After a tumultuous night, the murky green waters of the Lake of Rage were calm — unnaturally so. Flakes of red Pokeballs and myriad debris bobbing on the surface, leftover from battle and storm.

  The Red Balls would be retrieved later. More than likely, Rangers would come in with a Magnezone to suck them all up before doing another thorough sweep. Nina did not envy their job.

  “There you are. The girls and I are heading back home now. Wanna come with?”

  Nina, sat brooding on a broken stump, jolted and looked up at her employer-cum-aunt.

  “Nah, I'm good. Kerry said she wants to stay for a few days and help with the locals. Justin's all fired up as well.” The boy, energetic as ever, was probably making a menace of himself as they spoke.

  Lily chuckled. “Sure, kid. It's your journey. And nothing wrong with charity. Just don't get into any more trouble, okay? Ali and Misty were stresssing the fuck out when they saw you in the background of Team Rocket’s broadcast.”

  “I know… I know…” It wasn't like Nina was actively courting trouble.

  “Also,” Lily continued with a firm gaze. “I dunno what your deal is with Mew. And yes, I know — Lugia told me.” The Cerulean Sister pulled her Gym’s protege into a hug to placate her. “Just promise me this, Nins, that you’ll be careful… Getting all tangled up with Legends and Myths is a surefire way to court disaster.”

  The girl nodded in affirmation, then returned the hug and allowed herself to be smothered in kisses. After which, the two said their goodbyes and parted ways, leaving Nina in place to continue with her brooding. Once the woman was out of sight, however…

  “Alright, Celebi. She's gone now.”

  “Bi! Bibi!”

  “The girl chuckled. I think you owe me an explanation here, buddy…”

  “Biii?”

  “Don't play dumb with me. What's the deal with this Mew Gem? What do you guys want? Because I'm getting really sick and tired of being pushed around like this!”

  “Bi-iii.”

  “No, I don't want to play tag right now. And unless you give me some answers, I'm not playing tag with you ever again.”

  “Bi…”

  The little onion pixie wilted, prompting Nina to scoop her up like a baby.

  “Just tell me what's going on, Celebi… I promise I won't be mad. It's not entirely your fault anyway. Mew's the one who saddled me with this thing.”

  “Celebi…” The Mythical Pokemon sniffled, looking super adorable with her teary, round Baby-Doll Eyes.

  Nina responded with a resolute shake of her head. “Nope! You're not getting away that easily. Tell me what's going on, Celebi!”

  The green onion girl wilted even further. Then, with a helpless sigh, hovered close to touch foreheads with the girl.

  Nina gasped, and with a flash, images flickered rapidly through her mind, of days past, present and future. Of alternate timelines and different realities. Scenes of devastation, scenes of hope. A cackling Giovanni, a struggling Ash, a stoic Red. Blue, then Gary. A sensual Leaf dressed in Rocket garb. Yellow with her ragged straw hat surrounded by Pokemon in a field of flowers and many more…

  The world shrunk, lines of fate intertwined, ethereal and fleeting, ever changing. Cause and effect splitting the river of time into endless branches, endless possibilities, endless worlds. Then finally, another realm, myriad dimensions and beyond.

  But suddenly, a crack emerged and reality spilled. Peering inside, Nina could see; Ash and Giovanni, a splash of red, their unfortunate encounter. Then, a meeting between a pink feline and a remorseful green pixie. The crack spread, in its center an iridescent portal, men in black jumping headlong into the chaos of causality. And just like an oil spill, the swirls of rainbow darkness spread, suffocating the rivers of time with their malice and ambition.

  The girl reeled, choking on her breath and awoke in a fit of violent coughs.

  “That was… is that how you normally see the world, Celebi?”

  “Biii… Celebi.”

  “Must be rough, huh?”

  The Mythical Pokemon shrugged, to indicate that it was no biggie really.

  Nina giggled, it was hard to remember, given the pixie’s adorable nature, but Celebi was a bonafide spirit of nature and time in the context of the Pokemon world after all.

  “So let me get this straight.”

  “Bi, bi bi?”

  “You saw an old friend, Ash, return to Ilex Forest.”

  “Bi. Bi-bi.”

  “Then, as a prank, you decided on a whim to pull Ash into a domain to mess with him.”

  “Bi! Bibi.” Celebi nodded with a haughty puff.

  “But unbeknownst to anyone, you accidentally pulled Giovanni in as well, thereby placing the two on a collision course.”

  “Bi…” The Pixie wilted once more.

  “Ash was not supposed to meet Giovanni that day. Giovanni was just there to meet a courier from Sinnoh.” The delivery of a Zoroark to further his malicious agenda. “But because of your meddling, you changed the course of events. Not that cannonicity mattered too much…” A separate timeline would have just been created instead.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “However, you felt bad for causing the death of a dear friend. And so, in a last ditch effort to reverse your blunder, you created a time loop. A time loop that you had no way of intervening in without breaking causality.”

