In the vacuum of space, a girl drifts.
She's gotten over the panicking at this point; she doesn't seem to be running out of air or freezing or burning to death right now. But she is very very lost, and doesn't remember where she came from
There isn't really much to do except look at the stars. Her clamshell's gone flat and it's not like she gets the Archive in space.
A golden glow appears in the distance, gradually drifting toward her. She'd be forgiven for mistaking it for a star at first, except for how it seems to have more shape to it than a sphere as she gets a better look at it.
She looks. This is either very good news or very bad news and she's not sure which.
The glow draws nearer. It seems to be some kind of creature.
Its voice booms gently across the void.
"Be at peace, human child. It is well that thou art here. What is thy name?"
It nods, and the light dims, revealing an equine-shaped creature with a longer, almost centaurian section rising up from the front, a helmet-like head, and two golden, ring-like extrusions on its sides.
"I am that which humans call Arceus. I would see thee brought to a safer place, in hopes thou might one day learn thy power that brought thee here, and grow closer to humans and Pokémon alike."
It leans in closer to her.
"Thou wilt find friends easily. I will repair thy communications device."
Sparks of gold appear and swirl around her, before dipping into her purse and floating out her clamshell phone. The sparks swirl around the clamshell for a few moments, as a glow envelops the device, before receding to reveal a gold filigree in a delicate pattern of hearts around the pink exterior of the device, with a subtle ring-shaped design in the center of the top reminiscent of Arceus's rings. Then it floats back into her purse.
"Venture forth and grow, Audrey. Thy Pokémon Adventure awaits."
The glow envelops Arceus again, and then Audrey, before suddenly Audrey is shooting away from the Mythical Pokémon, falling through the void toward what first looks like a distant star, then rapidly reveals itself to be a planet orbiting that star.
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!!!
She plummets through the atmosphere, wind whipping her hair but somehow not burning her from friction, plunging down down down towards distant green and the glass flashes of a nearby city -
And slams into the ground in a landing that somehow leaves her staggered and winded but not, actually, dead? Like, at all? She's doing okay?
She picks herself up off her hands and knees and looks around her, trying to ascertain just where the heck she's landed.
Audrey finds herself in a meadow full of wildflowers, near a tree-lined path that winds through the land. In the distance to the east she can see the edges of a city skyline, while over the trees to the west and north she can see distant mountains.
Unfamiliar creatures lurk in the grass and tree branches.
And just a few meters away are different unfamiliar creature, and a purple-haired girl just a couple years older than her.
The nearby creature is small, with a white body, round head, almost-leafy green bowl-cut hair, and thin plate-like red spikes to the front and back of her head.
"Raaaalts??" she says aloud.
{Sable, love, how did that girl fall from the sky and live? Is she okay?}, she asks Sable telepathically.
Meanwhile, the purple-haired girl is shocked and worried about Audrey. {No idea.}
"Whoa! Hell of a fall! Are you okay?"
She bustles over to start checking Audrey over, looking for anything obviously broken.
She's wearing purple hiking boots, durable-looking black leggings, a pale pink skort, fingerless black gloves with purple trim, and a black t-shirt with a purple design of a pokéball with wavy concentric circles radiating out from it.
Audrey dusts herself off and takes a moment to still her breathing. She's wearing a flared miniskirt in red and black, a tank top, and black arm warmers with a pair of stompy boots. She's also wearing an obvious collar.
"Yeah, I'm fine, nothing seems to be broken or anything." She rubs the back of her head. "Uh, does a white furred alien with gold rings on it that calls itself Arceus mean anything to you?"
Sable blinks, taken aback.
"That is what the few people who've seen it say Arceus looks like. It's the Mythical Pokémon said to have created the universe. Although... calling Arceus an alien is really not what I'd expect?"
"Sorry, I, uh, don't think I'm from around here. I woke up drifting in space and my memory is kind of foggy. Arceus, whatever kind of creature it is, sent me here using some kind of obvious magic. I realize this is probably a ridiculous claim for you but I've got nothing better than the honestly pretty ridiculous truth."
"Ra-ralts," she replies in a disagreeing tone.
{Not that ridiculous, no,} Maya comments privately to Sable.
"Exactly, Maya," she comments to the little white-and-green creature beside her, before looking back at Audrey. "You fell at least a few hundred meters out of the sky, with no obvious source for you to fall from, and face-planted without getting hurt. On top of that, you don't seem to know what pokémon are. At this point, my top guesses are either shenanigans by a Legendary, or a teleportation accident coupled with serious memory loss to make you forget what pokémon are, and what you just described is literally a shenanigan by a Legendary."
