A/N: I've been hinting at some mythology/worldbuilding in the story so far that this interlude chapter may make more clear. You are totally in the right if you read this and think "god damn Keleri go write some original fiction already", but I think it also helps answer the question in canon of 1) where did humans come from? and 2) why does the pokémon world have such a long history but basic facts about pokémon seem to be poorly understood?
Sometimes it seems like humans (or pokémon?) have just arrived in the pokémon world, and other times people are said to have been there for millennia. (The DPPt games even claim, memorably, that humans and pokémon used to be the same.) Like most competing theories, I propose the answer, Por que no los dos?
Ancient pokémon (or daikaiju, "great strange beasts") are based on the giant pokémon from the first season of the anime.
Interlude: The People of the Crossing
Gaia and Terra are two planets connected by an incredible distance and none at all. An enormous amount of power is needed to break through to cross between them, but all around us are, overlaid like pages of a book, other Gaias and other Terras, and other earths yet unnamed by explorers. Humanity has always explored, looking out at land and sea and sky and the stars, and finally our gaze turned toward a new frontier, of new and unexplored planets only a breath away.
But like our ancestors striking out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, so too was there danger and deadly forces we could not imagine. The loss of the First Crossing, that deserted Roanoake of those early days, told us as much, and so too were the incredible discoveries of the fractured Second Crossing obtained at great cost. But the people who stayed discovered even more, who we thought were going to their doom, but instead survived in a strange land with new and indispensable allies.
And when we, the Third Crossing, arrived, they showed us how to survive and how to thrive, and how to do more than thrive: to create, for the first time in human history, a society where the vast majority are cared for and do not suffer under food or economic insecurity, where clean water, autonomy, security, and education are human rights, and freely available to everyone under the aegis of a cooperative elected government.
We had a rough start. We vowed not to repeat the sins of the past, but pain and fear got the better of us, as it always does, and as it will again—but we will always fight, and hope, that one day it will not. And the strange life forms of Gaia, these elementals with great and terrible and wonderful powers, who helped the Second Crossing survive and shortly the Third Crossing too, and all the people of Gaia united at last, protected and cared for, they showed us the way, and they will again.
On this fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Saffron City, I thank pokémon once again for putting up with humanity, and I look toward this year's crop of new trainers to learn from the past and to look toward the future, and to put your skills to the test so that they can continue to protect and serve everyone in our beautiful new world. I look forward to sharing this adventure with you. Let's go!
—Speech by Professor Maggie Druyan (Spruce I) at the Saffron City Golden Jubilee, 51 CR
x.x.x.x.x
Partial transcript of HIST202 lecture by Professor Aaron Singh (Holly III)
"The initial assays were done by drones, and the temporal anomalies weren't noticed until much later—they were smaller in magnitude—the drones would go through the breach for an hour and come back with 70 minutes of data, for instance. The First Crossing was a group of about two dozen people, survivalists and wilderness experts who would set up a base camp for the next group, due to arrive in about six months. Six months passed. Then nine. After a year, someone went back—crossing meant opening the breach, which depleted fuel that they used day-to-day, but eventually they decided to risk it—and that person, returning, found that barely a month had passed on the Terra side.
"When they returned through the breach with a rescue party, the First Crossing camp was entirely gone, with only a few scattered items long-disused and overgrown, and no trace was found of the people left there.
"The Second Crossing was better prepared: with the temporal anomalies clear, they set out with more technology and resources to fall back on, and a clearer understanding of what it meant to cross. One could come back, to resource-depleted, climate-changed Terra fairly easily, but years would pass on the Gaia side. And it still wasn't clear what had happened to the First Crossing. They were wary. But months turned into years, and they founded towns on the rich shores and rivers and scarcely had to farm, and the animals were nearly tame and unafraid of them, in a world untouched by humans since its beginning.
"But soon they found that there were more than animals on Gaia: there were monsters, lizards with fire breath and walking plants. Even as they sought to understand these wonders, the first daikaiju appeared, living hurricanes and forest fires that nearly obliterated all they had worked for, and they could guess at last what had happened to the First Crossing.
