He seems to be in an extraordinarily unusual garden. 

To his left, there’s a meadow of flowers, with tidy paths of stone, where everything vaguely floral fluctuates wildly from mundane to fantastic, and from fantastic to crude.  In one patch, roses; in other patch, bizarre pitcher plants eternally pouring water into a pond. In one patch, daisies; in another patch, a large, many-petaled sunflower, with 'Emperor Mulberry, Let it Be!" written on it. That particular sunflower is next to another sunflower, with writing inviting that same emperor to have sex with a tree, in less pleasant language, and that sunflower is next to a bridge made entirely from tall, layered mushrooms, and that bridge is next to a tree with leaves as black as lacquer, and a brook with seaweed like glitter, and that book is next to a bench, comfortably grown out of a single piece of wood and speckled with lichen, with the cycling through the colors of the rainbow -

And so on. 

To his right, there is a house. It's reasonably tasteful, unlike the rest of landscape - seemingly carved out of a gigantic turnip jutting wildly out of the ground, mind, but tasteful. Black walls with silver tracings, delicate stained glass windows, a simple door, and a sign above the door, reading 'Witch In Residence, Proceed At Own Risk' in a language he doesn't speak.

Ruby blinks. This definitely wasn't where he was expecting to be.

"Ruru, Coco, Nana, are you alright?"

He looks over them, worriedly. They're uninjured, but Nana's fur is ruffled is slightly ruffled from the unexpected fall and the surprise, so he makes sure to restore her to her natural coolness. Once the essentials are taken care of, he returns them to their pokéballs, and looks through the box that fell with him for anything useful. It's got most of the stuff he planned to bring with him on his escape, plus a gift from his dad. He almost throws it out, but doesn't want to litter and he actually needs the shoes if he's going to be doing any real traveling, so he puts them on and sets off towards the house looking for an explanation. 

Every plant on the property abruptly fades to a sort of withered black, and ominous mist starts pouring out of several previously innocuous crevices, when he knocks.

A short, stout woman pokes her head out of the door. She lets out a little surprised chortle, and the landscape returns to what it was.

“... goblin gods, I ‘aven’t had a kid with moxy enough to bother me in years,” she says, in his native language. “All of ‘em get scared away by the tall tales and all that ‘Barbara the Destroyer’ rubbish. Imperialistic pricks. Win one war, kill a couple dozen battalions, and suddenly you’re a dragon and a half, ain’t that the way? - come in, doll, lemme get you a cuppa somethin’ sweet.”

She pushes the door all the way open, gesturing for him to go in.

"I'm not a doll," Ruby replied. He's mildly annoyed, but his curiosity is stronger than than his annoyance, here, and the house is quite pretty, so he follows her inside. 

“- oh, that so? Gotta have a name, then - always just call ya ‘you’, but it’d get mighty old, mighty quick.”

(A wooden coconut in the kitchen spontaneously breaks itself in half, and various flowers growing out of the granite bend and pour obscure liquids into it. A bamboo sampling stirs.)

"My name's Ruby."

He doesn't notice the kitchen; he's busy looking at the decor.

The door enters into a sort of living room, with a well-appointed bar, a bookshelf, and several exquisitely comfy sofas and recliners; it opens up into a kitchen, an elaborate looking indoor koi pond, and a mundane hallway. The flooring of the day seems to be ‘exquisitely comfy grass’, most everything else is wood or fur or stone, and the ceiling seems lit by little orchids, peering down at them from unseen rafters - the effect is of a floral starscape. There’s also a fireplace, beside the bar; it ignites when they come in, without external prompting. There are a few paintings, on the walls; they seem to be of protest marches.

And the bar has giant toadstools in lieu of anything wooden, of course. It just wouldn’t be a proper witch’s house, otherwise. 

“Pretty name. Got a preference ‘tween cacao and hazelnut, then, Ruby?”

