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Dabbling in the art of divination came naturally with a set of rules to adhere without doubting them, demanding utmost obedience from anyone with the talent and interest to pursue the distant, unknown future. Secrecy was only one of the countless, ancient laws that seers have to uphold; they protect their methods as viciously as magicians would with their deception, sworn to seal their mouths shut even long after their flesh and bones have turned into flaky ash.
This, Morty reasoned, was why not even Eusine— both his best friend and other half, the kindred spirit who he had shared years of his life with to trade support in the chase of their elusive dreams —was unaware that some prophecies physically hurt a diviner to receive, like the weight of its revelation transcended time itself to heed them of its importance. Back in his youth— when the title of Gym Leader was a faraway dream, long before he even caught on to just how distant his mystical reach was to glimpse at the future —these instances were easy to contain, as every bad omen of danger struck his younger self whilst he was isolated during his training, surrounded only by fellow sages and mediums who shared the same— albeit weaker —psychic link as him. The people of Ecruteak were always thoughtful of him, but they did not crowd him like they did around Pryce’s wise leadership, and that respectful gap has saved Morty more than once whenever his balance was knocked askew with each prophecy that stole his breath.
Not every vision foretold was meant to be announced with all humans, after all, even if it involved a matter of life or death. Some futures were set in stone, emerging with a finality that no clairvoyant could ever mistake for anything else; it was all the more reason, then, for everyone connected with the realm of spirituality to take their secrets to their graves, even down to the very ailments that wrecked their bodies when they saw what others could not.
Because of this, Morty was positive that all of the elders holding the fort down in Ecruteak would have his head for this blunder he made. Centuries-old pact preserved to safeguard their very teachings, and yet here he was: a Gym Leader renowned for both his battling prowess and clairvoyance, buckling at the sheer flashes that bombarded his sight, his last anchor to reality being the panicked grasp of a smaller hand than his, daintier and delicate in touch but much more weather-hardened than his.
The colorful, mosaic tiles stretching across Pasio’s Centra City were gone as if invisible hands had swiftly swapped them with a barren land of white. It was freezing, too, and the Ice Path at the end of the year paled in comparison to this; the blizzard raging wildly around Morty helped to explain that, along with the horrendously low visibility. Every step forward on the thick layer of snow zapped all of his energy, yet he pulled on anyway, barreling into the dangerous snowstorm as if he was possessed by what he would find in the middle of it, blindly trailing after its silent call.
Soon, it was revealed the risk was worth taking, venturing this late out into the vicious night.
A giant Magmortar bounded ahead, using its ever-flaming body as a precious torch to guide the humans to what it first spotted, pointing one of its cannon-like arms 2 meters ahead. Instead of following suit, whoever this premonition was meant for stayed rooted in the knee-deep snow, paralyzed by a sight that not even Morty— with all the times he had assisted in searching for missing people and Pokémon, both because of a cruel tragedy or a part of a crime stint —was prepared of witnessing.
There, half-buried in snowflakes, was the body of a man.
Anyone could see the inky red blotch staining the untouched snow that his body laid on, bleeding wildly like sumi ink dabbed by a novice calligrapher, uncontrollable in its spread from where they started near the man’s right ear, washing his gray sideburns in blood. The black coat that he donned was tattered all over, barely sparing any fabric for the carmine strips decorating its bottom half, ruined by large and jagged rips that Morty imagined was the work of large, sharp claws. His deduction has an echo of truth in it, based on the two sets of bloodied, faded footsteps left at the crime scene; a human-sized one that obviously belonged to the man’s funny-looking shoes, and the other etched by a three-toed beast, with prominent claws that marked its presence wherever it stomped on. Pokémon has never been found to be this savage in the modern age, and Morty’s logic whispered to him about missing a crucial piece to understand this eerie sight.
People and Pokémon soon swooped in to save the injured man. First came a female kid dressed in a blue tunic, climbing off from the perch of a Braviary that was exactly like Rei’s, and there was something in the way she solemnly watched the adults execute life-saving procedures that betrayed the childlike-essence of her chubby cheeks and green, braided pigtails. Amongst several of the men donning pink tunic was someone completely shirtless, and Morty has no moment to marvel at his ability to withstand this cold with just how confident the blue-haired man was in barking his orders.
A furry, lilac Pokémon then stepped into view, carefully scooping up the man in its long limbs as if he was a dandelion that could wither at the smallest touch. This foreign-looking Pokémon also swiped a matching black hat that lay nearby, but when an ornament sewn on its crown sparkled along with Magmortar’s shine, the enigna upon him was further derailed from Morty’s common sense.