"Some returned to Terra, but others discovered the secret of befriending monsters instead of fighting them. Some learned to command armies of elementals and people, to tame the aggressive ones, and finally, to subdue the kaiju instead of running. And the Second Crossing made them their war-leaders in a world perpetually at war, their dukes and caesars.
"Centuries later, from their perspective, we arrived—the people of the Third Crossing.
"We were different. The survivors of the Second Crossing had returned a year or two ago, from our perspective, and they told us about monsters. We were people desperate enough for land and skies unmarred by pollution, landless people, people without citizenship, people who didn't exist.
"We came prepared, of course. The best weaponry of modern Terra: guns, drones, cybernetic implants, combat enhancements; doctors filled us with augmentations, the better to survive in a hostile world."
x.x.x.x.x
Excerpt from We Are Explorers by E. Mordvinova and C. Muomelu (Linden II)
The temporal distortion was well-known by the time the Third Crossing was organized, and a new breach was established with stabilizing factors that would allow a large number of colonists, soldiers, supply vehicles, agricultural vehicles, animals, etc. to pass through over the course of about a week without significant disjoint, and option for a quick abort if the same problems with destructive entities arose.
The analogy of dimensional travel is thus: a pencil pierces two sheets of paper to form a path between them; so too does the breach link the sheaves of two worlds. The problem of temporal distortion might be analogous to both those papers rotating out of sync, and so initially the pencil length that joins the papers is very small, but it grows as they twist away from each other. Although the time spent in this "throat" is instantaneous, the "length" of it growing as the dimensions fall out of sync creates dangers that are still poorly understood. "Old" breaches have been used successfully to travel backward to Terra, but they expose the user to what is hypothesized to be a hostile extradimensional environment that is wholly unexplored and uncharacterized.
The Third Crossing was aware that the Second Crossing had survived and that they had established towns and cities. It was not until communications were established that the real extent of the temporal distortion was realized, and how disparate the people were from the original settlers.
The Third Crossing arrived at a time when the people of the Second Crossing were in a period of expansion. The construction of large ocean-going vessels had been forgotten for hundreds of years after the initial destruction, and a long history played out while restricted to a single landmass. However, with the help of pokémon, eventually this technology was rediscovered and the Second Crossing made more and more distant journeys, sparsely colonizing new continents, or returning to bring word of barren, elemental-less lands, or not at all.
The emergence site of the Third Crossing was the Kansai continent. They found a country with only a few Second Crossing villages already established and a generous people living on what came to be called Vermillion Bay. There the inhabitants survived on rich seasonal seafood, and only engaged in a little hunting and farming to add variety.
The Third Crossing had overprepared, ready for disaster and death: they had expected the tougher soils of Terra that required reinvigoration to grow anything, collapsed fisheries, extinct animals, hardship, famine. The richness of the new world caught them off-guard. They did their best to integrate with and learn from the people of the Second Crossing. One of the stated goals of the colonization effort was to avoid the kind of environmental abuse and unsustainable exploitation that had ruined Terra, and their harmony with nature appealed to the Third Crossing's leaders. It was a hopeful attitude, but also a practical one: the people of the Second Crossing had survived for millennia in the face of all the legendary dangers that the original refugees had reported, and so it was vital to learn how they might protect themselves.
Children and adults of the Third Crossing were bonded to pokémon for the first time. In the days before pokéballs, most people could only bond with one or two, if at all, and the search for a compatible monster could be arduous. People who could support four or more were considered "adepts". Traditionally anyone with such abilities was scouted and sent to a master in the capital of Nalea, the main Second Crossing region, but that order had broken down in the distant colonies. Further, the Third Crossing governing body rightly judged that they would be seen as a threat by the lords in Nalea, not as allies and bringers of otherworldly comforts as the Kantonian people did.