  “Bi…”

  “And so, not knowing what to do, you went and sought help from your buddy, Mew.”

  “Cele. Celebi.” The Myth bobbed her onion head up and down in affirmation.

  It was often mentioned in the games and other associated media of Nina’s past life that Giovanni had gone into Ilex Forest for isolated training after his defeat in Red’s hands. But little Miles at the time had never really understood why.

  In the context of the video game, Ilex forest was a low level map — a place teeming with annoying Bug Types at the level 10 range designed more as a maze to confuse players more than anything else. And Giovanni could be considered, at bare minimum, a trainer at the level of a last boss Gym Leader. So then, why was he even there to begin with?

  But now, in the context of the real world, Nina had discovered that Ilex Forest actually contained a power spot — a dense well of Type Energy siphoned from an underlying leyline. Perfect for training Pokemon. So that was one part of the mystery solved; Giovanni really was taking advantage of the power spot for training.

  “It’s just that, at the same time, the guy was also making use of Ilex Forest’s secluded nature to conduct his shady dealings…” Which led Nina to her second enigma. “It makes no sense whatsoever for a control freak like Giovanni to abandon his organisation to their own devices.”

  The fact that Giovanni was still engaging in business with Team Plasma even during his training period was telling enough. There was no way in heck that the crime lord would ever cut himself off from the outside world — not when he fancied himself a shadowy mastermind. That sort of character was one who had a possessive need to stay informed, to maintain control.

  “But what if he couldn’t leave… What if he was trapped? That would explain why he just vanished without even informing his most fanatical subordinates.”

  Eight to nine years… That was how long Ash and Giovanni had been trapped. “And I, or rather, Nina is twelve years old this year…” The girl was around three years old when Miles possessed her body. “Is this all just a coincidence?”

  The day that the timeloop formed, when the Ash Ketchum of this world died — the aspiring Pokemon Master, the hero of Nina’s childhood — snuffed out like a flame. That day, the walls thinned and cracks formed. Space and time wavered on a fleeting whimsy. “Was that how I slipped through?”

  The revelation from Celebi explained a lot. Why this world was similar yet different from the games and the anime. Nina was sure that there was probably a different timeline out there, one that conformed perfectly with the fictional canon of her past life, one for each of the different entries in the Pokemon franchise and maybe one for different fanfictions even.

  “Mew picked me because they sensed that I was different — alien, unbound by causality. Which meant I could intervene.” Even undo death.

  Celebi, this version of Celebi, was native to this timeline, which meant that her actions were bound by causality — each decision resulting in different branches of reality. The Mythical Pokemon literally couldn’t undo Ash’s death.

  But Nina/Miles was different, they could undo the damage, pluck Ash out of the time loop while maintaining the current flow — prevent a timeline where Ash Ketchum ever died in Ilex Forest. THIS for Celebi was important, because the Myth was a unique existence, capable of perceiving all the timelines all at once.

  To allow Ash to die because of her blunder would mean that there would forever be a branch of reality where a version of Celebi would be forced to live with the guilt of killing a friend. And since all the Celebis were connected, it meant that ALL of them would have to live with that same guilt.

  “Bi. Celebi.”

  “But there’s more to this story, isn’t there?” Nina pouted and pulled at Celebi’s leafy little cheeks as punishment. “Mew has their own agenda. One is their other half — their illegitimate offspring. And the other… Team Rainbow Rocket.”

  “Bi! Bi-bi!” Celebi broke free from Nina’s hold and forcefully nuzzled against her chest in protest, eliciting giggles from the girl.

  Nina sighed. “Does it even matter? Giovanni’s dreams won’t come true no matter what. Regardless of which dimension or which timeline he escapes to.”

  To achieve ultimate freedom and become the master of his own fate. All to create his own utopia where people were free to become whoever they want, completely ignorant of the fact that this was already the case in their current reality. That was what the crime lord was after. Such vapant idealism, utterly uninspired.

  “The irony here is that all he had to do to be ‘good’ was penitence — reflect on his mistakes and strive to repent.” But while the man was willing to break the world to change his fate, he was not willing to change himself.

  The fact of the matter was, Giovanni was a villain due to his inherent nature and life experiences. No doubt there was probably a farmer Giovanni somewhere out there in the infinite branches of reality. It was just that a good majority of Giovannis born into the world ended up becoming villains — a contradiction in and of itself.

  How much of Giovanni’s nature was dictated by the events that came before him? Was that a form of destiny? Who could say? Maybe Celebi knew, but the Mythical time traveller never gave much thought into such mundane issues. The more omniscient a being, the simpler their worldview. Because they themselves were a phenomenon, bending space and time just like how one would casually bend their elbows.

