Chapter Text
As Tanya walked out of her apartment on the third day after she had been told she would need to submit an actual visa to her new employers at the Silph Company, she felt almost… embarrassed by how badly she had panicked at the thought of having to scrooge up those documents in a week. She knew, in the moment, that it had felt like a natural, even logical outlet for her fears and anxieties about losing her job, but a few days of research had proven her fears to be wholly unfounded!
She greeted Angela as she left, raising a hand to wave as she slipped on her jacket for the cold weather and pushed through the door and began to make her way to the train station. Scowling at the light of the morning sun, she ignored the slight tremor in the raised hand, sure that it was due to the stress she’d been under for the past three days.
Perhaps it would have been near-impossible to get her paperwork submitted and accepted so quickly in her old world, she didn’t know. She assumed that such would have certainly been impossible in Japan, excepting the necessity of a diplomatic visit or something similar.
Certainly, if she hadn’t paid the equivalent of several hundred dollars to expedite the process, it wouldn’t have even been possible in this world.
She continued to walk along the cracked sidewalk of the corner of the Current Ward she inhabited, towards the nearby train station, keeping her gaze trained purposefully forward and trying her best not to notice the faint but pervasive scent of trash.
Despite knowing better, curiosity had compelled Tanya to look at whether she could be naturalized anytime soon. As expected, a few months was not enough time to be anywhere close to being able to apply for citizenship.
Unexpectedly, one only needed to have lived in Japan for three years to start the process. She wasn’t exactly aware of what the requirements had been in her last life, but considering that the minimum age here was fifteen, below the age of majority she had known, she was nearly certain that the standards were, yet again, relaxed compared to her last life.
That, however, would be a matter for the far future. For the moment, the thing she really needed was her work visa. Most of what she needed, she already had, which had been a relief to discover.
She looked down at her hand, frowning. Why had she gotten so anxious, then?
She put the matter out of her mind as the train station finally came into view. She pushed through the turnstiles that were always partially jammed. Her application was mostly filled out at this point and ready to be submitted digitally.
Her Secondary School Proficiency Certificate and the certifications that she could speak six different languages were proof of her education. A copy of her temporary residency permit, a copy of her lease agreement, bills for the electricity she used, and copies of bank statements detailing her pay from the two places she’d worked at thus far would serve as proof of both her having been in Japan for an extended period of time and being an exemplary example of a citizen.
Tanya pushed through the crush as best as she could. She managed to do better than her size might suggest, but it was nothing compared to how well she had managed back in her first life, considering how tall she’d been. Finally, she squeezed onto the train, pressed uncomfortably into the door.
Unfortunately, she lacked two things she needed to obtain a visa. The first was-
Tanya blinked. In the reflection of the window to her right, she could see an odd Pokemon standing still, its eyes closed as the train glided along its tracks.
If she’d seen it out of the corner of an eye, she might have mistaken it for a person, though someone far shorter than average. However, she’d seen plenty of this Pokemon in the dojo and been shocked into silence by its appearance at the time.
The tan-skinned Hitmonchan stood in silence, afforded a whole inch of space around it compared to the crush everyone else was in. Tanya couldn’t help but stare at the shoulder pad-like growths on its shoulders or the purple coloration of its torso and the kilt that was apparently a part of its biology.
Again, her eyes flicked to its blank face. Its face was squarely on the border of the uncanny valley, with the lack of nose, wide mouth, and large, closed eyes differentiating it just enough that she didn’t feel the unease one might if they were looking at an attempt at recreating human features that just missed the mark.
Shaking her head, she turned her gaze back out of the train. It felt odd, seeing something like that just walking around, but it was unavoidable to miss just how many dozens or even hundreds of Pokemon belonged to the people that inhabited the city. She supposed it would be like watching a gorilla or a macaque walking around and no one paying it any mind.
She refocused on her current objective. She was currently lacking two things that were required if she wanted to get a visa: a passport, and an eligibility certificate. Nothing she had could replace either, not even the Trainer Card that had been able to suffice in most situations up until now.
The latter was already taken care of. She’d sent an email before leaving home to the Silph Company that she needed an eligibility certificate, and that she would appreciate it if they would contact the Kanto Immigration Services Bureau for one. Considering she was changing jobs, it was even required that her new employer do what she was asking, and considering the mundanity of the request, she doubted there would be any trouble. She doubted the email would even be seen by any people for more than a few seconds. The process was supposedly highly automated.
The automation and the mundanity of the request were both important, because if she had been in the country legally, the only reason she would need to have that done was if her visa was being renewed.
If there were any problems with such a routine procedure for a multi-national company like Silph, it wasn't something she couldn’t smooth over. Probably.
Or, at least, they would be once she finished with the task she was traveling towards.
The more important problem was definitely her passport, since there was absolutely no way she could acquire one.
Legally, it was obviously impossible for her to get one, as she’d never visited this world’s Germany or the Pommern region, hadn’t set foot in the country, and had absolutely no documentation proving she’d even left the place, much less been born there.
If she’d wanted to make the jump into committing crimes, or, committing more crimes than coming to Japan without any documentation, anyway, her options were almost as limited as the legal routes. She hadn’t looked up anything as idiotic as ‘where to buy a fake passport,’ but she’d quickly found that passports were more microchipped than in her first life. That undoubtedly made them more difficult to forge, which meant, with her time constraints, she had very little chance of finding someone to do the job in under a week, much less for any amount of money she currently possessed.
Fortunately, the visa requirement for her passport could be waived if she didn’t have one, as long as she was a refugee.
The train began to slow, and Tanya prepared to push out, past the people desperate to get onto the train.
She’d been telling her coworkers and superiors, at her translation job and at the docks, that she was a refugee. Her coworkers had been unwilling to dig into a subject she always made sure she looked uncomfortable about, while the jobs she’d taken were ones where her superiors didn’t care about the legal reality as long as they had enough proof for the government not to bother them, which had been covered by her Trainer Card.
