I stared at myself in the mirror, which alone was a very strange thing for me since I was still more or less on — or at least over — the squatty potty that Arceus himself, presumably, had decided to be the right and proper form of water closet within his palace at the top of the mountain at the center of the universe. Being a pokemon, I was more or less used to doing my business in the forest as it were, Or at least in a sandbox, so being able to watch myself do it was a new kind of weird.

On the other paw, if he’d decided that the only potties were to be the kind of seats that lots of humans used then that would not only have been weirder seeing as there weren’t any humans here other than zigzagoon-guy, debatable whether he counted at this point, but that barely any pokemon could have sat on them.

Wait, no, the mirror. Was the mirror an integral part of… I sighed. No, I was just babbling to myself, and why wouldn’t I be? I feared going back out there to Giratina himself, dark overlord of the reverse world.

“Get it together, Lux,” I told myself, staring my reflection in the eyes. I shouldn’t have been surprised when the surface of the mirror rippled and one of Giratina’s weirdly long, segmented legs pushed out from it to tap me on the head.

“If you’re quite done,” came the god’s sonorous tones, “then I am still waiting. And I do not like to be kept waiting.”

“Eeep!”

Finishing up, strangely the interruption had helped, I skittered quickly from the opulent bathroom, paws not really finding purchase on the marble floors, to return to the party. There, waiting for me, was a god. He drew me aside and looked me up and down.

“Well?” he asked.

“Umm,” I replied, not really sure what he wanted. “You said you had questions for me?”

Giratina growled, but I felt it was more a disapproving rumble at the state of things in general, rather than at me specifically.

“Hmm. Celebi!” Giratina called out for the time-travelling pokemon, loudly. I winced, so did Celebi as he — she? It? — appeared before us.

“Yes, umm, sir?”

“Explain.” Giratina pointed a long, dark and sharp talon at me. I shivered as both of my pathetic, short and abridged lives flashed before me.

Celebi, the strange, green, onion-looking creature that it was, looked me up and down — or more exactly down and further down — and then narrowed it’s eyes. “Name?”

“Umm, Lux?” I eventually responded, after an uncomfortable amount of silence wherein I didn’t realise this was directed my way. Celebi looked at me blankly for a second, then concern flashed across her face.

“Hold, please.” Celebi disappeared in a brief flash of green light, then reappeared holding a little flip-top notebook. “Lux, Lux, Lux… ah, I got… oh, well, that’s embarrassing.” The diminutive flying vegetable then floated over to Giratina and whispered in his ear, to a chorus of “Really?” and “hmm” and “I see” from said Lord of the Underworld. Giratina rumbled again, fixed me with a gaze that melted my bones to mush and then spoke, turning his baleful gaze upon the flying green speck.

“You will sort this out, spawn of my sibling. And you,” Giratina turned back towards me.

“Yes?” I squeaked, in danger of needing another number sixteen.

“It appears I haven’t met you yet. Or, more accurately, the you that I have met is not the you that I am meeting now, as you have not yet met the me that will have met you. I am far too drunk to wish to navigate my way through the past imperfect never-tense right now, so I will leave you in the… capable, I sincerely hope, paws of Celebi. But understand this, Lux… when this is all done, then you will answer my questions.”

“I don’t even know what they are!” I wailed, as Giratina strode off to terrorize the punch.

“That went well,” Celebi said brightly. It — she, I had decided — floated closer. “Ah, I can see why we picked you up, originally at least. A legendary pokemon was wanted, and you fit the bill.”

“Wait, what, why?” I asked, rubbing my paw on my muzzle to clear the tears out the way.

“You came in with Ho-oh, he does kind of… do that. You got drafted. So, let’s catch up with when you are.” Celebi started flipping through her notebook. “Team Rocket attacks, no that’s not going to be useful. Haven’t been then yet, so we’re way before… most significant place you’ve been?”

“Mauville?” I offered.