"Thanks," he says, with a grin. "I'm not sure what either of those are, but I guess cacao? This is a neat place you have; the architecture is a bit odd, but the aesthetics of how it fits together are fine, and I bet lots of Pokémon love it."

The translation effect that Barbara’s using, charming thing that it is, smooths over the word ‘Pokemon’ into the adjacent word ‘goblin’. Close enough.

“Thanks - I don’t keep a bunch of the little critters, meself, but I haven’t heard a complaint!”

She shuffles into the kitchen, and returns with one coconut-half for herself, and one for Ruby; she swipes an open bottle of wine from the bar, pours a swig into her coconut-half, and flops down on one of the recliners.

“So, Ruby, what sorta nonsense brought you over to the Wrathful Witch die Weintraube, this fine evenin’? Gotta say, I’m gettin’ awful curious.”

"Is that where this is? A portal opened on me while I was on my way to Hoenn and dumped me in the garden out there. I was hoping to find out where I was, and where the nearest contests were."

“I am the Wrathful Witch die Weintraube, ‘though me friends call me Barbara; this is my house, by Frosch, in the Land of Beer. You got less moxie and more klutz, if you don’t know the name, seems like, though that’s still an awful lot of either. And Hoenn - no, never have heard of it, ‘m afraid, might have to consult someone better up on their geography. What sorta contests are you gettin’ at?”

"I haven't heard of those places, but I didn't study geography that much. The names sound european, though? Hoenn is a region in Japan. As for what contests I plan to win, the answer is all of them, eventually, but I'm only prepared for cool, cute, and smart contests at the moment. I'll need a larger team if I want to get beauty and toughness."

“Haven’t heard of Japan, either. An’ I still don’t know what you mean; maybe try a paragraph’s worth of summary, ‘stead of a sentence? Suspect we split up contests different ways, ‘round here.”

A lecture on contests? You don’t need to ask Ruby twice.

“Contests are performances, the ultimate test of your skill as a trainer! Comtestants groom themselves for each category, to show off their own unique talents and appeal to the judges and audience! There are four levels of contests - Normal, Super, Hyper, and Master -and in order to compete in the next level up you need the ribbon from the previous stage. For each stage, there are five seperate categories of contests!”

“In a coolness contest, the goal is to be as impressive and flashy as possible, and to show off your knowledge of fashion! Being awesome is the point. Confidence is also an important part of any coolness appeal, and is no less important than having a fabulous style. For my team, Nana is the ace of our coolness appeal.”

“A cuteness contest is all about being adorable! A cute pokemon should be delightful, playful, charming, and childlike, without giving up their appealing appearance! Cuteness, more than any of the others, cannot be forced-it has to be entirely natural, or it won’t work in the slightest. Nana takes that spot for me.”

“After that is smart contests, and with them, Ruru! A successful smartness appeal will show up the contestant’s intelligence and brainpower. Here, in addition to looks, a standout appeal to demonstrate cleverness on the psrt of the contestant is a must!”It always helps if they’re is actually smart, but unlike the other categories, it technicolly only needs to seem smart rather than be smart; they’re still contests, not IQ tests.”

“The last two categories are toughness and beauty. I’m still looking for some Pokémon to fill these categories. For the first of the two, it’s a competition to show off how strong and fearless they are. These aren’t actual battles, but they’re much closer than most other appeals, and many of the same Pokémon are good at both. Beauty contests, meanwhile, track how pretty a contestant is. Much like coolness, a successfulful appeal with Beauty almost always involves paraphernalia to show off beauty, often in the form of fancy clothing and jewelry for the contestantant. Condition is important for all the contests, of course, but for beauty contests, it’s even more important, as are are other methods of increasing beauty such as hairbrushing and nail decoration to contribute.”

“Lemme give you a piece of advice, kid: round ‘ere, just call it a ‘goblin pageant’, skip the unhelpful monologues. How ‘bout I give you a ride to Frosch, you talk to someone else about this, we never see each other again?”

He blinks.

"What kind of Pokémon is a goblin? I've never heard of those. If Frosch is likely to have a map, that sounds as good a place as any.”