The Third Crossing built dense cities in ecologically insignificant areas and preserved vast tracts of virgin wilderness. They were able to survive a handful of ancient pokémon incidents with the help of the Second Crossing and pokémon, as well as modern technology, and became confident that their preparation had been sufficient. The development of nearly-modern pokémon training and the wide adoption of apricorn balls were also progressing at this time. Overall this was an idyllic period, where it seemed that the fears regarding Gaia's "monsters" and the potential for the Third Crossing's arrival to be violent or even genocidal had been assuaged.
The ancient ho-oh that destroyed Saffron Town was a kaiju of kaiju.
Although there existed records of encounters with other ancient legendaries and Primal legendaries that were often fatal, none of them had ever threatened a major human settlement. And not just any easily-evacuated village, but the center of the Third Crossing's activity on Gaia, and the repository of the modern technology and knowledge they had brought from Terra.
The Third Crossing's primary residential, commercial, and industrial areas suffered catastrophic damage. It severely damaged critical infrastructure and left thousands without running water, electrical power, etc. for months. The ho-oh emitted extreme heat that caused marine life die-offs in Vermillion Bay and sterilized the soil along its path, and the water vapor and ash it generated was lifted high into the atmosphere and caused unusual weather all over the globe.
If it had appeared earlier, the operation would have been abandoned, but the damage was severe but recoverable. However, it was immediately obvious that the Third Crossing had been far too centralized. A number of important data backups were lost or almost lost due to their proximity to one another. The Third Crossing governing body immediately began developing plans to spread out throughout Kanto and Johto, so that a similar attack could not again be so decisive. (Unfortunately, Saffron City eventually grew into Gaia's largest and densest metropolis, and it could see severe casualties today if its defenses were to fail.)
This expansion brought the Third Crossing into conflict with the Second Crossing in Kanto, and notably with the powerful steel- and dragon-cults in Johto, leading to decades of back-and-forth aggression. Technological development focused on the rapid evolution of anti-pokémon devices, as well as black-market distribution of modern ordinances to Second Crossing groups, and the militarization of pokémon usage among the Third Crossing. The biological manipulation of pokémon was also explored and led to the creation of the first human-designed pokémon, Mewtwo. Ironically it was this pokémon, designed to be a weapon, who was able to end the conflict through diplomacy.
x.x.x.x.x
Sometimes it seems like humans (or pokémon?) have just arrived in the pokémon world, and other times people are said to have been there for millennia. (The DPPt games even claim, memorably, that humans and pokémon used to be the same.) Like most competing theories, I propose the answer, Por que no los dos?
Ancient pokémon (or daikaiju, "great strange beasts") are based on the giant pokémon from the first season of the anime.
Interlude: The People of the Crossing
Gaia and Terra are two planets connected by an incredible distance and none at all. An enormous amount of power is needed to break through to cross between them, but all around us are, overlaid like pages of a book, other Gaias and other Terras, and other earths yet unnamed by explorers. Humanity has always explored, looking out at land and sea and sky and the stars, and finally our gaze turned toward a new frontier, of new and unexplored planets only a breath away.
But like our ancestors striking out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, so too was there danger and deadly forces we could not imagine. The loss of the First Crossing, that deserted Roanoake of those early days, told us as much, and so too were the incredible discoveries of the fractured Second Crossing obtained at great cost. But the people who stayed discovered even more, who we thought were going to their doom, but instead survived in a strange land with new and indispensable allies.
And when we, the Third Crossing, arrived, they showed us how to survive and how to thrive, and how to do more than thrive: to create, for the first time in human history, a society where the vast majority are cared for and do not suffer under food or economic insecurity, where clean water, autonomy, security, and education are human rights, and freely available to everyone under the aegis of a cooperative elected government.
We had a rough start. We vowed not to repeat the sins of the past, but pain and fear got the better of us, as it always does, and as it will again—but we will always fight, and hope, that one day it will not. And the strange life forms of Gaia, these elementals with great and terrible and wonderful powers, who helped the Second Crossing survive and shortly the Third Crossing too, and all the people of Gaia united at last, protected and cared for, they showed us the way, and they will again.