Despite what she’d said, it hadn’t been a legal reality.
The doors opened, and Tanya pushed forward, the strength hidden by her size allowing her to push past surprised commuters relatively easily.
Before starting her research, she’d feared that the process would be as difficult as it had been in her first life, but she was once again surprised by the apparent generosity of the systems governing Japan. Much of it was built around getting refugees resettled or repatriated somewhere other than Japan, but the path to integration had a surprising amount of support, from what Tanya could determine.
She pushed into the open air and, after orienting herself, began to walk with purpose north of the station. The documents she had would help prove she wasn’t taking up their meager resources, and that all she really needed was the waiver they could provide that would allow her to skip needing a passport.
She turned to her left and continued striding forward, past small storefronts and residential apartments. This would definitely be pushing the envelope of the week she’d been given, but as long as she got emailed the waiver today, she could attend her visa hearing later that afternoon with her documentation in place, submit the digital application for the visa and have it processed over the weekend, and then email her information to Silph on Monday.
She would need to submit physical documentation as well, but Constsance Kitky had told her digital records would suffice until tax season in two and a half months.
It took only a few more minutes for Tanya to find the refugee center. Outwardly, it looked like a low-rise office building that was just as boxlike and drab as the old office. Even the name on the building, which might have ordinarily differentiated it from the buildings around it, was painted in gray lettering that was barely a shade off from the paint on the building itself.
Still, the words ‘Japanese Center for Refugees, Vermillion Office,’ were legible, and she quickly strode past the iron gate and well manicured patch of grass that might charitably be called a lawn, through the glass doors, and into the building.
A paper sign with a QR code gave her a digital map that directed her towards her destination. The entrance to the Refugee Status Processing Center was as unassuming as the exterior of the building.
The inside was… well-used was the best way she supposed she could put it. The chairs were of a uniform make and model and seemed, to her eyes, to be just below what one might call comfortable, but the unique wear and tear on each served to differentiate the forty or so filled and unfilled seats.
The wooden desks that six workers were sitting behind might once have looked imposing in the right conditions, but the stains, both dark and light, kneecapped any such feeling one might have gotten from the thing.
From the almost uniform tiles on the ground and the unremarkable ceiling that managed to have been marked in several places, to the frazzled looking people going between the rows of people seated in the room, Tanya found herself all the more sure that well-used fit this place to a tee.
She briefly glanced down at her phone and tapped the button to indicate that she had arrived on the website she had been directed to from the main Ministry of Foreign Affairs webpage. After a long second, it told her that she was thirty-third in line, and that number eighteen was being served.
She glanced back up, towards the display showing an identical number eighteen, and then, after a brief glance around the room, she sat down in one of the aging chairs that had the least amount of tan, spider webbing cracks in its blue exterior.
Tanya shot a brief look at the chugging space heater that had probably been dragged out of some musty storeroom and then looked back down at her phone. If nothing else, a moment to collect her thoughts and go over what was next would do her some good.
By the time she finished going over her plans for the immediate future, politely declined the offer of a water bottle and gone over what would be expected of her by one of the workers walking between the chairs, as well as how she planned to answer the questions that would inevitably be asked of her, the number displayed on the screen behind the desk and on her phone had only increased by eight.
She briefly felt the urge to speculate how her lesson with master Ikube would go before dismissing it. It would undoubtedly be just like the lessons she’d had with him for the past week.
Tanya took a deep breath and only then noticed that she’d been tapping her leg. She scowled at it, wondering when she’d started doing that.
SLAM!
Tanya flinched.
For a moment, the war was no longer over. She was back, because of course she’d be sent back eventually; this farce would end, and she’d end up knee deep in muck or a hair's-breadth away from having her skin and muscle and organs punched with holes one by one by one or having every piece and part and portion of her heated, melted, burned, and charred or sent somewhere else or spending eternity dancing on a spinning plate flung through a kaleidoscope of indescribable sensation for all time-
VRRRR.
The moment passed.
Tanya blinked and looked down at her phone, her neck stiff, and found that the number now read thirty-one. She gulped, her grip on her phone and the chair relaxing slightly.
That… wasn’t good. It certainly hadn’t been normal-
She gulped and turned her attention to the five stations set up at the five wooden desks on the far end of the room, standing up, walking towards them, and sitting down in a chair closer to them now that her turn was upon her. One had just been filled, and the number ticked to thirty-two. She scanned the others, trying to guess which would be the one she would sit at.
She found it quickly. A glum looking man with tanned skin and darker hair speaking in heavily accented Japanese seemed to be finishing up his business.
“So… there’s really no chance I can stay?”
The kind looking woman shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, sir, but Kanto is quite firm with its stance on invasive Pokemon. Without the correct documentation, your only recourse is to trade your Pokemon to a region either without import restrictions or where Braviary are native, or… you could take measures to ensure that she won’t have any Eggs while here?”
The man reeled back for a second and then, the five-foot-tall bird next to him let out an ear-splitting cry that caused everyone not already looking at it to flinch. The man vehemently shook his head.
Tanya glanced at it for a moment longer. Its talons looked like they were at least half the size of the Weedle that plagued her apartment.
“We won’t do that!” he said, his accent making his words almost unintelligible as the fire that had briefly flared up just as quickly dissipated into blubbering. “Bu- But where will I go? It took-”
“Not to worry!” the brunette exclaimed. “You couldn’t have foreseen this,” she lied. Tanya was certain that something so obvious as what Pokemon you could and couldn’t bring with you into the region was published somewhere. “I believe that Ever Grande City has lifted such restrictions on the species due to the nearby American military base.”
“Ever Grande City?”