“Frosch’ll have maps. And I use translation, not bein’ a polyglottal type, an’ as far as I can tell you just said ‘what kinda goblin is a goblin’. Not sure why it’s renderin’ differently the other way - wanna have somethin’ to give you the local language, by and by, ‘fore you’re on your way?”

“That’s odd. The way it translated earlier, it was acting as though Pokémon was the name of a species. I didn’t know machine translation was that good yet; how does it do that? Being able to talk to people would definitely be helpful.”

“I grow a bean. You eat a bean. You can speak Milk. It’s not that complicated.”

"I've never heard of something like that," Ruby says, looking somewhat confused. "Is this a Psychic thing?"

“It’s a witch thing, me bein’ a witch... witches are people born with the death of a heartfruit trees, able to grow goblin fruit and goblins, prone to gettin’ all fanged up, divided into circles, immortal ‘till their mid six hundreds? Ringin’ a bell?”

“No, it doesn’t. That portal seems to have taken me farther afield than I thought.”

She produces a bean out of her sleeve, and flicks it at him.

“Language bean, ride to the city, you go bother someone else?”

Ruby catches it, deftly. This woman isn't exactly polite, but he has a fairly good grasp of her character by now, and she's not likely to try and trick him with this. He shrugs, subtly moves it so that he catches a whiff of the sent without having to visibly sniff, and if there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it, eats it.

"I didn't know you could do that."

“Good for you,” she says, in a suddenly-comprehensible foreign language. “Now get outta my house; got a carriage outside, it’ll take you where you wanna go.”

A carraige, huh? Kinda rustic, Ruby thinks to himself, but at least it’s rustic in an elegant sort of way; if it was a csrt, even walking might be better. At least this way it probably wouldn’t be too long until they had some proper civilization where Nana, Coco, and Ruru could show off their beauty.

He heads outside without voicing complaint.

There is, as promised, a carriage - one shaped like a pumpkin and entirely lacking in horses, for whatever reason, but still a carriage.

It lacks any obvious engine, but once he's seated within it, it starts moving very quickly. Eighty miles an hour, at a guess, although it's difficult to ascertain precisely. 

It's hardly the modern conveyance that Ruby tends to prefer, but there's no denying the aesthetic taste of the designer; eccentric, certainly, but hardly ugly. He bites back his suggestions, and refrains from calling out his pokemon; this woman seems hardly likely to appreciate their radiant beauty. Instead, he pulls out some of his papers and starts plotting potential appeals.

Barbara seems content to maintain a sort of uncomfortable silence.

They reach their destination. The door slams shut in his face, and the pumpkin speeds away.

The city around him is... different. 

The streets are paved with a strange black wood, rather than with anything more modern, and almost every building seems primarily wooden in construction; hardly any of those buildings are taller than three stories. On those streets, there are people - most with fashion senses leaning towards fur, glittery gemstones, metal jewelry, and copious exposed skin - and other pumpkin carriages. The sidewalks are dotted with trees, and almost every building seems to have a heavily landscaped ‘front yard’ regardless of its status as a residence.

The sign on the building in front of him - which most closely resembles a sort of three story log-cabin with prettily-engraved steel in the gaps between logs, surrounded by attractively looping paths through a blue-themed flower garden - reads ‘Accommodation of Recent Immigrants’. 

The architecture and fashion here is definitely bizarre, but it was already obvious he was far away, both from Johto and from civilization in general. The sooner he can figure out where he is, the sooner he can get somewhere with a reputable contest system.

Ruby steps out of the carriage and heads towards the immigration building. He has no intention of staying here, but this should give him the information to find out where he needs to travel to.

The woman at the front desk is blonde, chipper, and - for whatever reason - wearing realistic cat ears, 

”Hello!” she chirps. “How may I help you?”

“I arrived in the area unexpectedly, and don’t know where I am. I was hoping you would have a map, and maybe a public phone.”

