The thing hovered in midair.
Its body was composed of several massive green and gray geometric shapes. Its head resembled an inverted miniature UFO, with long bamboo-like strips extending from either side and a cluster of thick tentacles hanging down from the bottom.
It rotated slowly, emitting red beams of light from its head as if scanning the surrounding environment.
The device chimed again.
[Target Encountered: Celesteela]
[Type: Steel / Flying]
The comment feed exploded into a frenzy of scrolling text.
[This thing looks way too sci-fi!]
[Is this a Pokémon or an alien? It looks completely man-made to me.]
[The design's actually pretty cool though.]
Cynthia stared at the Celesteela on screen for a long moment before she could even figure out where its head was.
Once she'd had her fill of looking, she triggered the battle immediately.
The battle style was completely unlike the previous one. Celesteela moved at an agonizingly slow pace, but its durability was nothing short of maddening.
Cynthia cycled through several Pokémon and threw out every super-effective move she had, only to chip away the tiniest sliver of HP each time. The thing's defense and health were absurdly inflated.
After grinding through more than a dozen turns, Cynthia finally whittled Celesteela's health bar down to the red.
She made her move and threw a Beast Ball.
A flash of blue light streaked through the air.
No drama whatsoever. The Beast Ball didn't even wobble — it clicked shut with a clean ding, sealed.
Captured.
The comment feed filled wall to wall with question marks and exclamation points.
[Yes! We caught a UFO!]
[Streamer's luck is unreal, first try?]
[Beast Balls are so good, didn't even shake once. Is the catch rate literally 100%?]
Cynthia looked at her newly caught Celesteela and was already mentally calculating how to slot it into her battle team. That combination of exceptional type resistances and raw bulk was exactly what her lineup had been missing.
There were still several red dots left on the map.
Cynthia glanced at the next location.
Meteor Falls.
She set off immediately.
She had come to Meteor Falls a few times while exploring the Hoenn region before. She'd noticed it seemed to be a fixed spawn point—the kind of place where rare Dragon-type Pokémon would show up with some regularity.
Since her main team ran a rain-weather composition, though, which didn't pair especially well with Dragon types, she'd never spent much time there. The last time she visited was just yesterday, during the Cynthia storyline.
She guided her character into the cave at Meteor Falls.
Beneath the thunderous roar of cascading water, her character slipped through the hidden passage behind the waterfall and descended a staircase, going deeper and deeper underground.
The map was extensive, with branching paths splitting off in every direction.
Drawing on memory, Cynthia navigated straight to the lowest level.
On a raised platform at the very back, an elderly man in a long blue robe stood in perfect silence.
She was about to walk over and talk to him when something in her peripheral vision caught her eye. The stone wall behind the old man.
Tucked inside a natural fissure in the rock, a faint and deeply unnatural purple glow seeped through, half-blocked by a jutting outcrop of stone. It was so faint you'd miss it entirely if you weren't looking carefully.
Something stirred in Cynthia's gut.
She guided her character around the old man and squeezed along the wall into the gap.
Sure enough, hidden behind the rock was a tiny Ultra Wormhole.
She went in.
The moment she entered, Cynthia noticed her character seemed to be moving more slowly.
The temperature here looked far colder than outside. A layer of frost coated the surrounding rock. A thick purple haze hung in the air, and a poison warning icon had appeared at the edge of the screen.
The environment in here was brutally hostile. Whatever Ultra Beast was lurking inside was almost certainly not going to be anything ordinary.
Cynthia felt her way forward along an underground stream.
At the far end of the stream, on a flat stretch of ground, she spotted a purple shape.
What she saw was not what she had expected at all. It looked like a small dragon-type Pokémon, and it was lying flat on the ground, fast asleep. With every breath, little purple poison bubbles drifted lazily out of its nostrils.
It wasn't large. Its entire body was a vivid shade of purple. Three sharp poison spines jutted from the top of its head, and a pair of small wings sprouted from its back, each one looking like it was filled to the brim with venom.
The screen displayed its information.
[Target Encountered: Poipole]
[Type: Poison / Dragon]
The comment feed lit up immediately.
[That little dragon is adorable! Purple and squishy-looking.]
[Poison and Dragon? That's a wild type combo, no Fairy weakness at all.]