  “I mean, what’s there to think about really? Nature is nature, laws are laws. Just like how water is just water and wind is just wind to mundane mortals.” That little glimpse into Celebi’s mind gave Nina a better understanding of how a transcendent existence like her thinks. Albeit, she couldn’t fully internalize it — it was a fundamentally different thought process from her own.

  “Bi! Bibi-bi-bi!” With a vehement shake of her head, Celebi pressed onto Nina’s forehead once more and transmitted another slew of thoughts into the girl, eliciting a worried frown in return.

  “So… You’re saying that because Giovanni was trapped in the time loop for so long, he has now gained an almost instinctual awareness of causality and is now fully capable of wreaking havoc across reality?”

  That last slew of images that Celebi projected was just pure chaos, one where there was no ‘flow’, just a roiling soup of colors and darkness.

  “Bi-iiii.” Celebi met Nina’s eyes with a severe gaze and nodded once more.

  Nina sighed and reached into her shirt to rub at her necklace. The Mew Gem, it was more restricting than Nina could ever imagine. Mew was literally using it to steer her, since she wasn’t bound by causality — a fact that Nina already knew. But to have it confirmed like this was aggravating nonetheless.

  “The dominoes, they don’t affect me…” Where a flap of a Butterfree’s wings in Unova might cause a Hurricane in the seas of Kanto, such a gale would simply blow past Nina with no consequence. “But the Mew Gem… The Mew Gem is bound to Mew who, in turn, is bound by causality.” The girl’s sigh deepened.

  Nina’s first meeting with Futaba back in the moonshrine was actually part of Mew’s arrangements. She wanted her to journey out immediately to prevent this from happening. But the probability was low due to the constraints of her age at the time — Nina was only six years old — which Mew was fully aware of. So it couldn’t be helped that things turned out the way that they did.

  “Knowing my mindset back then, I probably would have done everything in accordance with the games — starting from Pallet Town and doing a full tour of Kanto before moving on to Johto.”

  There was another thing she realized as well. The GS Ball, it was not actually broken. Rather, it worked perfectly fine for its intended purpose — the capture of Celebi.

  The little prankster, when she found out about the plan to capture her, secretly snuck into the Ball and left a temporal mirage in there. So the reason why it wouldn’t open or function was because it was technically loaded with an inert image of Celebi.

  Sneaky bastard was practically snickering at the ancients as they scratched their heads in confusion at their supposed “failed creation”. It was also part of the reason why Celebi was leisurely shadowing Nina’s journey instead of doing Voice of the Forest duties or whatever — because the GS Ball was still in her possession and the one she’s speaking to right now was a temporal image.

  “Haaaa…” With a long, exasperated sigh. Nina smooshed her cheeks against Celebi and nuzzled roughly against her leafy exterior. “Kurt's gonna have a stroke when he learns about this… ”

  “Alright, fine. But promise me that I’ll be free after all of this.”

  “Bi. Bi-bi.”

  “I have my own life to live, Celebi. Journey around the world and all that. Not run around as your nanny.”

  “Bi! Celebi.” The precocious pixie hooked her stubby little hands around Nina’s pinkie and shook it up and down to seal the deal.

  “Hehe… If I weren’t so annoyed right now. I’d say you were super adorable and pamper you with Berries.”

  “No! Wrong! Celebi is always super cute!”

  “Oh so now you can talk, huh? Celebi isn’t cute, she’s a naughty little girl. And naughty little girls don’t deserve Berries. A shame really, the last batch of Pecha Berries I got were really juicy~”

  “Biiii!” The Celebi wailed and grabbed hold of Nina’s jacket with a pitiful gaze.

  Nina sighed and after having her fill of teasing the stinky onion, she finally relented. “Alright, if I’m gonna do this, then I’m gonna need you to help me.”

  “Bi…”

  “Don’t give me that look. I’m cleaning up your mess here.”

  “Bi, bi bi…”

  “You already know what I want, Celebi. If I’m going to take on Giovanni and foil his plans then I need power.” Because if every single Rocket goon had one of those Mega Crowns or whatever they’re calling it, then Nina stood no chance.

  “At a bare minimum, I need a Mega Stone — one that’ll work with one of my Pokemon. Which, now that I think about it… Only Azzy has a known Mega Evolution huh? And she’ll have to Evolve into Gengar first.”

  “Haunt…” A quiet whimper emanated from Nina’s shadow.

  The girl swooned and reached in to grab hold of her Haunter’s hand. “Don’t worry Azzy. There’s no rush. We still need to bolster your fundamentals before moving on to the next stage.” Gengar was a Trade Evolution, which meant they could initiate it whenever Azzy was ready.

  “Bi? Bibibibi bi-bi.” Celebi responded with a confused tilt and a shake of her head, eliciting a frown from Nina.

  “What do you mean there’s a better option?”