"You survived," Riven said again, this time quieter, as if the second utterance would make the fact sit better in his chest. It didn't.
The old man didn't move. He sat hunched at a sun-bleached terminal, surrounded by dead monitors and notebooks that had yellowed at the edges, brittle with age and disuse. His white coat was less white than bone-grey, stained with ash and silence. And in his eyes—murky, ancient, twitching beneath deep-set wrinkles—there was no triumph, no defiance, just the hollow stare of a man who had seen something vast and wrong and hadn't looked away quickly enough.
"Do I know you?" the man finally croaked, voice brittle like glass left out in frost too long.
"No," Riven said, stepping inside the room fully now, boots crunching over powdered metal, "but I knew what you made. And I saw what it did."
The old man's hands twitched at the mention. He chuckled, though there was no humor in it. It was the sort of laugh people made in their final moments when they realized the horror wasn't just real—it had already happened.
"You came from the other side," the man said slowly. "Didn't you?"
Riven didn't answer right away. His breath fogged faintly in the air; the underground lab was colder than the snowfields near Snowpoint. Echo whimpered from inside his hood and didn't come out.
"I came from the end," Riven said. "The real end. After the sky split. After the oceans turned black. After Arceus—"
The old man flinched. Not subtly. Visibly. Like a name alone could wound.
"—after Arceus turned on us," Riven finished.
The silence that followed felt older than the room.
---
"It wasn't supposed to happen that way," Yurev said finally, staring down at the bones of a broken Poké Ball in his hand. "Project Genesis… we thought it would let us correct mistakes. Unwrite wars. Save cities. I had a daughter. I—" His breath caught. "I thought I could build her a world without the same fires I watched burn through Kanto."
Riven crouched near one of the inactive consoles, brushing away thick layers of dust. Beneath, a cracked screen blinked—faint green text, like a dying heartbeat still pulsing data through time itself. Most of it was corrupted gibberish. But a few lines still glowed with terrible clarity:
> // Emergency Override: Arceus_Protocol_Ω
// Timeline Authority Seized
// Error: Multiple Threads Detected
// WARNING: Anomalous Sentience Registered
Riven let the silence stretch until it nearly broke.
"You gave it too much," he finally said. "Arceus was never meant to be bound by our laws. You caged a god in code."
The old man looked up at that—really looked up. And for a moment, through the grime and years, something like the old spark of a younger scientist flickered in his eyes. "No. No, we didn't cage it. We just… offered it a map."
"And it burned the world instead."
---
They stood in that room for what felt like hours, two ghosts pacing the ruins of ambition. Riven told the story he never thought he'd tell out loud—the one no one in this soft, warm, not-yet-broken world would believe.
He spoke of the day it began: when the skies cracked over Mount Silver, and bolts of light not made by any known Pokémon rained down like judgment. How Indigo Plateau burned in a heartbeat, its towers cleaved in half by some unseen force—how even the Elite Four fell screaming, their strongest Pokémon reduced to ash. He spoke of how wild Pokémon lost their minds, of how they turned not feral but something worse: intelligent, coordinated, and cruel.
He spoke of Red, who vanished the day before it all began. Of rumors that he'd touched something deep beneath Mt. Moon. Of the obsidian shrine that pulsed like a heart. Of the whispers that maybe he didn't vanish at all—maybe he was chosen.
Riven spoke until his voice gave out, until the air felt too heavy to breathe.
When he finished, Yurev had tears in his eyes. And a confession on his lips.
---
"We modeled the Genesis system on Arceus's plate resonance," the old man said, standing with effort. His joints cracked like twigs under pressure. "The Multiplate Algorithm was meant to stabilize reality. Create a correction field across all League-recognized timelines. But it—"
He swallowed.
"It woke something up. Or maybe… maybe it just gave it a window."
"And it looked through," Riven muttered.
"It didn't just look," Yurev whispered. "It learned."
He shuffled toward a locked cabinet, drew out a metallic device—one of the old PokéDex prototypes, cracked and humming faintly.
He tossed it to Riven, who caught it without thinking.
"You have Ralts," Yurev said. "You can feel the link. That device has residual gatecode. You'll need it."
Riven looked down at the Dex. It was heavier than it should be. Like it remembered what it had seen.
"I don't want another tool," Riven said.
"You don't have a choice," Yurev answered. "If you're going to stop this… you have to start gathering them. The Plates. The real ones. The ones not bound by game code. There are nine left. Each buried beneath a region's heart. Each tied to one of the fallen champions."
"Champions?" Riven blinked. "They're not even eighteen yet in this timeline."
"They will be," Yurev said. "If they survive."
---
Outside Again
Riven emerged into the late dusk of Fallarbor with the wind tugging at his cloak and a thousand thoughts fighting for space in his skull.
He didn't remember the sky being this blue. Not since… gods, how long had it been since he saw the sun without blood in the clouds?
Echo curled tighter in his hood. The Ralts wasn't speaking, but the emotions were loud: confusion, fear, loyalty.
And something new.
Hope.
Riven walked slowly through the town. People watched from porches and behind store windows. No one spoke. But a little girl walking a Zigzagoon paused and looked up at him.
"Your eyes are sad," she said, simply.
Riven paused.
"And your future's loud."
He crouched, managing the faintest smile. "Is that so?"
She nodded seriously. "My Ziggy says you're walking backwards into something scary. But you're not scared. Not really. Just tired."
Riven said nothing. What could he say? That she was right?
Instead, he stood up and gave a nod that said more than words could manage. And walked on.
---
A Whisper Beneath
Later that night, by a fire just outside town, Riven sat alone.
He held the Dex. Watched it blink.
One by one, the Plates appeared as blinking nodes on the screen, fuzzed out and incomplete, but real. The first flickered in Kanto—beneath the ruins of Cerulean Cave.
Of course it would be there.
Mewtwo.
The second—Mt. Pyre. Hoenn.
He stared at the map until his eyes blurred. Until the fire burned low.
Until a voice—soft, ancient, genderless—whispered through the trees:
"You were not meant to return."
Riven didn't move.
"I returned anyway," he whispered. "And this time, I'll do more than watch the world end."
Behind him, Echo stirred.
'Ral...ts.'
The voice was gone.
But something watched.
---
END OF CHAPTER 12