Chapter 3: The real me
(A/N: There is a bit in this that may count as advertising. Sorry, but it’s a part of the fic and I’m not trying to advertise websites.)
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I regained consciousness lying somewhere, don’t know where, with a headache and feeling all weird. The first thing I could think of was checking the clock, so I raised my left arm, but just then some freaky blade came towards my face. I stopped dead and it stayed there in the air. I slowly moved my arm down, and the blade was withdrawn to my great relief. I dared to turn my head carefully to the left to see that someone with the blade, but what I saw freaked me so much out I shouted “AAAAHHHHH!” without meaning to. Apparently shoulder had turned into some sort of a green ball. But actually, this freaked my out more. What I had shouted was not “AAAAAHHHHH!” at all. It was more like “SAAAAAAAI!” I still understood it as “AAAAAHHHH!”, like I was speaking some sort of a strange language. Weird.

“Welcome,” said a sudden voice (or well, it was speaking in yet another language, but I still understood it), “to the pokémon world.”

I quickly looked around, and if anything freaked me out, it was that.

The speaker was a giant, orange dragon with a fire on his tail.

“Who are you?” I mumbled, but again I got this strange language thingy out of my mouth. Darn it, didn’t I know English anymore?

“It’s me,” he continued, “Morpheus. In my real form.”

“What language are we speaking?”

That was a stupid question and there were other questions more important, but I still asked. To my surprise, however, he didn't seem to find the question weird.

“We’re speaking pokémonish. You’re a pokémon too - a Scyther, to be exact. I'm a Charizard.”

I jumped up as I saw a mirror on the wall and I quickly checked myself out.

And really, if Morpheus being a dragon freaked me out, it was nothing compared to the fact that I was actually a green bug, that blade that freaked me out for the first time belonged to my own arm, and my right arm had one too. I also had wings. And three big claws on each foot.

This was just too freaky. I carefully raised my arm. The scythe in the mirror moved too. I moved it before my own eyes, and instantly screwed them shut and lowered it again.

“I can’t take this,” I said to Morpheus, shaking my head. “I mean, pokémon’s a freaking FAD from, like, 1998 or something!”

“That’s what you’re supposed to believe,” Morpheus answered calmly. “In reality, we are all pokémon. They made video games and a badly-dubbed television show about pokémon, just to underline the illusion that it’s nonexistent.”

“Who? What ‘they’?” I quickly asked.

“Humans, Neo, humans. They multiplied so fast and consumed so much energy there just wasn’t enough energy on the planet for them all after they managed to release enough pollution into the air to block out the sun. So they thought: “Hey, why don’t we just use pokémon to generate energy? We can hold them in pokéballs so it won’t take up much room, and pokémon are 96% pure energy.” So they used Dark balls…”

“Hey, wait a minute,” I interrupted. “I don’t know anything about that pokémon stuff, except that they’re some kind of little pink flying animals that say moo. Please tell me what “Pokéballs” and “Dark balls” are.”

“That’s simple,” Morpheus said. “Follow me.”

He took me into another room. There were a few balls there on a table. They each had a button on them, and that button was in the middle of a line that went around the ball and separated it into an upper and a lower half. They were colored in different colors. Morpheus picked up one that had a red upper half and a white lower half.

“This is a normal pokéball,” he explained. “We use them to go into the Type Chart when we need to. The actual Type Chart, that is. We use other kinds of balls to go into worlds we created, similar to the actual Type Chart but created by us and with our rules. Here, however…”

He picked up a ball with the letter M on it.

“…we have a Master ball, which will plug us into a blank world that can be used to load information into our brain or just give us things like clothes or weapons we can use inside the Type Chart. Here I’ve got, for example, a pokédex. You must learn that, of course.”

He held up a CD cover. I peeked at it and read aloud from it.

“Complete pokédex – copyright to Psypoke, www.psypoke.org…”

I looked at Morpheus. He picked up the Master ball and pressed the button. It somehow inflated. Then I felt a weird sensation as my cells got sucked into the ball one by one. I was floating around in some blackness like a cloud of atoms for a second. Then he sent me out of the ball again. I reformed on the floor. It felt good to be solid again. Then I suddenly realized something.