She began to talk to him about the Hoenn region, but before Tanya could hear anything else, her phone vibrated once more, the number on the screen behind the desks changed, and someone else moved on.
Tanya sighed and stood. Her guess had been wrong, then.
As she made her way forward, she couldn’t help but frown internally. Unlike the smiling, peppy woman helping the man two seats to her right, the older man in front of her was frowning and unhappy, wearing shabby clothes that somehow managed to look out of date even to her uncaring sense of fashion. The deepening of his scowl as she sat down sent her positive projections for his meeting into a nosedive.
Not that she was unprepared for a bad experience, of course. Tanya always tried to prepare for the worst these days. Though the fact that she was having to go through all of this on such a short notice was perhaps a sign that she clearly wasn’t being paranoid enough.
Tanya bowed her head. “Hello. My name is Tanya von Degurechaff,” she said respectfully. “I am here to apply for the status of refugee and also obtain a waiver for the requirement to present a passport for my work visa.” As she finished, she placed the manila folder containing what paper copies of the documentation she did have on the desk in front of her.
The man’s eyes narrowed immediately and severely. “So you don’t have a passport?” the old man said, scratching his balding head with one hand while doing his best to cross his arms with the singular arm that wasn’t currently engaged in attempting to tear away what little hair he still had on his wrinkled, balding head.
Tanya nodded. “I do not.” From his demeanor, she highly doubted he would appreciate the waterworks she had planned to possibly employ.
The old man grumbled under his breath, and Tanya pretended not to hear any disparaging comments he made. His behavior was far from what she would have expected from an exemplary member of the government. He was likely a volunteer, because unless the labor he was offering was of the free variety, she doubted the government would have wanted his services.
Besides, well over a dozen links on the websites she'd visited related to the center were begging for people to help in community service.
Still, he did begin rather quickly. He snapped pictures of the papers in the manila folder, of the trainer card she kept in her wallet, and had her email matching digital copies of her teaching certificates, her trainer card, and her temporary residency permit.
She declined to have him explain how the copies would be deleted. She had already done a cursory examination of the process herself, and the answer apparently boiled down, once again, to Pokemon. Apparently, some of them had the ability to go inside computers.
Even more grudgingly, after waiting a few moments for his computer to tabulate the information from the various sources it had just been fed, the man said they would be skipping the preliminary questions. She hadn’t the foggiest idea of why he found the idea contemptible, considering it would save both of them time, but she remained as polite and deferential as possible.
“Why didn’t you register with the Japanese Center for Refugees upon your arrival to Japan, wherever it might have been?” he asked accusingly. Tanya’s estimation of the man continued to drop. Rather than this being a bad day or being a poor worker, neither of which really excused his lackluster behavior, it seemed the man might just be a bigot, which begged the question of why he’d volunteered to work at a refugee center of all places.
Still, she remained the picture of acquiescence. “I was unaware of the specific laws upon my arrival in Japan and was afraid of being deported back to my home region.”
Ignorance of the law was a very poor excuse for having broken it in her opinion, but the website very specifically said that ignorance of the law would be accepted as an answer as long as you weren’t suspected of any other wrongdoings. It was a part of trying to get refugees and immigrants to actually register with the government instead of going under the radar.
“Why didn’t you register earlier than now?” the man continued, his tone even more pressing. “Again,” she replied, “I was afraid of being deported back to my home region. Additionally, I was more focused on getting by.”
He scowled, another accusations dripping from the tip of his tongue, and then he looked back at his computer screen. “You come from Germany? From… the Pommern region?”
She nodded once. “And what’s so bad about that place?” he asked rhetorically.
Tanya remained stoic as she began to lie. “Any number of things, but the specific reason I decided to leave was the flood that happened last year.” If she was going to lie, which she would have to do considering her actual arrival in this place, she needed to minimize the chance she’d get caught in the lie.
Refugees were people either facing the threat of violence in their home country, which Pommern certainly experienced regularly based on the news articles she could find, or suffering from climate disasters, which had grown in size and frequency over the preceding decades.
Tanya’s experience in the war could serve as the backbone of a lie about her being on the run from corrupt officials or organized crime, but there would be gaping holes in such a story caused by her lack of familiarity with the area, physically and culturally, that the system might find it convenient to drop her through. Forming a lie based around a flood that had actually occurred in that region would help explain her lack of ability to provide documentation.
The man blinked languidly at that. “And your parents?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Tanya raised one back. “They were…” she began, hesitating for the briefest moments to feign sadness, “killed. I was on my own for months before the flood destroyed all my physical possessions. I decided to leave it all behind after that.”
“Why now?” he continued, his tone accusatory and not at all sympathetic to the thirteen-year-old.
Tanya tried to sit up even straighter. “I am changing jobs and require a visa since I am not a citizen of Japan yet. Since I don’t have a passport, I need the refugee waiver.”
“Changing jobs?” he clarified. She nodded. “And your previous jobs did not require you to show a visa?” he asked, a predatory grin growing in the corners of his mouth and his rising tone.
Tanya replied, “I provided them with proof of my residence as well as my Trainer Card,” carefully not saying that he was correct. She wouldn’t care much whether the docks were hurt by some investigation, but her past coworkers and supervisors would be her future coworkers and supervisors at Silph.
She raised both of her eyebrows as the man actually let out a growl. “I understand,” he bit out between gritted teeth. She quickly returned her face back to neutral, wondering if the man just wanted others to suffer. Clearly, he was a bad fit for a forward facing service job such as this if his intent was not to help her but trying to poke holes in her story or find people to prosecute for the sake of it.
“To confirm,” he said with another glance at the computer screen next to him, “you only want help with obtaining a visa?”
She nodded once. “Yes, sir.”
He licked his lips. “Why does a little girl know so much about loopholes in the law?”
