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Say, do you remember Occulture Magazine? Nobody else seems to, but I do. I remember poring over them in my academy days, my heart racing. The creatures in those pages fascinated me to no end. Beautiful machinations from the distant future, offering a glimpse into the world to come.
And they had to exist, right? These couldn’t be invented reports. How could so many people invent the same creature without collaboration? That’s the sort of thing that gives you hope, isn’t it?
Then I encountered the Violet Book… The most renowned report on future pokémon sightings, confirming Area Zero as the point of origin. It was in the academy’s library too; I couldn’t believe it wasn’t part of the curriculum!
Pokémon from the future, appearing centuries ago in a labyrinth of mystery. There had to be a logical reason for it. A time machine, perhaps? Something like that had to exist, right? Who would have built it? How could they have built it? And why pokémon from the future…
Those thoughts kept me up at night. I spent years at the academy, researching this phenomenon. How will those pokémon come to survive in the era of artificial intelligence? Will they serve specialized ecological functions like the pokémon of today? Was this why we brought future pokémon to Area Zero? To learn the answer to these questions? So much time theorizing, spinning those theories into reality.
Then I met someone. Someone who knew, who understood. Only she knew of a different book. She had a different understanding of what happened on that expedition.
I’d read every back issue of Occulture and never encountered the creatures she described. She was insistent on her memory being correct, but time and time again, we found nothing but the issues I remembered. And yet… her accounts were so vivid I found myself believing her. Perhaps these memories came from another time, another place.
We had a theory of time travel, an explanation for why both books came to be. Scarlet and Violet, two separate accounts of the same journey with diverging results.
We believe that time converges on axes, crossing together at billions of points with trillions of results.
Isn’t it curious how two results came to be in the same world?
Perhaps that’s why she left. She couldn’t accept a world where my result was correct…
I’m sorry. I lost sight of myself for a moment. Did you ever read those magazines? They were what led me here, on this expedition. You must have, certainly. They’re in the academy’s library after all.
If not, then… Hm… Surely, there must be a world you want to be taken to?