That insignia— a circular badge of white and blue colors, printed neatly onto a silver plaque —symbolized a spectacle that no one who has ever visited Unova could forget. Even when the first Pokémon World Tournament was the reason that brought Morty to travel to that faraway region, he was still a seer looking for ways to bring his dream into reality, and just like any other trainer, he had wound up at Gear Station in his free time, looking to battle the famed Subway Bosses.
Yes, now that everyone could see the tiny cuts littering the man’s face, Morty could recognize him now— the iconic gray sideburns, the perpetual frown of his lips, his regalia tied neatly with monochromatic wear that resembled train tracks… There was no mistaking this man as Subway Boss Ingo, only a few years older than he last met him.
That, too, cemented the fact that this was not a frightful sign like Morty had initially perceived.
No, this was a memory— an event that had already happened before, replayed in high definition for his sake.
Morty reeled back as if he had been slapped by that fact, and so did the unfortunate person he was viewing this nightmare through. Bile rose in the back of his throat just like all the questions that surged in, desperate in its attempt to understand this anomaly— what in Arceus’ name even happened to Ingo? Where was he stranded on to begin with? Did Emmet, Elesa, or any of the Battle Subway’s loyal workers even know that the man was at the verge of death’s door?
“Let’s get moving!” The blue-haired, shirtless man yelled, commanding his Glalie and Froslass to shield the lilac-colored Pokémon’s path from the snowstorm. Everyone rushed along with their leader to get back to safety, the Magmortar taking its illumination as it marched side-by-side with the shirtless man to light the way home.
Well, all except for Morty— or the body of this person tethered to his terrified conscience —plus the small, emerald-haired girl and her Braviary.
He was frozen in time, tracing with his eyes where Ingo’s body had been sprawled on the ruined ice like a police officer would with their chalk outline, feeling sicker the longer he stared at the leftover blood but unable to wrench himself away from the chaos. Morty was too lost in his dread— in all of his mad, rapid-fire wondering, really —to even notice that the young girl had shifted into his field of vision. Only when she clutched his hands in her oversized, beige gloves did he look up, and that alone was the second, huge error he made today.
The body that Morty borrowed and this child’s green, doe-eyed irises locked in an intense gaze, and it was saying something that she stood her ground despite standing in front of a much older person— possibly even an adult twice her age. Their staring match continued in tense silence, but the little girl persisted, peering into him in a way that made the hairs on the back of his head stand up. For a split-second, it almost seemed like this child was not even seeing the host of his conscience, but looking past that barrier and right into Morty instead.
Of course, with the axis of his world thrown askew and his surroundings being starkly different from Ecruteak, Morty naturally forgot that he was not the only one born as a clairvoyant in this vast space.
When the girl firmly squeezed Morty’s larger hands in her mittens, the gesture was electrifying, urging him to look deeper into the same, all-knowing eyes that greeted him every morning from the bathroom mirror. He gasped, then, as the last puzzle piece to solve this conundrum clicked into place, and the young seer’s face finally broke into her first smile, the gravity of her serious exterior melting away into something that was reassuring and earnest.
“We’ll be okay out here, believe it or not. Even Ingo will be fine,” The girl whispered, all rosy-cheeked and bright optimism, looking more like the child she actually was now even when delivering the horrible twist of another man’s fate. She gave a last, gentle squeeze of their intertwined hands, and the sudden pinch taking over Morty’s own heart signaled the end of their stolen moment. Her playful grin was one of the last things he saw before the edges of his vision started to blur, “But the question is… Will everything be okay in your reality, Mr. Morty?”
Then, before Morty could even say his farewell, the universe warped around him in a merciless swirl, catapulting his conscience back to Pasio with the force of a freight train bulldozing over him. He heaved for air upon seeing Centra City’s familiar, mosaic tiles and his own, wooden geta upon returning, relying on one hand to brace himself on his knee before he could collapse in the public eye.
Morty barely got a second of respite, as his third and final strike welcomed him without any consideration of what he had just gone through.
“Are you okay?!” Shrieked another voice— a woman, this time around, her beautiful face pressed a breath away from his. She kneeled on the ground without a second thought, her hands shooting out to steady his quaking shoulders, clenching them in an iron grip. Her piercing, ice-blue eyes chased after his dazed gaze, frantic in her search to catalogue any signs of physical injury and mental distress. “We only shook hands, but your eyes— they turned cloudy all of a sudden, and then you became as stiff as a statue for a few minutes! Tell me, do I need to call for help? Are you hurt anywhere?”