One of her eyes twitched involuntarily, but she said nothing in reply, for a moment. She hadn’t expected a question like that and needed a moment to think and not to irritate the man in front of her.
Getting her case denied wouldn’t be the end of the world. She was sure she could get another job outside of Silph within the two weeks required before her temporary residency permit terminated due to her lack of a job. Getting deported was far from likely.
If he did reject it, however, she wouldn’t be able to reapply for a week, which would mean the job at Silph would pass her by. It wasn’t even close to paying a median wage, but it was a lot closer than her job at CCTS had been paying.
She sniffed once. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I figured it was prudent to get a trainer card so that I wouldn’t be breaking the law in the remote case I caught a Pokemon. The fact that it sufficed as a form of identification was a happy accident,” she replied with a straight face.
The man openly rolled his eyes at that and leaned over the desk. “You get a trainer card but you neglect to register at the refugee center, hmm?” He glared openly at her. It wasn’t intimidating in the least, considering how old, wrinkled, and thin he was, but she stiffened her posture and expression as much as possible just in case. “Why flee Germany, then? I’m sure there must have been some region there where your prospects would have been decent. Instead, you traveled all the way to Kanto. Why?”
Tanya took another moment to gather her thoughts and answer the question. “Part of it is that this is just where I ended up,” she began truthfully. “Mostly, I decided to seek out Japan because I felt that I would fit in here,” she continued. Certainly, she would have fit in perfectly if she’d just been reborn here instead of dropped into the ocean. “After reading about places I could go, I was convinced that I would acclimate best to the work culture and job opportunities here than anywhere else. Thus far, I’ve been proven right.”
“You’re lying.”
Tanya blinked. What?
The old man grinned. “I think you’re lying, at least about that last part. I can hear it in your voice.”
Tanya just raised an eyebrow. “And do you have any proof of that?” she asked while mentally scoffing. Of all the things she had lied about, appreciating the work culture and opportunities offered to her in Japan in general and Autumna in particular were certainly not among them.
He ignored her question, his voice rising in volume. “I’m certain you’re just here to copy the trainers of old, if even that.” He spat the last word out like a curse. “Maybe you just want to take advantage of the people doing the real work here.”
Mightily, Tanya resisted the urge to roll her eyes and opened her mouth to say that she would be working at a multi-million dollar corporation within the next four days.
“You're lucky,” he said, still glaring daggers into her, “that this ain’t like the old days. Goddamn government won’t let us use a psychic screenings anymore-”
“Frank!”
The old man flinched at that, and before Tanya could wonder what exactly a psychic screening was, the woman from a few seats over whacked the back of the man’s head with a bundle of papers. “What’s taking you-”
She looked from Tanya to Frank, who Tanya only now realized hadn’t even introduced himself, and groaned. She leaned down next to the browbeaten man to look at his computer screen.
She let out a long suffering sigh and then bowed to Tanya. “My apologies for Frank,” she said, rising back up with a glare at Frank before turning back to her. “It seems you meet all of the requirements to receive refugee status and more than qualify to receive the waiver you need for your visa.”
She glared down at the old man who muttered something unintelligible under his breath, and the woman smiled brightly. “Again, my apologies for Frank giving you trouble. I’ll have a talk with him later. If he doesn’t give you the documents you need in the next five minutes, just call for me and I’ll finish for him.”
Tanya smiled back at the woman and thanked her, and she was soon out of the office, the barest hint of smugness playing on her lips while Frank glared silently at her retreating back.
Just one more step, and then she’d achieve her goal.
--OxOxO--
Tanya sat ramrod straight once again. This time, she was sitting with her back to one of her walls rather than at the desk beneath her bed. Thankfully, that Weedle hadn’t managed to get back in during the short couple of hours she’d been gone.
With one last bite, she finished off the half of a sandwich she’d bought on the way back. The shop selling it declared that the cartoonish, simple face and even more cartoonish, simple body were near-perfect recreations of a Pokemon called Diglett, and that only the color of the sandwich bread, the roma tomato nose, and the olive eyes were different.
She’d been highly skeptical but bought it anyway because it was one of the shop’s cheaper options. On the train back, her Pokedex app had confirmed that Diglett did, somehow, perfectly resemble a brown, mole-like cylinder with very few other features.
Her attempt to find out what the hell ‘psychic screening’ simultaneously quickly bore fruit and also sent her down a rabbit hole…
Tanya glanced at the digital clock on her computer and, seeing that she still had a few minutes before the meeting, typed a query into the now familiar search engine.
She nodded to herself. Looking up psychic screening had momentarily piqued her curiosity and sent her down a Buneary hole into the different types Pokemon could be. Tanya hadn’t been able to avoid learning at least a few. All of them shared names with regular words and they were scattered in various sayings and metaphors.
She had been compared to fairy-types far too often for her liking, though thankfully never twice by the same person once she expressed her displeasure.
While Tanya had barely been able to recall ten types from those first two games, scientific consensus was that there were eighteenish.
The ish was because there was debate over whether there were more than that, though Tanya didn’t have the time or the desire to do a deep dive into scholarly debates about the validity of various methodologies to determine whether something was a type or not.
She frowned. While her guess of what a psychic screening was had been correct – a way to read minds and determine what one was thinking – reading minds was, thankfully, not something every psychic Pokemon could do. Still, if she wanted to keep her secrets, maybe there was a device that could block such things?
Tanya's frown deepened. Wait, just how smart were psychic Pokemon? She supposed a Pokemon wouldn’t need to be too smart to mentally understand something like aggression, but calling something a screening implied a much higher level-
Tanya’s email refreshed itself, and Tanya’s wandering mind focused on the newly received email. It was time, then.
