

Is The World Strange? Or Am I Strange?

[+] Rules 1. The first Pokémon encountered in each area must be caught.

1a. Dupes Clause: If the first three Pokémon encountered in an area are already owned by the Player, it is not required that they be captured. However, the fourth Pokémon must be caught regardless of its status.

1b. Gift Pokémon: Do not count towards the area encounter clause but must be marked to signify their status as a gift Pokémon. This includes eggs.

1c. Only one Pokémon may be obtained through Voltorb Flip in each Game Corner.

1d. Shiny Pokémon are exempt from these rules but can only be used if they are caught within the rules.



2. If a Pokémon faints, it is considered dead and must be boxed permanently until the end of the run.



3. All Pokémon must be nicknamed.

3a. With the exception of the Player's starter, all Pokémon are to be given a name that has been randomly generated. Or, y'know, just a random name in general.

[+] Art Stuff Nothing yet except the header which is doing its job up there.

[+] Prologue There was a world out there, somewhere, that we were told to steer clear of entirely. As if we had any control over where we were going to go. Nobody ever ended up there anyway, even when they did have control over what was going on, so we began to doubt it existed. I sure as hell didn't believe in it, that is, until I found myself trapped there.



It was my first shift, and I hadn't been expecting much from it. I was pretty excited about it. A few hours in another world sounded like fun, and that was all I was told it would be. A few hours, maybe two, possibly four, but usually around three. Somewhere benign as well, something as simple as twenty years ago, or twenty years from now. Somewhere peaceful, safe, special.



My first shift was none of those things.



I woke up flat on my back, as I had been told I would. From what I could tell, I was human. Male. Red-haired. That was fairly normal. I sat up - I was in a bedroom, something simple with a bed and a television and a laptop on a desk next to a dresser with a mirror set into it. I got to my feet - unsteadily - and made for the mirror. Yes. Red hair, to my shoulders, sleek. A youth's face with commanding steely grey eyes. Handsome, but with an aura that betrayed a difficult past. I liked my appearance, but I also figured that being naked in a human body was likely not the norm in whatever world I had appeared in.



I opened the dresser and pulled out clothes that appealed to me on sight - a black vest, a long sleeved navy shirt with red trim, some boots which matched this shirt, and a pair of nondescript jeans. Once they were on, I examined myself in the mirror once more. Yeah. I looked good. I was going to enjoy this first shift.



As I was about to leave the room and explore the rest of the area, the television flickered into life. I had been expecting this; we'd been warned about technology responding strangely to our presence. We had been told to ignore all oddities that our presence caused, to pass them off to other people as nothing, a mere glitch in the matrix... whatever that meant. I couldn't ignore this glitch, however - I was drawn to it. An elderly man appeared on the screen. He was smiling. I recognised him in a way I could not make sense of - I knew that he was one of us.



"Welcome to the world of Pokémon!" he said cheerily. I figured I must have misheard him. He'd said that word. The one we were warned about, the one from the world that did not exist and that we were never supposed to go to.



But no. I hadn't misheard him. He said it again, and even showed me one of these Pokémon things, setting it loose from a little red and white ball in his hand. This was bad, he was one of us, why was he being so cheerful about this? I could barely pay attention to what he was saying because of the panic rising within me. I wasn't supposed to be here! Had something gone wrong? I had to get out, get away from populated areas, wait out the rest of the shift in solitude. I fled down the stairs, away from the television, and crashed headlong into a grown human woman.



"Oh! Silver!" she cried out as we both steadied ourselves. "I thought you'd left already? On that errand for Professor Elm? Did you come back for your bag?"



She handed me said bag, and I slung it over my shoulder awkwardly. It felt reasonably empty. I had no idea how I was supposed to speak to this woman, and so I kept my mouth shut. She didn't seem to notice, and ushered me cheerily out into the open air beyond the front door, wishing me luck and bidding me farewell and whatnot. Perhaps she was a relative of this "Silver" I had become. His mother, or aunt, something like that. She must have been used to his silence.



I assumed that the real Silver had already gone out in search of Professor Elm, and so I made a point of steering clear of the laboratory that had his name all over it. Instead, I headed for the outskirts of the town, which was pretty sparsely populated. It was about noon, judging from how high the sun was in the sky, and yet I only saw two other people in the town. One of them was the young woman who stopped me as I attempted to leave.



"What are you doing? You can't leave town without a Pokémon! Wild Pokémon will attack you in the tall grass, and you need to be able to defend yourself!"



After debating at length with this young woman, I learned that I could get a Pokémon of my own from... surprise surprise, Professor Elm. I made a start over to where I assumed I would find him, and had to stop and frantically throw myself into a bush when I caught sight of a redhead exiting from the laboratory. I couldn't let him see me. That was the first rule of the shifts; you couldn't let your counterpart so much as entertain the notion that you existed. He didn't notice me at all, and once he was safely out of sight, I crept around the back of the laboratory and peered in through a window.



Someone was pattering around on a computer to my right, and on my left there was an odd machine I had no name for, but on its counter there were two little balls that I assumed had Pokémon inside. The man from the television... Oak... he had let one out of a ball just like that.



The person in the room suddenly began talking. "Hello? Mr. Pokemon? It's Elm. ... Yes, I've just sent Silver out your way to pick up the Egg for me. ... He should be there shortly, within a few hours I'd imagine. ... No, I don't think he'll lose his way. ... All right, I'll talk to you soon then. Tata."

A phone conversation, no doubt. The window was open a crack, and I had heard it clearly.



Once the professor was gone from the room, I pried the window open and stole into the room. Wasting no time at all, I grabbed one of the balls and opened it just as Oak had on the television. It was a different Pokémon to the one that had come from Oak's ball - a small crocodile-like creature, with glittering aquamarine scales, a yellow breast, and blue spikes on its back. It gibbered at me happily, and I hurriedly returned it to its ball and hopped out of the window, into the forbidden world once more.



I was more than happy to show the creature off to the girl who would not let me pass otherwise, and she gasped in delight when she caught sight of it.



"A Totodile! Oh, he's gorgeous! Such an unusual coloured one as well! Where did you get him? Not from Elm, surely! He'd never give away a shiny Totodile! What's his name?"



Most of her babbling went over my head, but I did give her a curt reply. "Nix. His name is Nix."

I was doing a comic run of PitchBlack, but it glitched out on me and I lost all my save data... so I started up a new run on HeartGold and got incredibly lucky within the first few minutes of it. I'm taking a LOT of liberties with the original storyline of this game, so bear with me, and feel free to ask questions... I feel like I might need an FAQ for this run eventually, even if it's only for myself. I like to write in little bursts, so updates will most likely be short and frequent.Anyway.And the story itself begins here.