On this fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Saffron City, I thank pokémon once again for putting up with humanity, and I look toward this year's crop of new trainers to learn from the past and to look toward the future, and to put your skills to the test so that they can continue to protect and serve everyone in our beautiful new world. I look forward to sharing this adventure with you. Let's go!
—Speech by Professor Maggie Druyan (Spruce I) at the Saffron City Golden Jubilee, 51 CR
x.x.x.x.x
Partial transcript of HIST202 lecture by Professor Aaron Singh (Holly III)
"The initial assays were done by drones, and the temporal anomalies weren't noticed until much later—they were smaller in magnitude—the drones would go through the breach for an hour and come back with 70 minutes of data, for instance. The First Crossing was a group of about two dozen people, survivalists and wilderness experts who would set up a base camp for the next group, due to arrive in about six months. Six months passed. Then nine. After a year, someone went back—crossing meant opening the breach, which depleted fuel that they used day-to-day, but eventually they decided to risk it—and that person, returning, found that barely a month had passed on the Terra side.
"When they returned through the breach with a rescue party, the First Crossing camp was entirely gone, with only a few scattered items long-disused and overgrown, and no trace was found of the people left there.
"The Second Crossing was better prepared: with the temporal anomalies clear, they set out with more technology and resources to fall back on, and a clearer understanding of what it meant to cross. One could come back, to resource-depleted, climate-changed Terra fairly easily, but years would pass on the Gaia side. And it still wasn't clear what had happened to the First Crossing. They were wary. But months turned into years, and they founded towns on the rich shores and rivers and scarcely had to farm, and the animals were nearly tame and unafraid of them, in a world untouched by humans since its beginning.
"But soon they found that there were more than animals on Gaia: there were monsters, lizards with fire breath and walking plants. Even as they sought to understand these wonders, the first daikaiju appeared, living hurricanes and forest fires that nearly obliterated all they had worked for, and they could guess at last what had happened to the First Crossing.
"Some returned to Terra, but others discovered the secret of befriending monsters instead of fighting them. Some learned to command armies of elementals and people, to tame the aggressive ones, and finally, to subdue the kaiju instead of running. And the Second Crossing made them their war-leaders in a world perpetually at war, their dukes and caesars.
"Centuries later, from their perspective, we arrived—the people of the Third Crossing.
"We were different. The survivors of the Second Crossing had returned a year or two ago, from our perspective, and they told us about monsters. We were people desperate enough for land and skies unmarred by pollution, landless people, people without citizenship, people who didn't exist.
"We came prepared, of course. The best weaponry of modern Terra: guns, drones, cybernetic implants, combat enhancements; doctors filled us with augmentations, the better to survive in a hostile world."
x.x.x.x.x
Excerpt from We Are Explorers by E. Mordvinova and C. Muomelu (Linden II)
The temporal distortion was well-known by the time the Third Crossing was organized, and a new breach was established with stabilizing factors that would allow a large number of colonists, soldiers, supply vehicles, agricultural vehicles, animals, etc. to pass through over the course of about a week without significant disjoint, and option for a quick abort if the same problems with destructive entities arose.
The analogy of dimensional travel is thus: a pencil pierces two sheets of paper to form a path between them; so too does the breach link the sheaves of two worlds. The problem of temporal distortion might be analogous to both those papers rotating out of sync, and so initially the pencil length that joins the papers is very small, but it grows as they twist away from each other. Although the time spent in this "throat" is instantaneous, the "length" of it growing as the dimensions fall out of sync creates dangers that are still poorly understood. "Old" breaches have been used successfully to travel backward to Terra, but they expose the user to what is hypothesized to be a hostile extradimensional environment that is wholly unexplored and uncharacterized.
The Third Crossing was aware that the Second Crossing had survived and that they had established towns and cities. It was not until communications were established that the real extent of the temporal distortion was realized, and how disparate the people were from the original settlers.