“Mau..! Arceus.” Celebi flipped back and forth through her notebook, finally hanging her head. “Wow, we’re back a ways. This never happens. Very embarrassing. So, uh, Mauville, huh? Came through Verdanturf of course, the tunnel, Rustboro, yada yada… much before that?” Celebi scribbled notes, thoughtfully chewing her pencil, scribbling out mistakes as she made changes to her hurried timeline and muttering under her breath. “These pocket universes do screw things up, even for me. Time travelling is fine, but when it’s a pretzel…”

I shook my head. “I got, uh, hit with the, uh… can you keep a secret?”

Celebi just looked at me for a moment, one eyebrow raised. There was a lot of scorn for one tiny little pokemon in that gaze. “I’m a time traveller. I eat butterfree effects for breakfast.”

“Well I got hit with the masterball, in the woods near Rustboro.”

“Oh great, that makes things easier I guess, I’ll just have to arrange for the masterball to be taken by the right group of people, dropped in the mountains… the masterball did that, huh?” Celebi gestured to my body. “Hope I don’t have to arrange for it to be stolen in the first place. I’ll just note the date… you didn’t fly in with Ho-oh, did you? No? Good, just checking, that’d be a bit… you have no idea how hard it is to arrange meeting legendaries.”

I gave her a flat look. She paused, peered around the room, then back to me. I swore she blushed.

“You know what I mean. This is… this is what you get after… normally. That.”

“So, did… did I get ‘drafted’ because of this, or did this happen because I was, uh, drafted or?”

Celebi sighed, closed her little booklet, then floated down closer to me. “Do you have the time for the nine-dimensional math lesson and temporal psychometry model I’d need to explain to talk you through it?”

“Uh uh.” I shook my head.

“Then, with the best of intentions, I’m honestly telling you not to worry about it. I’ll make sure all of this has will happened to get you here so that all the things that will have been happened also do have been happen to, uh, need.. yeah.”

“Do I want to know?” I asked, trying and failing to untangle the horrifically butchered tenses and conjugations of that sentence.

Celebi paused for a moment, then thought really hard. “You’ll find out, so it probably doesn’t matter, but… no, you don’t. Go talk to Arceus, I think,” she checked her little notebook and nodded to herself, “yeah, he won’t know you don’t know what you’ve will have be talked about yet, but might tell you something that’ll help. Of course it won’t, yet, or I’d know, so there’s that.”

I hung my head, then head-butted the table-leg. “Is it always like this?” I asked, looking pleadingly at the onion fairy. She nodded, shrugging her tiny shoulders apologetically.

“Sorry, but it does kind of end up like this, one way or the other. It's going to be worse for you, you'll have gotten the fast track to weirdness, both before and aft... ah, well, I guess I shouldn't exactly mention any of that yet. Now excuse me, I have to go, I have a person I need to will have been meet.”

"Just as long as you make sure I don't die when I become me, I'll do my best," I said.

"I'll make a note to double check that, I'll have to make sure that Joy gets Rotom, and learns to be a bit adventurous... you'll will have be fine. Now I really do have to go!"

“Why are you in a hurry? Aren’t you a time traveller?” I asked her innocently. She gave a half-grin.

“Nine-dimensional math,” she threatened, with a smile so sweet I swore my teeth started to decay. “I have slides. Three thousand, two hundred and eighty four of them. You and me. Let’s go. There will be a test after.”

“I-I-I think I have to go meet the creator of the entire universe right now,” I said, “so, uh, you get to your…”

“Sidereal time branched bifurcated recausal nexus,” said Celebi.

“Yeah, that,” I replied, as the strange little creature disappeared in a green flash, flip-top notebook and all. Deciding there really was no time like the present, I squared off my shoulders, fluffed out my tail and went to meet God, with the capital unonwn.

I found God in the bottom of a bottle of some sort of pokeberry wine. I wasn’t sure if that was a statement about my life or just life in general. He was explaining to one of the more normal pokemon, of which there were plenty — did that still include me? On the other paw, did that ever include the me-that-is-a-part-human-eevee? — about how he’d had to fix the universe more than once.

“Oh, everybody knows about it, but nobody thinks anything of it, because it’s just the way things are!” Arceus said amiably, pointing a hoof-like limb and waving it around the room. “I’ve had to put this thing back together so many times… like there was that hullabaloo a few years ago now when my kids were trapped by chains made of primordial matter! Had to create an entire alternate universe to exile that awful human who made them to, along with far too many of you pokemon to be honest.”

