find these people – them, and more.
She could band them together.
She could sway them, over time. It wasn’t that much of a jump from ‘Mew is divine’ to ‘its offspring is not.’
Then, they could find the Mew-child.
The corners of her lips curled upwards. When they found the Mew-child, they would find Mew. And then…
And then.