She opened it and clicked the link, and Tanya rehearsed how this meeting was supposed to go. Her visa request had been submitted digitally, the waiver and her newly received eligibility certificate included alongside a 3D scan of the physical documents she’d taken using her phone. The video call she was about to join was mostly a formality to confirm her identity and allow a real pair of eyes and ears to confirm she was who her pictures said she was.
The call connected, and Tanya smiled widely as the name of her opposite popped up. Steven Nara.
She looked up and found her smile frozen for a moment as the man grinned.
He was fairly nondescript. He was young, though not as young as her, with long black hair tied back in a ponytail. Otherwise, his appearance was completely bland.
His appearance was not what had given her pause.
He introduced himself. “Howdy! I’m Steven Nara.” Tanya stopped staring at the Pokemon hovering in the air behind his shoulder and looked instead at the camera built into her computer. “Tanya von Degurechaff,” she said in reply.
His grin widened, and his eyes roamed over his screen, scanning her documents. “Alright, everything looks good from what I can see. The 3D scans match the digital ones, everything is a genuine copy. I’ve just got a few questions to run through, and then you’ll have your visa! Exciting, right?”
Tanya nodded her assent. “Very.” As he looked down from the camera, her gaze drifted down from the camera to the Pokemon behind him.
Three purple hexagonal prisms, barely transparent enough that she could see through the outside faces but not through the faces of the prisms on the opposite side of the creature, were arranged with no gaps between them and so that the bases were facing just slightly away from the camera. Intersecting with each of the three prisms, one prism above the other two, was a cube indented with what looked like two cameras, while a rectangular speaker and a heap of pareidolia made each set look like a face.
The cubes were oriented so that the eyes of each face were pointed towards the center of the construct, where the three rectangular prisms met. It looks like thin lines of… something ran between the three cubes and into that spot.
The face of each of the cubes was also intermittently flashing a soft, white light, like the entire face was a light or a screen.
“Alright,” he said, scrolling, “you are working for… The Silph Company?” he asked, slightly concerned.
Tanya blinked. Why was he concerned for her? “Yes. Is there a problem with the eligibility certificate?” she asked. He shook his head vehemently. “Of course not. Silph is just…”
He shrugged. “It’s not the first place I’d have thought a refugee would go for a job, is all.” He moved on swiftly.
Tanya was still wondering if perhaps she should have done a bit more research into Silph before she’d decided to go to that interview when he asked her if she liked living in Japan. “Yes, Autumna is much cleaner than anywhere in Pommern. Certainly less dangerous,” she said, not daring to say anything else, just in case. He hummed in agreement as he continued to go through her papers.
Assuming she was around in this world that long, she should make plans on visiting the region she had supposedly come from, just so she had something to talk about in the remote case it came up. She also resolved to look more deeply into Silph. Her research had all come up squeaky clean, but perhaps she had missed something crucial.
“Ah, and a basic trainer card as well. Any plans on what Pokemon you’re going to catch first? Will it be from the first members of the digital Pokedex or the later group? Oh, or will you look at older versions of the Pokedex?”
Tanya blinked in confusion. “Eh, what?”
He blinked and then smiled ruefully. All three of the screens of the Pokemon behind them flashed white in unison. “Sorry, sometimes I forget not everyone is as interested in Pokemon categorization as I am.”
He cleared his throat. “Professor Oak, rest his soul, made the first handheld digital Pokedex,” he explained. “The technology wasn’t nearly as good back then, obviously, so he could only include about a third of the Pokemon that actually call Kanto home. Despite that, he included personal notes he'd made on them and rapidly made innovations over the next decade.”
“Fascinating,” she said, injecting a spark of interest into her voice to hide just how uninterested she was. He beamed at her. “Well, just about the only Pokemon I have any experience with so far is Weedle, and that is wholly against my will.”
He winced. “Nasty pests, aren’t they?”
Tanya nodded in reply. “Indeed. I’m living on the east side of Autumna and wasn’t aware of just how close the area was to the forest when I scoped out the place,” she complained. “Otherwise, I am… nervous about psychic types-”
He whirled around comically to look at his Pokemon and then whirled back. “Is that why you were looking at Combyte?”
Tanya suppressed the urge to sigh. He’d seen her staring, then. “To be honest, I haven’t seen that Pokemon before, so I was a bit curious.”
His eyes widened. “Really? Well,” he said, rapidly changing gears, “I’d be happy to tell you all about-”
Tanya cleared her throat. “Actually,” she interjected, “I have a commitment I made coming up soon, so I’m afraid I don’t have that much time between when this is supposed to end and the beginning of that commitment.”
His eyes widened, and he nodded quickly. “Right, of course! If you’ll just hold up your documents in front of the camera so I can confirm they match the ones you submitted, we’ll be good to go!”
She did, one by one. During the silence of shuffling papers, he was unable to help himself and nattered on about how ecologically similar Pokemon were fascinating. Tanya just smiled and nodded and typed a note to herself, next to the list of other odd, Pokemon-related things she had yet to look into.
As she finished and the last paper was confirmed to be a match, he spoke again. “Er, if you don’t mind me asking, was there a reason you were nervous about psychic types?” Tanya fought back a sigh and said the first thing that came to mind. “They were… involved in the death of my parents,” she said.
Steven winced and quickly apologized. ”Um, well, everything is good on our end. You have been approved to receive a visa. You should see an email pop up with a link to the app where you can access your digital copy,” he said just as the aforementioned email popped into existence. “We’ll send a physical copy to the address listed in your records on Monday, or, should there be some kind of slowdown, within a week after that.”
Tanya smiled, thankful. Just like that, she was safe. A few more emails, and she would be employed by Silph.
He cleared their throat. “Uh,” he began nervously, muttering “I hate this part,” under his breath. “We at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would like to give you a gentle reminder that you wouldn’t have had to pay for expedited processing if you’d begun the process at an earlier time! Our online services are available at all times. Regardless, we hope you have a wonderful day!”