Finding it in him to speak between his panting breaths was difficult, so all that Morty could choke out was a weak, “I-I need to sit.”
She nodded determinedly, set on the task to gingerly pry Morty’s wooden geta from his feet and rearrange his limbs with polite touches to help him sink into a comfortable seiza on the plaza. There were curious eyes now flitting at them as people passed by, and Morty could see why they would be wary; they were two Sync Pairs dressed in similar shades of purple and red, deciding to take a break in the middle of the street instead of the many establishments littered all around them. Morty could care less about his image, though; his focus, scattered as it was, was whisked by the lady in front of him.
With chin-length blonde hair curling near the tips and round eyes with irises in a shockingly-cold blue tint, Morty imagined that she would fit to be an ice princess, especially if one considered the graceful way she carried herself, cool-headed even in the face of jeopardy. She must be not that different from him in age, her steadfast demeanor being one of the many qualities that stood out despite her young age. Dressed in modern clothes, he has no clue on where to start gauging anything specific about her.
Finally, once his heart had stopped running its marathon, Morty took a deep breath, straightened his spine, and said, with a grimace, “Thank you for helping me there, and I’m sorry to have scared you. My name is Morty, a Ghost-type Gym Leader from the Johto region. And you are?”
The woman did not extend her hand this time around, though her gaze did flicker towards Morty’s own in thinly-veiled bewilderment. She, too, fixed her seiza, opting to bow her head as far as the minimal space between them allowed, and replied, “I’m Irida— clan leader of the Pearl Clan in the Hisui region, several centuries before it was renamed as the Sinnoh region. We were about to make our introductions when you…”
Right. An unforgiving winter, blood putting a blemish on the unbothered snow, the bruised body of a man who was displaced from his home— just like his usual vision, this flashback came to haunt Morty with a vengeance.
“I’m a seer, you see. A psychic, clairvoyant, medium— I have the same ability as them; someone who can see into the future,” Morty hastily explained, and Irida did not gawk at him the way foreigners always do, whenever he told them of his talent. It meant that the little girl he had met— the one who had surpassed the limitations of that phenomenon to meet him in the middle, a sage from the past conversing with one from the future —did not hide her skill, at least around Irida. “My ability allows me to see what others cannot, but it’s limited to what is foretold about the times ahead of us. What I had experienced earlier with you, however…”
“You just time-traveled into the past, didn’t you?” Irida finished for him without missing a beat, hazarding an accurate guess and not at all phased by their peculiar topic. When Morty faltered in his search of words, less overwhelmed by the sheer mayhem brewing in his mind and more astonished with her knowledge of the divination, she aided him with a simple, “Sabi once elaborated that clairvoyance doesn’t just extended forward into the future— it can also backtrack by letting the experts look back into the past as a way to advise them of changes in the future. Well, at least that’s what I gathered from her young wisdom; she had actually posed it as a question, in her typical playful fashion.”
Yes, that made whatever that was revealed to him all the more rational.
“I see. So Sabi was her name,” Morty muttered, remembering the unique color of her eyes and braided hair, its shade reminiscent of the pungent condiment found in many Johtonian restaurants today. “I met her in it, actually. She instantly knew that I was someone watching the past from another person’s body— your body, I presume.”
“Wait, you did?!” Irida squeaked, showing a new side of herself with the awe that lit up her whole face, its warm gleam dazzling bright at the mention of people from her home region— folks that she had not seen in a long time now, people who she undoubtedly missed when she was displaced to Pasio. Leaning closer, she gushed, “Did she say anything to you? Wait, no— what memory were you even shown in the first place?!”
Before Morty could recall his brief trip to the past, the bark of a Pokémon crashed their party, demanding their attention somewhere else. It must have been Irida’s partner; with their emotions synced perfectly, she tore her gaze away and sought for the interruption that her Pokémon hinted at. Morty, on the other hand, was petrified by the same, gut-wrenching fear he had felt in that past fragment, his stomach turning inside-out when he saw three-toed claws expanding from a huge paw, nudging close to Irida’s bare thigh. He did not need a good spatial comprehension to know what the outline of its foot would look like on fresh snow, and when he braced himself to glance further up, he trailed past long limbs, thick fur of white and red colors, and even more dangerous claws before he soon landed on yellow eyes seething with rage.