“We aren’t nearly well funded enough to have instant communication, but we do have plenty of cartography!”

She gestures at a wall with four maps, framed and arranged in a grid - one labeled 'Frosch', one labeled 'The Land of Beer', one labeled 'The Empire', and one labeled 'The World'. Each one has a cheerful little 'you are here!' dot, indicating the location of the office, and each one is completely unfamiliar.

The map of the world, in particular, shows three major continents - or five, depending on how you count the weird one with three distinct sections, connected by narrow bands of land, and an internal ocean - instead of some more familiar number.

When they deny having the funfing for a phone, Ruby holds out hope that this backwater town simply lacks in funds in general, and prepares for a long transit back to civilization. When he sees the map, however, that hope dies; there’s just no way they would be so out of touch by accident; this is either some elaborate ruse, or he’s much farther from home than he thought. He’d been meaning to run from home, but that was to participate in the Hoenn contest circuit, not to hang out in some primative alternate reality.

Almost desperately, he looks for some sign that things aren’t as bad as he fears, looking for some sign on the map of a location with a higher population density, and thus more advanced technology, than his current locale. His thoughts go back to the day before he left Johto with his mom, and the night spent at the edge of illex forest. He’s known the move would be a big deal, but he hadn’t expected this.

Their population density seems weirdly uniform throughout the globe! Cities and villages are pretty evenly distributed - a little less common in deserts, a little more common in fertile plains, but not by that much. 

Are there any bigger cities near here?

Nope!

This is kinda concerning for his plans. Sure, he hadn't wanted to stick around, but his method for doing that would have been to run around the Hoenn region performing for contest ribbons. Now it looks increasingly likely that that's no longer going to be possible.

Still, it's not all downsides. All his Pokémon are probably going to be exotic here, and there are probably many Pokémon he's never even heard of that he can get to perform with. Ruby turns towards the map of Frosch, looking for the Pokémon center, and the Contest building, if it has one.

As the city of Frosch remains a city and not a theme park, and is correspondingly sized, the building labels are in exquisitely small print.

If he’s dedicated to the task of map perusal, he can still eventually discern a building labeled ‘Center for Goblin Paegentry’, and another building nearby it labeled ‘Center for Goblin Control and Miscellany’. 

He isn't, not really. If there's a Pokémon center here, he thinks, it's definitely going to be well labeled; a contest hall might well not be, but if there isn't even a center things are clearly different enough from the norm that he can't simply assume. There's clearly something important that's going to happen, but if it had been willing to explain it probably would have from the start. Instead, Ruby turns back to the front desk, and addresses the women with the odd skitty headband.

"Excuse, me, but what kind of lodging does Frosch have, and where would I find it?"

(Is it, really, a headband? It must be hiding under her hair, if so.)

“We have several rent-free instances of government housing!” she chirps. “But whatever you’ve heard about us nasty foreigners, we’re still plenty hospitable to children! We’d all die out, otherwise - you can knock on any door you like and get whatever you need, lodging or food otherwise.”

(He's not going to comment on it. His hat has been mistaken for hair more than once, and he's certainly not one to criticize someone for following through on their aesthetics.)

That's a weird way of phrasing it, honestly, but it's hard to tell if that's another translation glitch like he had earlier or something to genuinely be concerned about; if the former, it would probably be fairly rude to comment, while in unlikely the latter it might not be the best idea to.

"Where would you recommend, or where would I go for a recommendation?"

“You can stay at my residence, if you’d like!” beams the catgirl receptionist. “My wife should be home, and she’s making Sauerbraten, tonight - and I’m sure that we could spare an extra portion!”

This is honestly kinda weird; this isn’t that much more so than Johto, in that regard, but Johto is one of the most welcoming in the world on that scale. He does need a place to stay while he gets up to date on the fashion trends of this world so he knows just how to blow their minds, however, so it’s certainly convenient.

”If that’s convenient, sure. Where do you live?”