“But, but,” replied the Miltank, scratching her head with a hoof, “what do you mean the universe isn’t compiled right?” She looked quite distraught at the idea. Arceus took a long swig of wine — I’m not sure I’d put that much in a glass let alone drink it in one go, but then I am a good deal tinier than I used to be — and then gestured with a hoof. There was a flash of light.

“Er… hi? I… I’m a venonat?” asked the venonat, which had suddenly appeared. “That’s right, yes?”

“Take this venonat, right? They evolve into venomoth, hmm?” Arceus gestured with his hoof again. There was another flash of light, and the venonat expanded, growing and changing. It sprouted wings, grew spikes from the back of its head.

“Oh, er, that’s… wow, did you do that, s-sir?” the venonat asked Arceus, who was still talking to the miltank. “Wasn’t expecting to do that today. Wasn’t expecting today, to be honest.”

“Of course! Everybody knows that! I know quite a few venonats who are now venomoths, what’s wrong with that?” the miltank asked, brow furrowing as she paid rapt attention.

“They were supposed to be butterfree,” Arceus continued conspiratorially, “or… butterfree was going to be venomoth and venomoth was going to be butterfree? Humans and their names; very clever creatures, humans. I’m quite proud of them, even though they do cause trouble on a distressingly common basis.” Arceus looked at the bottle again, somewhat distantly. The venomoth’s form lit up again as Arceus spoke, and transformed into a butterfree.

The now-butterfree was speechless for a second, then stammered out a few more words to Arceus. “Um, um, sir? Am… am I supposed to be a butterfree or a venomoth?”

Arceus finished off the bottle he levitated before his weirdly draconic muzzle, then tossed it over his shoulder, where it vanished with an audible ‘pop!’ before he turned to the butterfree. “That’s a good question.”

“Are… are you going to make me disappear?” the now-butterfree asked, after an uncomfortable silence spent gazing at where the bottle had vanished.

Arceus tilted his head before looking almost directly at the butterfree. “No? Do you want me to?”

The butterfree almost fell out of the air. “No! No, please, I… think I quite like being alive. I’ve only been alive for a few minutes and I’ve evolved twice, I’d like to see what this means all means first.”

“Good, good.” Arceus turned back to the miltank. “You see—”

“Umm, sir? What is my purpose?” the butterfree interrupted. “What do I do now?”

“What do you want to do? Do you want a purpose?” Arceus levelled a very direct gaze at the butterfree, who quivered but then straightened and answered, the bug pokemon’s gaze direct and unwavering.

“Umm, yes?”

“Oh.” The god was nonplussed for a moment. “Well, I suggest you go and find one then, that’s what most of my pokemon seem to do. If you need something of a hint, I think young Ho-oh is around here somewhere looking for more pokemon to volunteer as Great Beasts?”

“Y-yes, sir, I’ll… I’ll do that.” The now-butterfree fluttered off in the direction of the still conga-ing god of rebirth — who was terrorizing the buffet with one wing and emptying the bar with the other — looking quite flustered, but determined.

The miltank now looked rather appalled, but also intensely curious. “S-so there’s a lot of this sort of thing?”

“Oh, nothing too serious, after all, the whole universe has to compile and run otherwise I’d have to halt the whole bally thing and start again, and nobody wants that. Again. No, no, I’ve only had to patch in a few upgrades and bug-fixes — haha! bugs! — in the last few thousand years. Speaking of! Young… Lux, wasn’t it? How are you liking the changes you requested?”

I’d been sidling up to god as inconspicuously as possible and yet Arceus had seen me without even turning his head. And apparently remembered me. I didn’t remember him. I wasn’t sure if that made it worse. I grinned like a maniac — rabid pokemon? — and looked up at him.

“Oh, I think they're working perfectly!” I hedged. Were they? Heck if I knew.

“Good to hear it! I wasn’t sure about the balancing, you see, but I think it’s working out quite well! Less trouble than that whole fairy deal, at least!”

“Fairy deal?” I whispered, heart thudding in my chest. I heard the miltank echo my words.