"I... see?" She shrugs. "Um, hi, I'm Audrey!"
She offers her hand to shake. "Heck of a way to meet someone new! I didn't expect humans, that's for sure."
"And that's Maya. She's a Ralts, a species of pokémon. Should I assume you know absolutely nothing about pokémon and explain everything from scratch?"
Sable stretches, bouncing a bit on her heels. "Oh wow. I've never gotten to do the speech before. It's usually the local Professor doing it, and then usually in a video you watch before you get your trainer license."
Then she grins at Audrey.
"Welcome to our world. This world is full of creatures we call Pokémon," she says, gesturing grandly at Maya.
Maya strikes a pose. "Ralts~," she says. Then, a bit of a purple glow around her horn, she floats a rock, orbits it once around Audrey's head, and then drops it to the ground.
"Pokémon come in lots of shapes and sizes, and, as Maya just demonstrated, with all sorts of abilities. Humans have shared this world with Pokémon for thousands and thousands of years, as far back as we have records, but we still don't know anywhere near everything about them. Most Pokémon live in the wild, some live with people as friends, and some partner with trainers to battle each other, whether for prestige or to get stronger and help people. Pokémon and their trainers work together to help out when natural disasters hit, or to mine ore, or to build houses, or anything else, because there's no end to the things humans and Pokémon can accomplish together with a strong enough bond.
"Any questions so far?"
"What kinds of abilities? Do all of them have magic like that? Why battle and not, like, date? Do I need a pokémon to be safe around here?"
"In order: Lots! It ranges from physical movements stronger than muscles alone would allow, to elemental punches or bites, to healing, to telepathy, and so much more. They all can do something, usually several things, not usually the same things. Most pokémon want to battle but not all, while pokémon and humans interested in dating each other are comparatively less common and there's occasional stigma. And finally no, not if you stay safe in a city and stay out of trouble, but otherwise yeah totally."
"Ra-raaa..."
{Sable, I think she was not asking about pokémon/human relations, but rather the human trainers.}
Sable blushes. "Aaand you probably weren't asking about pokémon-human dating. Oops."
"No, actually rishathra just makes sense, especially if you don't have to worry about cross-species fertility. A little surprised that not everyone's on board with that but I guess it could be hard to establish consent through the language barrier? And huh, interesting that pokemon have an inherent competition or conflict drive, that's funky! All of them? Really?"
She hop-skip-jumps over to Sable's side and runs a hand through her hair with a shy smile. "Um. Sorry if I'm a little intense, alien culture and all." She opens her arms. "Do you do greeting-hugs here?"
"I do, not everyone does, more common among girls than guys."
She hugs Audrey cheerfully.
"Also, rishathra? It sounds from context like that's a word for interspecies relationships, but I've been staying out of your head since I don't know how you feel about that, so I didn't grab the exact meaning as you said it. As far as consent, I cheat, psychic human and psychic pokémon."
"You can read my mind??? Whoa, cool! That's only very vaguely possible using advanced techology on my world and you have to, like, implant a chip in the person's brain about it to even give them basic controls for a computer - totally wicked!!" She grins and bounces up and down.
"Definitely don't scan me just casually, but I definitely want to see if you can sort through my memories sometime and try and retrieve stuff. And yeah, it is. From a fictional book series, where I come from there's only humans who are smart."
"Oh wow. That's wild, a world without pokémon." Sable smiles warmly and shakes her head in wonder.
"Oh! Good question," Sable replies to her partner. "Maya wants to know if you have other creatures at all, even non-sapient ones."
"A ton of non-sapient creatures - we call them animals. Some of them we mostly leave alone, some of them are pests that get into garbage or ruin crops or bite people, some of them we domesticate and live with even though they're not very bright, some of them we domesticate, kill and eat. In between the two options there's things like eggs and milk and honey. There's been some recent studies on tool use in cows so there's a lot of investment in trying to make lab meat these days, which is just starting to come down in price enough to be affordable. Unfortunately a lot of people on my home world have texture sensitivities to vegetables so it's hard to go wholly vegetarian, but a lot of people will eat a tasty meat substitute preferentially over meat - falafel's big where I come from, so are persine wraps, but people like meat so a lot of them go on eating animals despite their ethical misgivings."