“Thank you, Mr. Nara,” she replied. He nodded. Just as she was about to exit the call, he said, “Um, there was just one more thing.”
Tanya blinked and raised an eyebrow. “Yes?” she asked, eager to move on with her day.
He cleared their throat again. “Um, just, y’know. Keep an open mind about the Pokemon you meet, even if you have had a bad experience!” The Pokemon hovering over their shoulder blinked a slightly brighter white twice in a row and let out an odd, electronic humming noise.
Tanya’s reply was as automatic as it was false. “Of course. Again, thank you for your time, Mr. Nara.” He nodded and smiled. “No problem.” The call disconnected.
Twenty minutes more saw her documents being submitted to the Silph Company website, and a congratulations message telling her to await news of her acceptance to the Silph family soon.
Tanya sat back in her chair. It wasn’t luxurious by any metric, being a second hand office chair with a loose wheel and tatty upholstery. She felt happy to have gotten that crisis out of her lap.
Her mind wandered between thoughts for a moment, and then, like a cracking whip, she snapped out of her momentary stupor. It was time for her to-
A trio of emails appeared in her inbox, all three talking about the parts of the onboarding process she could complete ahead of coming into work, if she wanted, and Tanya sighed. Concerns about her mental state would have to come later, then.
--OxOxO--
“Truly, you are advancing at a prodigious rate, Tanya.”
“Master Ikube, that would suggest I am a prodigy, which I most certainly am not.”
“I suppose, then, that if I ask you once more to participate in the intermediate exhibition, you will refuse once more?”
“You suppose correctly,” she replied as she finished her last kata for her warm down. She had considered going; it could be a way to increase her social prestige at the dojo, after all, or to win an award that could serve as proof of her abilities to those outside of Autumna’s Fighting dojo. In the end, however, it just wasn’t worth her time. The only people witnessing it would be other people who used the naginata. Ikube was the only person who was going whose opinion she particularly cared about, and she wouldn’t even be getting an award out of it.
Hell, they wouldn’t be doing any actual fighting in such an exhibition. They’d just be practicing their katas.
“I think I’ll wait until I take my placement test to show off,” she said, and Ikube chuckled. He thought she would be bolting straight from rokkyu to yonkyu, if not up to sankyu. Jumping straight from the sixth to the fourth or even the third basic rank sounded wonderful to her ears, and though Tanya doubted she was that good, as Ikube obviously had an incentive to compliment her to keep her coming back and paying nearly every day, she did hope a demonstration of her basic understanding of how to wield a naginata would allow her to move on to simultaneously study other weapons.
She frowned. When she had time anyway. “Master Ikube,” she began, “I think I’ll have to put off taking other classes for the time being,” she said. His eyes widened slightly.
“Oh? But you seemed so dead set on expanding your horizons,” he said, trailing off slightly. “What happened while you were gone?”
Tanya waved away the hint of concern in his voice. “I’ve just gotten a new job, and I expect that it will cut into my time off from work quite deeply for the next few weeks. Until I’ve stabilized, I’m afraid you’ll be stuck as the only one teaching me,” she said.
He scoffed. “How terrible,” he snapped back with a grin. Then, he stilled as she put away the equipment, a small scowl on his face. “Is that all it is?”
She blinked and glanced over her shoulder. “Of course,” she answered swiftly, because everything was. She'd gotten the job, after all, and her situation was improving. The lack of free time would be a problem, but that was the only one she had at the moment.
He raised an eyebrow, a familiar look on his face, and Tanya fought the urge to roll her eyes. Ikube tolerated a degree of informality because this was a personal class, but rolling her eyes was probably just a touch too much, especially since that look meant he was about to remind her of one of the parts of his teaching she was less than enthusiastic about.
“Yes, yes, cultivate the mind and knowing oneself, but it’s not that bad,” she said, partially parroting him.
He frowned, his nostrils flaring, and she hid a wince by bowing her head. She’d disciplined the 203rd for infractions in their respect for her, of course, but she barely had to do that because she’d made sure to beat any such inclination for committing said infractions during their training. Most of the time, they had been purposefully informal to distract from just how bad the war-
“Tanya,” he said, and her head dipped lower. The more philosophical and ephemeral things that Ikube taught to her were either things she already appreciated or did, like practice and hard work, or spiritual drivel that wasn’t useful for achieving her goals in the slightest.
Her mind ran wild and distractingly as the silence stretched on.
When he refused to say anything more, Tanya rose back up and busied herself with finishing putting away her gear, taking care not to face him. “It… I-”
“I take it,” he said slowly and cautiously, “that it involves you having come to Kanto from Germany? Or something that happened in Germany?” he asked. She nodded, because the Empire had basically been Germany with some territorial additions, and she had already told him of parts of her last life, the truth plastered over with synonyms and metaphors and faked apprehension.
“Something,” she said, verbalizing her thoughts just as slowly as he had talked, “lingers in my mind,” she said.
There. She'd said it.
In all likelihood, it undoubtedly had to do with her service during the war. Whatever was happening wasn’t being caused by anything even close to regret, because she’d only ever done what she’d had to.
A part of her had an inkling of what it might be, but she subconsciously strangled the thought before it could form. She had other, more important-
“Something is blocking me from… cultivating my mind,” she finally said, almost cringing at how reluctant she sounded. Still, that was all she was going to say about it. He certainly wasn’t legally obligated to keep her precious secrets, she hardly knew what might possibly be wrong, and, moreover, she wasn’t going to voluntarily give someone else the kind of power over her life that came with keeping secrets.