Akari, in their quest to understand his Hisuian Typhlosion, had ventured off on a tale about another Ghost-type Pokémon; one that was reborn by its deep resentment towards humans. Morty knew, from a single glance alone, that this was the Zoroark variant from her region, the Pokémon glaring down at him with utter disgust when other Ghost-type Pokémon flocked to him without trouble. It was the fury incarnate that, most likely, whose brother or sister had attacked Ingo when he first landed in Hisui.
Then, as if the carpet underneath him had not been pulled already, Morty’s faults in the past 30 minutes were overshadowed by perhaps his most daunting and idiotic one yet.
“Apologies for my late arrival! There was an unexpected detour in our tracks before we could depart for this station!” A loud, male voice boomed from a distance, his strong strides and the magical trill of a Pokémon accompanying his presence. Morty did not need to look up to know who was speaking that peculiar lingo, capable of picturing a face to that blasting voice from a mile away. Irida was the only one who snapped her head towards the source of the voice, and Morty was dreading an interaction that had been warned by the stars from unfolding right in front of his eyes.
The mystery man came to a halt in front of them, dressed in a costume that combined both a traditional and modern interpretation of a train conductor, mirroring the same color palette as his floating partner, Chandelure. Even with the perpetual frown on his face, there was eager kindness oozing from his silvery eyes— an otherwise friendly gesture that soon dimmed when he saw Morty’s pale skin and Irida’s jaw quite literally hitting the floor.
She was not the only one who saw a ghost today, it seemed.
“Y-You’re— Mighty Palkia, are you Ingo?” Irida stuttered, her eyes blown wide as she stared back and forth between a surprised Ingo and an ashen-looking Morty. Gasping, she slapped both of her hands to cover her gaping mouth, not enough to muffle her next, surreal words, telling a story of its own from her hopeful tone. “Are you the Ingo from my time? Did Almighty Sinnoh finally send you home?! What about your memories?”
Ingo, to his credit, simply faltered, not at all sure on how to navigate such alarming questions. He glanced at Morty with a quiet cry for help, to at least be clued in about the context of this weird situation, his forehead scrunching in frustration the longer that the seer’s lips remained unmoving.
Well, so much for being able to see what others could not.
“Can you both help me up?” Morty interrupted, not trusting his limbs to work after the ordeal that barrelled into him today, his energy drained completely. He was likely going to tap out for the day, too, if his fatigue did not disappear after a much-needed sweet treat. “Our match doesn’t start for another hour. We can just… get something to drink while I help to explain all of this.”
In this multiverse of madness that Pasio has come to be, Morty’s one blessing amongst this uproar was this: the Sync Pairs that he met were all reliably selfless, and no matter how many evil organizations or issues that broke out on this isolated island, they always had each other’s back no matter what.
“Of course!” Ingo instantly agreed, crouching down to flank Morty’s right side, looping the seer’s right arm across his shoulder while the Subway Boss’ left arm rested on the other man’s waist. He then turned towards Irida, sweeping any of his bafflement and nervousness under the rug to cautiously ask her, “Would you please help him up from his other side, Miss…”
Irida took a sharp breath, then, getting all the confirmation that she needed that this was not the Ingo that guarded a part of the Highlands— he was an alternate version to the wonderful man and battler whose fragile memories were cracked beyond repair, left forever grieving for the blurry spectre that occasionally plagued his dreams and a past he could not return to, never quite fitting in no matter how hard Irida and her Pearl Clan tried to make Hisui his new home.
She proved to be tougher than her young age suggested, as Irida soon regulated her breathing enough to do what was needed: stop her tears from rolling down, tuck her broken hope away to be soothed later on, and copy Ingo’s move on the seer’s free side, her touches on his kimono-clothed body gentle, but resolute. She then glanced at Ingo from between Morty’s lolling head, answering him with the hardened facade of someone who ascended to her leadership title a little too soon. “I’m Irida. Let’s all stand up at the count of three, okay?”
Together, they wobbled in tandem to the nearest café in their vicinity, taking one unsure step and the next in flawless harmony. What a funny trio they must look to other visitors of this island; three Ghost-type trainers looking like they had been spooked to their cores, their respective Pokémon clearing the path for their Shuckle-like walk.
Amidst the dizziness holding his head hostage, Morty caught sight of Ingo’s small, but comforting smile beaming at Irida, and the woman replying with her own, tentative one, unfurling to the companionship that he offered like what she had done, with another version of him centuries ago. This was not an ideal start to a havoc that Morty could have easily prevented, but their reality had already been shaped, and the seer would gladly take this hesitant camaraderie as a small win.
Distantly, Morty thought of Sabi again and knew what he would say, if he ever got the chance to meet her again: everything will be okay in his timeline, too.