[Don't wake it up, just sneak attack!]
Cynthia drew a slow, quiet breath.
She checked Poipole's status. It was sleeping soundly.
Rather than triggering the battle the conventional way, she carefully guided her character around to the side.
One step. Two steps.
Her character crept up directly behind Poipole.
Cynthia quickly opened her bag, selected a Beast Ball, and pressed the throw button.
The Beast Ball arced through the air and landed squarely on the back of Poipole's head.
The little creature never even managed to open its eyes before the blue light swallowed it whole.
Ding.
Captured outright.
The whole sequence was seamless.
The comment feed went wild with a flood of "GG"s.
[Wait, what?? A backstab? She just caught it? No battle required?]
[Cynthia's so sneaky lmao, playing dirty.]
Cynthia said nothing, just made a mental note to check the thing's stats later when she had a moment. Her team was already full, so she couldn't see the newly caught Ultra Beasts yet.
Now only one red dot remained on the map, and it was the most unusual one of all.
Its location was at the very summit of Mt. Pyre.
Her expression shifted slightly when she saw it.
That place...
It was tied to the storyline involving the orbs, and she hadn't been back since.
Maybe she should take the time to explore the mountain while she was at it.
She quickly had her character use Fly to land at the base of Mt. Pyre, then began climbing the steps all the way to the top.
A thick white mist clung to the mountain. Gravestones dotted the slopes, and Ghost-type Pokémon kept materializing from the tall grass all around.
The atmosphere was heavy and suffocating.
She kept climbing until she finally reached the summit.
This was where the entrance to Sky Pillar was supposed to be, and where the villainous team had tried to seize the Red and Blue Orbs in that earlier storyline. But now the mountaintop looked nothing like it had before.
Above the ancient altar at the center of the summit, space itself had been warped into something deeply wrong.
Like the surface of still water violently stirred, the air and light around it were caving inward.
No purple rift. Just a vast, bottomless darkness.
At that moment, the custom wristband Cynthia was wearing let out a piercing alarm. The vibration was more violent than anything it had produced before. The indicator light strobed furiously in red, screaming at her about the danger ahead.
Cynthia stopped moving.
She could feel it. Whatever was hiding behind that twisted space was not in the same category as any of the Ultra Beasts she had caught so far.
The comment feed had also picked up on the shift in atmosphere.
[Last time I came to Mt. Pyre it was still that storyline with the villains and the Red and Blue Orbs, right?]
[Why is the screen warping like that? Did my GPU just die? This is making me dizzy.]
[Be careful, streamer, feels like a BOSS is about to show up.]
[The BGM changed. It's so oppressive. I've got goosebumps.]
Cynthia took a deep breath.
She had come this far. There was no reason to back down.
She adjusted her team, confirmed that all her main Pokémon were at full HP, and then guided her character without hesitation into the warped space.
Darkness swallowed the screen instantly.
A second passed. Then a new scene crashed into view.
Cynthia's breath caught.
There was nothing here that obeyed any natural logic.
No blue sky. No ground.
Enormous shattered triangular islands floated in every direction. A massive waterfall plummeted upward in reverse, its spray flying skyward. Thick stone pillars crisscrossed at every angle, forming a three-dimensional labyrinth that seemed to have no end.
The entire world was drenched in a palette of deep gray: oppressive, cold, and yet carrying a strange and twisted kind of beauty.
A massive red warning box appeared at the center of the screen, consuming nearly half the display.
[Warning: You have entered the Reverse World.]
[This is a world that is the inverse of reality.]
The comment feed detonated. A wall of text buried the entire screen.
[What the hell is this map???]
[I'm getting dizzy. Did gravity just break?]
[There has to be something incredible in here. The pressure is insane.]
Cynthia pushed through the visual disorientation and had her character begin exploring this bizarre world.
Gravity here was completely chaotic.
She tried stepping down onto a lower platform, and instead her character drifted upward like a balloon, landing on a floating island above her head. It took several minutes before she could even begin to adapt to the reversed sense of movement.
Her character leaped between crumbling islands and inverted stone pillars.
The deeper she went, the darker everything became.
At last, she reached the center of this world.
A colossal black vortex hung there, rotating slowly and without a sound.
