The first thing you should know about this planet is that everything is aggressively cheerful. The sunlight is too yellow, the trees look like they were designed by a five-year-old with an overactive imagination, and the local wildlife seems to have one primary function: to be adorable. And right now, the most adorable of all was riding my shoulder like he'd just conquered a small nation.
His name was Caterpie, or at least that's what the girl called him. To me, he was a little green overlord with giant, unnervingly expressive eyes that followed my every move. He'd latched onto me the moment I'd crash-landed, and now seemed to believe he was my official handler.
The girl's name was Lila. She walked with the focused, purposeful stride of someone who alphabetizes their spice rack. Her hiking boots were spotless, her hair was tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail, and her eyes—sharp and analytical behind a pair of practical glasses—kept flicking over to me like I was a particularly baffling math problem.
"I've cross-referenced every known regional index," she mumbled, more to herself than to me. "Unregistered Grass-type? Potentially a new variant of Tangela? No, the cellular metamorphic properties are too advanced."
"Dude, for the last time, I'm not a Pokémon," I sighed, swatting at a bug that looked like a flying cotton ball with wings. "I'm an alien. From space. You know, spaceships, ray guns, little green men? Except I'm the little green man. Well, teenager."
She ignored me, her gaze fixed on my skin. "The chlorophyll pigmentation is remarkably stable, yet you don't engage in photosynthesis. Curious."
Caterpie chirped proudly from my shoulder, nudging his head against my ear. It was his way of saying, See? He's a weird one. I found a weird one.
I rolled my eyes. Surviving an escape pod malfunction and crash-landing on a planet that looked like a screensaver had been stressful enough. Getting adopted by a caterpillar and interrogated by a junior scientist was just insult to injury.
"Look," Lila said, stopping and rummaging in her backpack. She pulled out a small, red-and-white sphere that split down the middle. "This is a Pokéball." She held it up with the dramatic flair of a stage magician revealing a dove. "It's a marvel of transdimensional engineering. It converts a Pokémon's physical form into energy, storing it in a stable, comfortable pocket dimension until needed."
I squinted at it. "It looks like something you'd get out of a gumball machine for a quarter. Does it come with a stale piece of gum?"
She shot me a withering glare. "It's highly sophisticated technology. When I want to catch a Pokémon, I just throw it…" She made a gentle throwing motion, "…and the capture mechanism activates on contact, drawing the Pokémon inside."
"So you basically kidnap them with a bouncy ball. Got it."
Caterpie made another smug noise. I was beginning to think he was the brains of this operation.
I turned away, annoyed, and spotted a bird-thing perched on a low-hanging branch. It had a messy crest of feathers and a perpetually unimpressed expression. A Pidgey, Lila had called it. On an impulse born of boredom, I morphed my hand into a perfect replica of its head and chirped, trying to mimic its call. The Pidgey tilted its head, looked at my bird-hand, looked at my face, and promptly flew away, clearly disgusted.
"Figures," I muttered. "Even the pigeons here are snobs."
It was the perfect distraction. My focus was on the retreating bird, my guard completely down. I only registered a faint whistling sound a second before—
WHAP!
Something hard and surprisingly light bonked me right on the forehead. The red-and-white sphere. For a split second, I just stood there, stunned. "Hey! What was that for—?"
My question was cut off by a sensation I can only describe as being vacuumed up by a god. A blinding red light enveloped me, my body dissolving into a stream of shimmering green particles. The forest, Lila, and the smug caterpillar vanished, replaced by a high-pitched whine and a feeling of being squeezed through a straw.
Then, I was… somewhere else.
The word "somewhere" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I was standing on a floor that felt like a trampoline made of hard light. The walls, if you could call them that, were a swirling, pearlescent void. A glowing ring, like a hamster wheel for a neon ghost, spun lazily in the non-existent distance. The air hummed with a weird, static energy that made my skin tingle.
"Okay," I said, my voice echoing back at me in a bizarre, digitized warble. "This is… new."
I tried to take a step, but the bouncy floor sent me twenty feet into the air. I yelled, pinwheeling my arms, and that's when things got really weird. My powers, usually as natural to me as breathing, started to glitch.
My flailing arm suddenly elongated, turning into the long, scaly neck of a Brontosaurus. I landed with a boing, and my legs fused together, becoming the sleek, powerful tail of a dolphin. I flopped uselessly on the glowing ground.
"HEY!" my distorted voice boomed. "LET ME OUT! THIS IS NOT COOL!"
I tried to shift into something more stable, maybe a gorilla for leverage, but my body had other ideas. I flickered. For a second, I was a monkey, then a parakeet, then a fluffy golden retriever that sneezed, sending a puff of digital glitter into the void. My head morphed into a T-Rex's, attached to the tiny body of a hummingbird.