He was pensive as she busied her hands with putting away equipment that did not take this long to put up. Why hadn't she finished already? “Tanya. My recommendation to you is that you find someone to talk to about this. It doesn’t have to be me,” he said quickly, “but I have some experience with something similar, from after the war,” he said. For a moment, he stared off into space, and a holt of anxiety lanced her kneeling chest. “If you don’t feel you can speak to me,” and based on the look on his face, he rightly assumed that she didn’t, “then I implore you to speak to a close friend, a professional, or even a Pokemon that can at least lend an ear.”
Tanya frowned. “I… am not exactly flush with cash at the moment,” she admitted as she stood. The classes weren’t overly expensive, but doing them as often as she could added up. Getting her paperwork pushed through certainly hadn’t helped matters, and she’d also bought some more professional, and crucially new clothing to accompany her new job. “I am not willing to skip my training with-”
He raised a wrinkled hand. “Then you do not have to pay today, or for the classes we’ll have over the weekend, as long as you use that money to get help.”
Help.
She grit her teeth, about to reject-
“Please, Tanya. Promise me.”
She gulped down her response as she reassessed his expression. She doubted he’d do anything as drastic as stop teaching her if she refused to promise him…
But why wouldn’t she? He was basically giving her free classes in order to use money she would have spent under his tutelage to instead begin working on a problem she’d already known she needed to address. It would be the height of foolishness to refuse to promise him.
Still, she hesitated, and she wasn’t even sure why.
“I promise,” she heard herself say, and as he smiled widely and clapped her on the back. Her balance had improved enough that their height and strength difference wasn’t quite enough to send her sprawling when he did that. Instead, she merely stumbled slightly.
And as she left, she supposed that, at the very least, it was something else to do over the weekend. If it went well, the problem would be solved just as quickly, and she could focus once more on moving forward.
--OxOxO--
It rested, ruminating, fragmented.
A thousand, a million, a billion, an uncountable number of fragments.
If it focused, it knew what it would find.
Direction was meaningless here, in this ‘world.’ That half of the name this place was often, almost singularly, called, was false. It was only a world in the sense that its entirety, from the molecules to the atoms to the electrons to the quarks to strings and to that which existed below even them, to the grass and water and the islands of floating rock and ground, to the vast, unending weave of distortion that eclipsed in scale any universe that had or did exist by more than two orders of magnitude, could not be fathomed by those below, those smaller than it.
Still, if it focused, if it looked at the space that this realm of pure distortion weaved and bent and contorted invisibly around, it could limit itself and fantasize that direction had meaning here. Then, and only then, could it see any of those fragments.
It did not.
It knew what it would see.
Thousands, millions of faces, all blending together as they passed. An unending deluge of faces and forms, many Pokemon, many human.
It recognized each and every one.
It rested, thinking, fragmented.
How could it not? Time and space were its equal, not above it. Neither could hold it, could bind it, could swaddle it, could comfort it.
It existed, everywhere and always, all at once.
Some of the faces and shapes were more familiar, but instead of a face among millions, it was a single face among thousands. Millions of names. Billions of beings.
Still, it recognized each and every one.
Volo wielded it, atop a mountain or in a cave. Cynthia commanded it, on a large island or a small one. A human, names and shapes and beings as varied as the universe itself, in times long past or times to come but always and forever now, taught it and retaught it and never stopped teaching it compassion and love and, above all, to care.
A human, names and shapes and beings as varied as the universe itself, in times long past or times to come but always and forever now, taught it and retaught it and never stopped teaching it greed and anger and, above all, sorrow.
It raged, as it always had, as it always would, at Arceus. It rose against its creator, who consigned it to an existence such as this.
To an unequal existence, for it and all its creation.
It earned its scornful moniker, the renegade. It lashed out at its creator, at its brothers and sisters and friends. It hurt them. It helped thousands, millions, billions plunge an unending, unbroken line of worlds into danger.
It calmed, as it always had, as it always would. Arceus, its creator, who had entrusted an existence such as this to it, its shadow and opposite, to that one thing that could truly, ultimately, rise up against it, should it become necessary.
Had entrusted to it an unequal existence.
It renounced its scornful moniker, the renegade. It lashed together its creator’s work, bolstered its brothers and sisters and friends. It healed them. It helped thousands, millions, billions and more uplift an unending, unbroken line of worlds into safety.
No others could do their work. Gathered on but a single world or scattered across an entire universe, there were none that could do their work.
Those that kept the peace and guided and protected the order of nature, Rayquaza, Kyogre, Groudon, Lugia, Ho-oh, Archassis, Quaetoalser, Pavoteratic, and countless others, could not do it.
Life and death, Xerneas and Yveltal, could not do it.
Truth and ideals, Reshiram and Zekrom, and even the union of both built upon the foundation of reality or the remnant of their divergence, Kyurem, could not do it.
The defenders of space beyond, Solgaleo and Lunala, and even that being which sought to consume infinity, Necrozma, could not do it.
The keeper and constructor and tinkerer of the infinite sentinels, Regigigas, could not do it.
The embodiment of the unreachable future, Miraidon, and the embodiment of the unknowable past, Koraidon, could not do it.
The ruler of scale and degree and proportion and friend to all that called itself Pokemon, Eternatus, could not do it.
The all-seeing sentinel of order and balance between all that existed, Zygarde, could not do it.
Mew, the First, and Mewtwo, the Last, could not do it.
Even the embodiment of time, Dialga, and the embodiment of space, Palkia, the twins from which all that existed could achieve change and growth, could not do it.
They were, all of them, things of being. Arceus was a thing of being.
It was a thing of nonbeing. An existence of nonexistence. An impossibility that defined itself in opposition to the idea of possibility. The imaginary imagined.
It existed unbound by reality, unbound by even that which had created it. Acting together, a being and a nonbeing, that which was and that which wasn’t, fighting, for all time, for love.
It rested, reflecting, fragmented.
Giratina fought.
For camaraderie. For friendship. For growth. For change. For love.
A being and a nonbeing, that which was and that which wasn’t, fighting, for all time, against the unbeing.