“Oh, of course, yes, yes, mortals. Or, hmm,” Arceus peered down at me, I felt his gaze sweep through my very soul, “somewhat, at least. Fairy… I had to add another type a few iterations back. Now I’ve added it, it was always there, same as Dark and Steel… so, you like it, yes? I think it was a marvellous idea!”

“Thanks!” I said, brightly, deep in the mountains of madness.

“I wasn’t sure at first, but you made a good case for it, and turned the tide! Wonderful, wonderful.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Umm, one question? Is Giratina the oldest?” It took me a few moments to realize that it had been me that had spoken.

“Hmm?” God was, once again, nonplussed for a moment. He recovered shortly after though, I could tell he loved his kids. “Oh, yes, that’s why he got his own universe. Not really fair according to the younger two, but he claimed it first, what can I do? He is the oldest. It’s why dialga gets away with so much.” Arceus chuckled paternally. “Don’t tell my princess that. I’m so proud of her, and her kids are adorable.”

“True, true,” I said, nodding and smiling. “Umm, I think I’ve got to, uh, go! I just wanted to say thank you for letting me come to this party, and I’ll… uh… is it still ‘come next time’ if we’re in a stable sidereal timelooped pocket universe?” My muzzle hung open slack-jawed as I went back over that hodge-podge of gobbledegook in my head before nodding to myself, slowly.

“Unless you want to spend another few hours getting the tense right, yes!” Arceus laughed, slamming his hoof down so hard he cracked not only the tiles but reality itself. “Off you go, Lux! Tell me how it went later!”

I escaped as he started explaining how difficult it was getting the right seed values for an exciting universe, and how proud he was of getting humans really right in this iteration and that leaving them out of his other save made things a bit different and he had to use some pokes and peeks, or something. I fled, with the intent of finding at least a small island of sanity to retreat to. Of course, the next pokemon I met up with was pink and oh-so-close to that pink one, but was… not.

“Mewtwo?” I asked, fur frizzing out as I regarded the apparently now pink clone of mew. Was this my life now? The universe making less and less sense as I went on?

“Ah, yes, but probably not the one you’re thinking of,” she answered patiently, once she’d worked out what I was on about.

“You’re mewtwo too?”

“No, just mewtwo.”

I nodded, slowly. “Cloned?”

She nodded her head, then shook it. “Technically reincarnated, I think? Sort of? I also technically share a birthday with Mewtwo, although I remember a different one. From when I was human. You can call me Ambertwo, if you’d like? Or maybe just ‘Amber’.”

And she was also a girl! I had a brief flash of camaraderie. At some point I would have to talk to her about bows in tails and scented shampoo.

“Yes, ma’am!” I said, trying to salute with a paw. “Uh, should I be, uh, sorry you died? I mean, I am sorry you died, but, glad you’re alive… again? A-and a mewtwo, I guess?”

Ambertwo — a pink Mewtwo, so I guessed that made Mewtwo a pokemon species now as well as a name, but was pink the shiny? — chuckled and patted me on the head. “Thank you. And thank you for the birthday wishes.”

“Eep! Yes! Happy birthed-again day! Sorry I didn’t say that first!” I trembled, expecting to be blasted.

“I am psychic you know. Don't worry about things, I could see you thinking it.”

“Um, then, it’s going to be very hard for me to not think something that might make you upset so sorry if I do and, uh, and….”

Ambertwo patted me on the head again. “I know. Don’t burst a blood vessel overthinking it. I think your friends are trying to find you, by the way. See you again!” Ambertwo pointed behind me. I turned to look, then turned back as she waved and disappeared in a flash of pink light, just as I heard my friends calling my name from behind me. I turned once more to see Lucky, Bart and Shadow flanked by a gengar I didn’t recognize… until I did.

“Guy?” I asked, blinking. “Is that you?”

“Uh huh! Not only hands, but also legs! Look at me! I can walk!”

“Wow, well,” I said, blinking. “Congrats?” I meant it.

He floated into the air excitedly after strutting a few steps. “I don’t have to, but I can! I was talking to Giratina when Ho-oh went past and they got into a bit of a thing and then Giratina said he could do the whole reincarnation thing too, but I said I didn’t really want to be reincarnated yet as I literally died not too long ago...”