Panic set in. This wasn't a room; it was a cosmic washing machine, and I was the lone sock.
"IS ANYONE OUT THERE?!" I screamed, my voice now a chorus of a roaring lion, a squeaking mouse, and a quacking duck. "THIS IS A SERIOUS VIOLATION OF MY INTERGALACTIC RIGHTS! I'M GONNA BE SICK!"
Just as I felt my form collapse into a puddle of vaguely sentient green goo, the world flashed white. The squeezing sensation returned, but in reverse. I was being spat out.
I tumbled onto the forest floor in a heap of limbs that were, thankfully, my own again. I lay there, dizzy and gasping, the world spinning around me. My skin had a faint, pulsating green glow. A few feet away, Lila was staring at the Pokéball in her hand, her mouth hanging open in utter disbelief. The little sphere wobbled once, twice, and then with a soft ding!, a tiny light on its center blinked off.
Caught. She had actually caught me.
Caterpie, now perched on her shoulder, looked down at me, then at the ball, then back at me. His expression was one of pure, unadulterated smugness. I could practically hear him thinking, See? I told you he's one of us.
Slowly, shakily, I got to my feet. The faint green glow subsided, but the fury was building like a pressure cooker.
"Did you just… try to catch me?!" I yelled, my voice cracking with indignation. I pointed a trembling finger at her. "What am I, your pet alien grass-lizard?! Was that an 'experiment' too?!"
Lila snapped out of her shock, her scientific curiosity immediately overriding any semblance of an apology. "Incredible! The energy conversion was successful. Theoretically, it shouldn't have worked on a non-Pokémon lifeform. The molecular matrix is completely different! This suggests a convergent evolutionary trait, or perhaps…"
"I don't care about your theory!" I stalked towards her, poking her in the shoulder. "You trapped me in a bouncy-house prison! My molecules were having an identity crisis in there! I was part-dinosaur, part-dog, and I think for a second my arm was a tentacle!"
"Fascinating," she breathed, her eyes wide with academic zeal. "Involuntary polymorphic response under dimensional stress. I need to document this." She actually reached for a notepad in her pocket.
"Document this!" I screeched, turning into a small, angry green gorilla and beating my chest for emphasis. The display was less intimidating and more ridiculous, but it was the best I could muster.
We argued for what felt like an hour. She was all logic and scientific inquiry, utterly failing to grasp why being digitized and stored in a pocket dimension might be upsetting. I was all emotion and sarcasm, failing to get through her wall of detached analysis. She insisted it was a harmless test; I insisted she'd basically committed alien abduction.
Finally, exhausted, I slumped against a tree, my gorilla form melting back to my normal shape. The anger was gone, replaced by a hollow weariness. I looked around at the alien woods, at the weirdly-shaped trees and the sky that was just a shade too blue. I was alone. Stranded. And the only person—the only intelligent being I'd met who didn't communicate in chirps—was this infuriatingly curious girl who saw me as a walking science fair project.
I sighed, the fight draining out of me. "Look," I said, not meeting her eyes. "I hate this. I hate you a little bit right now. But… I have no idea where I am. I don't know what's safe to eat, where to sleep, or how to get home. I… I kinda need your help."
Lila fell silent. She adjusted her glasses, her expression softening from clinical to contemplative. She looked at me, then at the dense, unfamiliar forest around us.
"Your abilities are… potent," she admitted, her tone measured. "And your biological composition is an anomaly that warrants further study. You could be useful." It was the closest I was going to get to a compliment, and it still sounded like she was classifying a new type of fungus. "And I suppose leaving an undocumented specimen of your complexity to fend for itself would be scientifically irresponsible."
A grudging truce. We stared at each other for a long moment, a silent, reluctant agreement passing between us.
Suddenly, Caterpie, who had been watching the entire exchange with the gravity of a tiny judge, let out a decisive chirp. He crawled from Lila's shoulder onto her arm, then leaned across the gap between us. With a quick little shimmy, he sprayed a thick, white string from his mouth, wrapping it around my wrist and then hers, binding us together. The string was surprisingly strong and ridiculously sticky.
We both looked down at our tethered hands, then at each other. The sheer absurdity of the moment broke the last of the tension.
I let out a long, suffering sigh and leaned my head back against the tree. "Great," I muttered, staring up at the alien sky. "First alien planet I get dumped on, and I end up someone's failed science project."
A small smirk played on Lila's lips as she carefully began to pick at the sticky string. "Correction," she said, her eyes glinting with a familiar, unnerving curiosity. "You're my successful science project."