The Third Crossing arrived at a time when the people of the Second Crossing were in a period of expansion. The construction of large ocean-going vessels had been forgotten for hundreds of years after the initial destruction, and a long history played out while restricted to a single landmass. However, with the help of pokémon, eventually this technology was rediscovered and the Second Crossing made more and more distant journeys, sparsely colonizing new continents, or returning to bring word of barren, elemental-less lands, or not at all.
The emergence site of the Third Crossing was the Kansai continent. They found a country with only a few Second Crossing villages already established and a generous people living on what came to be called Vermillion Bay. There the inhabitants survived on rich seasonal seafood, and only engaged in a little hunting and farming to add variety.
The Third Crossing had overprepared, ready for disaster and death: they had expected the tougher soils of Terra that required reinvigoration to grow anything, collapsed fisheries, extinct animals, hardship, famine. The richness of the new world caught them off-guard. They did their best to integrate with and learn from the people of the Second Crossing. One of the stated goals of the colonization effort was to avoid the kind of environmental abuse and unsustainable exploitation that had ruined Terra, and their harmony with nature appealed to the Third Crossing's leaders. It was a hopeful attitude, but also a practical one: the people of the Second Crossing had survived for millennia in the face of all the legendary dangers that the original refugees had reported, and so it was vital to learn how they might protect themselves.
Children and adults of the Third Crossing were bonded to pokémon for the first time. In the days before pokéballs, most people could only bond with one or two, if at all, and the search for a compatible monster could be arduous. People who could support four or more were considered "adepts". Traditionally anyone with such abilities was scouted and sent to a master in the capital of Nalea, the main Second Crossing region, but that order had broken down in the distant colonies. Further, the Third Crossing governing body rightly judged that they would be seen as a threat by the lords in Nalea, not as allies and bringers of otherworldly comforts as the Kantonian people did.
The Third Crossing built dense cities in ecologically insignificant areas and preserved vast tracts of virgin wilderness. They were able to survive a handful of ancient pokémon incidents with the help of the Second Crossing and pokémon, as well as modern technology, and became confident that their preparation had been sufficient. The development of nearly-modern pokémon training and the wide adoption of apricorn balls were also progressing at this time. Overall this was an idyllic period, where it seemed that the fears regarding Gaia's "monsters" and the potential for the Third Crossing's arrival to be violent or even genocidal had been assuaged.
The ancient ho-oh that destroyed Saffron Town was a kaiju of kaiju.
Although there existed records of encounters with other ancient legendaries and Primal legendaries that were often fatal, none of them had ever threatened a major human settlement. And not just any easily-evacuated village, but the center of the Third Crossing's activity on Gaia, and the repository of the modern technology and knowledge they had brought from Terra.
The Third Crossing's primary residential, commercial, and industrial areas suffered catastrophic damage. It severely damaged critical infrastructure and left thousands without running water, electrical power, etc. for months. The ho-oh emitted extreme heat that caused marine life die-offs in Vermillion Bay and sterilized the soil along its path, and the water vapor and ash it generated was lifted high into the atmosphere and caused unusual weather all over the globe.
If it had appeared earlier, the operation would have been abandoned, but the damage was severe but recoverable. However, it was immediately obvious that the Third Crossing had been far too centralized. A number of important data backups were lost or almost lost due to their proximity to one another. The Third Crossing governing body immediately began developing plans to spread out throughout Kanto and Johto, so that a similar attack could not again be so decisive. (Unfortunately, Saffron City eventually grew into Gaia's largest and densest metropolis, and it could see severe casualties today if its defenses were to fail.)
This expansion brought the Third Crossing into conflict with the Second Crossing in Kanto, and notably with the powerful steel- and dragon-cults in Johto, leading to decades of back-and-forth aggression. Technological development focused on the rapid evolution of anti-pokémon devices, as well as black-market distribution of modern ordinances to Second Crossing groups, and the militarization of pokémon usage among the Third Crossing. The biological manipulation of pokémon was also explored and led to the creation of the first human-designed pokémon, Mewtwo. Ironically it was this pokémon, designed to be a weapon, who was able to end the conflict through diplomacy.
x.x.x.x.x