“WHOA! I know… everything!” I gasped.

“Yes,” Morpheus said and smiled.

“I know that you learn Wing attack at level 36… I know that I start with Quick attack! I know that… that… the pokémon that’s walking in at this very moment is called Butterfree, evolves from Metapod, learns Confusion at level 10, Poisonpowder at level 13, Stun spore at level 14, Sleep powder at level 15…”

“Enough, Neo,” said the Butterfree, a butterfly-like creature, just much bigger. “It’s me, Trinity.”

“…is a Bug/Flying type… hey, at least I’m not the only bug around.” I paused. “Are there any Butterfrees that aren’t feminists?”

“Of course,” said Trinity. “I mean, we aren’t even an all-female species.”

“No, I mean females,” I corrected myself.

“Yes,” said Trinity.

“Are they all as good-looking as you?”

Trinity glowed purple again and somehow convinced my brain that I had just been slapped hard across the face and was supposed to be feeling pain.

“Ow,” I said and had to think twice before I remembered that it wouldn’t be very wise to rub my cheek, with my arms in the current shape.

“Watch out,” Trinity said coldly. “We may both be bugs, but I’m the one with psychic powers.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “And I’m the one with scythes. Hey…” I paused. “How do I use those things?”

“You must be trained,” Morpheus said. “But first of all I need to tell you the whole story. The humans used Dark balls, special pokéballs that turn pokémon evil, to catch legendary pokémon that they then used to catch all pokémon in the world. But because pokémon can break out of their pokéballs, they had to do something to prevent us from doing that while they used us as batteries. So they made the Type Chart for us to be inside and believe that WE are humans and that pokémon is no more than a gameboy game, a bad television show and trading cards… it makes it sound more far-fetched to us when we hear that we actually are pokémon. And of course, they show movies like The Matrix all the time to make it sound far-fetched that our world isn’t real. Very clever of them humans. They even put the legendary pokémon there, as special guards there to make sure we’d keep out of the line. Those guards are the 00bers.”

“Are the 00bers pokémon too?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Do you know what pokémon the one called Smith is?”

I don’t know why I asked about him, but I just had the feeling that this Smith guy was more important than the others.

“He’s Mewtwo,” said Morpheus. “Actually the most powerful of them all, which is no wonder since the humans created him.”

“Oh,” I said. “How can we see what pokémon somebody is?”

“That’s what we’ll be going into now. You noticed that we all wore shades while we were inside the Type Chart? It’s the shades that do it. The 00bers also wear those special shades, as you have probably noted too.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said because I was starting to suspect something, “what does it look like to someone wearing special shades when I believe I’m moving my fingers inside the Type Chart?”

“Well, if you picked up something, like a ball, your scythe would just touch the ball and then you’d raise it again and the ball goes there too. You never actually moved anything, the Type Chart just makes the objects react as if you had fingers.”

That explained why Smith found my middle finger so funny.

“And am I supposed to get special shades now?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Morpheus picked up the Master ball again and found a disk labeled ‘shades’. Then he absorbed me into the ball, I again felt this weird floating sensation for a second, but then I felt myself reform in a blank room. Suddenly, a shelf appeared and filled with shades of all kinds. Morpheus emerged beside me, and I noticed how he appeared: a red beam of light came out of nowhere and shaped into a human, then the light faded away, revealing Morpheus in human form.

He lowered his shades.

“Ahh, so this is what you look like in human form,” he said. “Anyway, you’re pokémon number 123, so we need to find shades number 123 from the left, and they should fit.”

We walked along the shelf, got confused in the counting at least twice and had to start from the beginning again. When we finally found my shades, I tried putting them on, but they simply didn’t fit. Angrily, I threw them to the nonexistent ground, but the stupid shades wouldn’t break.

“I need to put them on for you,” Morpheus explained, picked them up and then it appeared that he was going to poke my eyes out with them. I automatically screwed them shut, and when I opened them again, Morpheus stood before me in his real form.

I raised my right arm and it was indeed a scythe. I smiled broadly. I was real. And now it was just... getting revenge on that cocky Smith guy for laughing at me.