“The big, pale house with golden metalwork and the daffodils, just three blocks away - turn right as you go out of the office, then turn left when you hit an intersection, and then turn left again, and it should be on your right!”

When he sees the house, Ruby feels better about his decision. It’s hardly how he would design or decorate a house, but it’s far less ugly than most hotels in Johto; even if the rooms inside probably aren’t nearly a match for modern convenience, the external appeal of a residence is an important part of a location’s mood. Besides, he can always move out if he changed his mind. It’d be astonishing if there was anything even remotely as difficult to deal with as his dad on that, and he had been preparing to ditch the genuine article.

So steeled, Ruby steps up and knocks on the front door.

A woman - taller and darker skinned than most of the other people he’s seen here, wearing a modest yellow dress in lieu of anything Viking chic - opens the door. She seems just as excessively cheerful as her wife.

“Oh! A new face! How the heavens must bless me, today, to show me such novel hearts by my hearth, to lend me their grace and their cheer! - come in, we have plenty, come in! I will add potatoes to the pot.”

That’s definitely obsessively cheerful. If Ruby had rigorous self awareness, he might equate this drive with his own focus on beauty, but that doesn’t rank highly among his many virtues. 

“Hello. I’m Ruby.” He thinks back for a moment, then continues. “I stopped by the... immigration center, looking for a place to stay for a bit, and your wife suggested I come here.”

She leaves the door open for him, and starts drifting to the house’s kitchen, gesticulating to punctuate her statements.

”Ah, so you have seen my beautiful Sabine - what grace! What passion! I have good taste, you must agree.”

“I didn’t actually meet her for that long, but she’s certainly passionate.” It’s not just the work, either, slthough she did seem enthusiastic on that score; wearing a Skitty ears headband is fsr from common back home, and from what he could tell from the streets its not the current trend here either.

”Speaking of which, do you have rules about Pokémon here? Nana, Ruru, and Coco are very well behaved, but I know some people have places off limits to even contest ‘mons.”

“... pardon?” says the woman-who-hasn’t-introduced-herself, turning around to look at him.

“I do contests.” He says, as if this was helpful. Then, a thought occurs.

”Is it translating that as the name of a species again? It was doing that before.”

“... you are saying ‘goblin’, child; goblins are the fruit of goblin fonts, alongside goblin fruit, and they are the creations of witches. Goblins are not a ‘species’, my grace of the heavens, any more than plants or stones are, they are a kind of thing. You have three goblins, which you enter paegents with, and you would know if they may enter here as well?”

“Huh, this really isn’t translating well, that's annoying. Maybe this will clear things up."

He reaches for his belt in a smooth motion and, with the speed and grace of a long practiced action, pulls off three red and white spheres. He then tosses them into the air with a flourish, and calls out, "Ruru! Nana! Coco!"

Out of the balls comes a strange red light, which solidifies into a adorable catlike creature , which begins playing with its own tail, a luxuriously combed grey dog, and a... something.

“... they may remain here if they harm nothing, child. Are you a witch?”

"I don't do Pokémon battles. And no, I'm a coordinator."

“... and that... is...”

“It means I do contests, not battles.”

There’s no denying it, though; the botched translation, the confusion, the lack of recognition of Pokémon and Pokéballs...

”I must be a lot further from home than I thought.

“It may be so, child, but the heavens watch over us all! Would you like something to drink, while you rest? The living room is there, and others will be glad to hear of your travels.”

Ruby heads to the living room, where there are two younger children, both younger than he is; from the looks of it, maybe 7 and 9, although he doesn't think he's good enough that he'd be able to tell them being a year off that. He continues his combing of Coco's fur while she finishes dinner; she's done just as the woman with the Skitty headband from earlier arrives. Dinner is fairly tasty, but it quickly becomes clear that they're missing a lot of the technology that he takes for granted from back home, and it's kind of an ecletic mix; they have no Pokéballs or other storage technology whatsoever, even though those had been around for centuries before some of the stuff they do have.