All that existed and all that didn’t, their two domains, their two pillars of order, against the unending, unquenchable, unrelenting unbeing that sought to reduce all that could and couldn’t exist into a fine slurry of miasmic, unchanging, unbeing identical to itself.
Giratina stopped fighting. Giratina rebelled. Giratina learned. Giratina began fighting.
Forever and always, Giratina would fight against the destruction of all that was and wasn’t. For love.
Forever and always, Giratina would balk at the unfairness of its existence or the unfairness of the existence of those smaller, less able than it, and would rebel against its creator to make things more fair. For love.
Forever and always, Giratina would be shown the power of camaraderie, of friendship, of love and bonds that transcended mere words and mere feelings, and it would learn. For love.
It rested, ruminating, fragmented.
A thousand, a million, a bi-
UNIQUE. UNREPEATED. UNPRECEDENTED.
The nonbeing, suffusing each and every part of the Distortion World and simultaneously indistinguishable from that which it suffused, stopped.
For an uncountably long amount of time and no time at all, all across its domain and nowhere at all, it paused.
It was split into an uncountable number of fragments. A fragment for each universe, the smallest possible portion of itself, poured into the facsimile of being.
Fragments were not it. Its fragments were not its mind or soul, were not its arms or legs or organs, were not its muscles or blood, were not its hair or skin. These fragments were but inconsequential, unremarkable dander in comparison to its nonbeing.
It was, it had been, and it always would be doing everything it was doing, had done, or would do already. There was no need for anything more than the smallest portion of itself. More than that might tear a world asunder.
Still, if it focused, if it looked at the space that this realm of pure distortion weaved and bent and contorted invisibly around, it could limit itself and fantasize that direction had meaning here. Then, and only then, could it see any of those fragments.
If it focused, it DID NOT KNOW what it would find.
It focused.
“Hmm? Giratina?”
It looked around. It hardly needed to look around. It was hard, as a nonbeing, not to notice all that was.
An open field, dominated by tall grass and teeming with life, stretched out around it. Hills rose in the distance, atop which sat a temple arrogantly named as if its meager height could hope to pierce the heavens. A river bisected the landscape, and opposite the hills, a group of wooden dwellings sat.
It looked down.
Lucas.
The name had been shared by tens of thousands with nearly identical features, as had the clothes and everything else about the landscape.
Together, they meant something.
‘This is Hisui,’ it had thought, was thinking, and would think again and again. Lucas had already taken down Volo, was taking down Volo, and would continue to take down Volo again and again.
Here and now, however, this was Hisui, and Volo was defeated.
“My apologies,” it intoned, very carefully not shredding existence as its vocal chords of nonbeing vibrated the air of being. “I would ask you to please repeat yourself, so that I may hear what thou said once more.”
The young man gaped up at him.
“You can talk?!”
Oops.
Fighting the urge to cover its mouth with a wing, it hastily explained. “Just as Arceus bestowed upon you a fragment of itself, to walk the world together with thee and see the world as it appears to thine own eyes, so too is this body but a fragment of myself. At this moment, I am focused."
A hand reached down towards a bundle of papers bound by a leather cover, and Giratina shook its head. The fragments of Dialga and Palkia were amused, as their real beings would be should he not leave soon enough. The fragment of Arceus behind the boy already had a knowing glint in its eyes.
Damn. Arceus was already there, then.
“Uh,” the boy said, “I just said I wondered what happened to that girl.”
Giratina tilted its head, careful not to rip the world to pieces once again. “What girl?”
He cleared his throat. “W- Well, I don’t really remember it all that clearly, but when Arceus told me what I needed to do, we got… interrupted?” he said, turning to the Pokemon behind him. His creator nodded, and Lucas turned back around. “Right, some girl came flying in out of nowhere and bumped into me. She seemed really upset and suspicious of Arceus… which,” he said, beginning to mutter and his voice hearable by all four of the legendary Pokemon around him despite it, “might have made me a bit more suspicious of what was going on than I would have otherwise been.”
Giratina was getting impatient. A small part was interested in how that had affected this world, but the much larger part wanted him to get to the point, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t already learned what had happened here. “Some girl?” he asked, insistence tingeing his words.
He nodded again and gave a short description of her. “Yeah. She thought Arceus had had my parents kill me, for some reason, and…”
He frowned. “She seemed to think Pokemon weren’t real.” He chuckled. “How insane is that?” He asked the question rhetorically, as if such a thing was plainly impossible to imagine.
It was impossible. Such a thing could not exist, in any lands that Arceus ruled, created, and protected.
Regardless, Giratina wasn’t really listening anymore. That…
Its eyes shot back up to stare at Arceus, and it inclined its head by a picometer in response.
He would be given answers, then. Giratina felt… anticipation.
Existing forever and always, at all times and places, and also in no place and never, stuck repeating its actions unceasingly, meant that Giratina’s existence was, quite often, boring.
Furthermore, if any significant part of its existence was boring, then Giratina had always been bored, was currently bored, and would always be able to look forward to being bored.
Something actually, wholly NEW was beyond exciting.
He almost left directly after that, needing to get back to fighting, preparing to fight, and recovering from fighting, but he allowed a brief moment to nod his head in thanks to the boy. “I give my thanks to thee, Lucas.
He nodded his own head, stylus working over the paper now clasped in his hands. “Oh, right! Um, if you meet her, be careful. She seemed really mad at Arceus for some reason. She might have even tried to do something to him before I left? I dunno, it was really bright,” he said.
Giratina stopped focusing, and the distortion world undulated as it stopped limiting itself. As a place of nonbeing, doing even that much was an extreme expression of interest.
A quick conversation, carried out just at the border of Arceus’s pocket dimension of pure being, made the distortion world positively writhe.
How interesting.