And directly before the vortex, something was coiled in wait, something that made the skin crawl.
A beast of enormous scale.
It dwarfed even Groudon. Its body was a profound, consuming black, wrapped in golden crescent-shaped dorsal ridges. Its neck stretched impossibly long, and a golden crown sat at the top of its head. Crimson eyes burned in the darkness with a suffocating, predatory light.
Behind it, six wings — black as wraiths and tipped with red spines — spread open, slowly and deliberately.
It simply floated there in silence, as though it were the sovereign of this Reverse World, and always had been.
The comment feed hit its peak velocity.
[What the hell is that?? A dragon??]
[It's MASSIVE. Looks scarier than Groudon!]
[That black and gold color scheme is unreal. Absolutely stunning!]
[Cynthia, why'd you stop moving? Are you scared too?]
[Who is this even? Does anyone know?]
Cynthia ignored the feed.
Her hands had left the keyboard and mouse. She sat completely still in front of the screen.
Her heart was slamming in her chest.
Because the thing before her was something she had seen before.
She stared, unblinking, at the massive black and gold beast radiating its terrible pressure from the screen.
Memories rose like a tide.
There was no mistaking it.
Absolutely no mistaking it.
This was the same terrifying presence that had appeared without warning during the spirit world storyline and unleashed a cataclysmic battle against Mewtwo. But why did its appearance look not quite the same as before?
---
Elsewhere, in another world entirely, Dan the Demon King sat at his computer cradling a glass of soda still fizzing with bubbles, blankly refreshing the player page for something called "Dimensional Game."
The screen's blue glow fell across his slightly worn-out face. He checked the time every so often and muttered to himself:
"This author updates way too slowly. That fight where Caterpie used String Shot last episode was great, and now it's been days and Episode 5 still hasn't dropped? This is torture."
He grumbled, fingers tapping out of habit on the keyboard, and hit F5 to refresh.
The loading circle spun once. Then, without warning, the previously dim and lifeless "Episode 5" button blazed to life, a conspicuous "NEW" label blinking right beside it.
"No way! It updated!"
Dan the Demon King let out a shout and nearly dumped his drink all over the keyboard. He scrambled to set the glass down and clicked play with frantic hands, then quickly leaned toward his streaming mic:
"Guys! Get in here! Episode 5 of the original series just dropped! We've got the Pewter Gym battle, I heard there's a Gym Leader fight. Move it!"
He hollered into the stream, and the viewer count, which had been sitting at a few tens of thousands, instantly started climbing, quickly filling the screen.
As the rousing music swelled and the screen lit up, the familiar opening played, and then the scene shifted.
The outskirts of Viridian Forest.
A breeze drifted through, rustling the leaves with a soft whisper.
Ash, Misty, and Pikachu finally walked clear of the forest that had given them such a hard time.
And above Ash's head, a butterfly with breathtaking wing patterns fluttered gently through the air with graceful ease. Its wings were covered in vivid, kaleidoscopic markings that caught the sunlight and shimmered, like something out of a work of art.
That was Butterfree, the very same Caterpie from before, now having completed its first transformation.
Misty took a deep breath, stretched her arms wide above her head, and let out a long sigh of relief. "Finally out of there! That forest was enormous. If we'd gotten lost one more time I think I would've lost my mind!"
Ash didn't respond to her complaint. He stood on a high ridge looking out at the distance, something burning bright in his eyes. Before him lay a gray city.
Most of its buildings were constructed from dull stone, blending into the rocky mountains that surrounded it on all sides, exuding a cold and austere kind of strength. Ash raised his fist and called out: "Pewter City! Pewter Gym! Here I come!"
Pikachu stood on his shoulder and cried out with equal excitement: "Pika!"
Butterfree, drifting above them both, seemed to catch Ash's fighting spirit. It let out a clear, bright cry and swept its wings in a wide arc through the air.
Down in the stream, the comment feed rushed in like a wave.
[Finally in the city! I was so lost in that forest I thought my brain was going to melt. Nothing but trees for ages.]
[Got chased by Beedrill the whole way, probably still have stingers in my backside. We made it, finally.]
[First Gym coming up! Pewter Gym, right? Wait, what do Gyms even do again?]
[I just hope we don't get lost again once we're in the city. Please.]