During dinner, he manages to finally unpack what, exactly a goblin is; they aren't wholly dissimilar to Pokémon, which seems to be why the translation got tripped up there. There are some... fairly major differences, but it's the closest thing to Pokémon contests they have, and there's one starting up tommorow where he can get a ruling from their equivalent of contest judges.

Some of what they do have seems like it must be very advanced - dinner is cooked with the help of a strange looking ever-burning bush within the fireplace, there are a few flowers scattered throughout the house that illuminate as much as lamps would, there’s a houseplant in the corner which spends its time gravely playing a small blue violin and providing ambiance, a few other contrivances are scattered here and there - but further inquiry reveals everything to be of magical manufacture. 

The woman with cat-ears and her wife continue being ridiculously hospitable, cheerful, and incurious, and provide a place to stay, for the night.

There is morning, and early afternoon, the next day, and then he’d best be off to the pageant, if he’d like to be in it.

He definitely would. He'd spent the morning putting the absolute finishing touches on their conditioning, making sure they were ideally bedecked to wow an antirely unfamiliar audience, who wouldn't even necessarily have the same basics of appeal structure, and then heads off to the building in question. He's maybe half an hour early - there wasn't that much to do.

Were this internal narration audible to anyone who had seen his preparations earlier that morning, there might be a sense of disbelief.

The building is very, very nicely made, and nevertheless resembles a sort of overgrown tree stump.

There’s a woman in a spectacular dress, just outside of it - a tasteful mix of metal scales in shimmering technicolor, a soft, silken, translucent fabric, simultaneously of the same Viking-chik style he’s seen elsewhere and inifinitely transcending it.

She glances down at him.

”Hello. You are here for the paegent auditions?”

"I am. I'm from a ways away, though, where we do contests differently; I'm hoping to get a list of the rules, and to make sure my Pokémon will be allowed to compete."

“Those who compete will compete; those who do not will not. You are not from Tea, and you did not learn this language by nature; from where do you come?”

"I'm from a place called Johto; Goldenrod city, to be specific. I have no idea where that is relative to here."

“Perhaps it isn’t. I have know stranger things. Young boys arriving early, for instance - most people will come five minutes before, and some will arrive five minutes after, and some will arrive after dusk. You and I have arrived thirty minutes early; why do you think that is?”

“I had some things I needed to have done before I participated, and didn’t know how long they would take, so I made sure to give myself plenty of time.”

“How practical. What do you plan to enter in the pageant?”

“My Pokémon are trained to participate in Cuteness, Coolness, and Intelligence contests, but I’m not sure how the categories line up here.”

“I see.”

“Is there anything from your plan that you can share, or all of it going to be a surprise? To be honest, I can’t wait to see what the local fashions are.”

“I am a judge, not a contestant.”

He blinks, the reevaluates.

”In retrospect, expecting all contests judges to have the same kind of uniform was pretty foolish; even Johto and Hoenn’s aren’t identical. That’s even more convenient, though; do you have a list of the rules I could look at?”

"There is a list inside the building, which will not open for five minutes still. I have memorized it, but recitation would waste my time, and to waste time is a terrible thing, far more terrible than killing it. I have killed before - but I have not wasted. Some lines are to be crossed, and some lines are better obeyed, as some little boys are ordinary and some are very strange... tell me of those goblins you intend to display."

“It doesn’t sound like you have these types, so I’m not sure how the translation will handle it but... Nana is a Skitty, Coco is a Poochyena, and Ruru is a Ralts, and back home they’d participate in cutenesss, coolness, and intelligence contests. None of them are very large, but Coco is the biggest of the three.”

"If they are larger than a sapling, and smaller than an oak, they may suffice? We will know with the passing of time. But of their colors, their forms, their metaphor and practice, their beauty and elegance and ugliness...?"

“They should meet that size requirement. Coco is jet black, and undoubtably cool; Nana is pink and beige and cute; Ruru is green, red, and white, and brilliant. Naturally, they’re all in peak Condition.”