“Still sorry about that,” I mumbled, my ears burning with shame.

“Less of a problem now,” Guy waved me off magnanimously. “Anyway, Giratina just did this to prove he could and pow! I’m a gengar!”

“I wonder what Giratina would’ve made him?” asked Lucky.

“Probably a reverse world dragon, or something,” mumbled Bart, thoughtfully.

“Naa, oldest sibling, he won’t want to give up his room remember?” Shadow objected.

“Y-yeah, he wouldn’t want to give up his universe,” I added. “Even his dad doesn’t want to mess with the sibling dynamic. Come on, I think I need a spot of fresh air.”

My friends shared a glance behind my back as I headed out to a side balcony, which overlooked all of creation. Or at least Sinnoh.

“You met Arceus?” asked Shadow. I nodded, as I took a deep breath to cool off. It was biting cold outside, which wasn’t surprising as we were halfway up a snow-capped mountain.

“Didn’t you? He’s right back there enjoying himself. At least I think he’s a him. when you’re Arceus I don’t know if it matters what you are.”

Bart shook his head, I could see he was considering rolling up but I figured we were well past that stage. “I didn’t dare. What would I even ask him about?”

“You could ask him what a cat is,” Guy suggested. Everyone looked at the ghost, confused, as he continued. “That meowth we fought, that’s the cat-scratch pokemon, right? Then what’s a cat?”

Huh.

“That’s a good point,” I conceded. “One I’m not sure I want to find the answer to considering I apparently caused, will cause since celebi’s involved, God to patch the universe. Again.”

“You could ask him why arcanine is called the legendary poke… what?” Lucky broke off, spluttering. “Did you say you caused God to patch the universe?”

“Uh huh, he’s done it before to add in new types.”

“And you just asked God to change the universe, and he agreed?” Shadow demanded of me. Bart rolled up into a tight ball, so the electrike put his paw on the sandshrew to make sure he didn’t roll off through the balcony’s railing and down the mountain.

“Uh huh.”

“What did you do, Lux? What did you do!?”

“If, when, I find out, I’ll tell you.” I looked up at the bright stars of the Sinnoh night as my breath steamed into the cold air. Idly I wondered if this was the same night, or if I could even tell. The silence that followed was broken by a screaming whoop of excitement as an entei burst out from an adjacent set of doors and leaped over the balcony to plummet tens, and eventually hundreds, of feet down the mountain in a loping run as it called out for joy.

“Woohoo! Wings are great but this is awesome! Running! Falling! Whee!”

We watched him disappear into the distance for a few moments before I spoke again. “You know, I think that was the venonat Arceus made a half hour ago or so? He evolved into venomoth, but apparently they’re supposed to evolve into butterfree? Which he did, but Ho-oh did him a solid.”

“Ho-oh… turned a butterfree, who used to be a venomoth, into an entei?”

“Yeah, Ho-oh’s probably still looking for volunteers if you want to be a raikou or a suicune or something.”

“...I think we should get home, before I take you up on that, Princess.” Lucky watched where the entei disappeared down into the distant valley.

There was a green flash and a celebi appeared floating in the air just off the edge of the balcony. “Did you just see an entei here?” she asked.

“Yep,” I said, “he went that way.” I pointed down the mountain, where the distant echoes of roars and what might have been explosions came echoing back up to us.

“Thanks.” The celebi floated off down the snowy mountainside a few feet, then turned and floated back up to hang in the air in front of me. “Say, you look familiar… done any work for me recently?”

“Ah, uh, n-no, don’t think so.” As the celebi pulled out a notebook, I hastily pushed all my friends back inside, picking up speed as I did so.

“Hmm, let me check my notes… yeah, looks like you… oh, you’re gone. They’re gone. Great. Time travel pokemon and I miss my cue. Ah well, I’m the time travel pokemon, I can make cues. I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little trainer, too.”

Celebi marked off something in her notes, put the pencil stub behind her ear and then cackled as she disappeared into the timestream, with just the tiniest clap of thunder.