Orion 2: Ruined Home

As Orion walked to the main ruins of the ranch, he noticed that the other Taurus kept their distance. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if there were other pokemon in the ruins.

Then he continued. He had to learn what had happened!

The building was completely overgrown, but the massive scorch marks on the walls showed that something had blasted it apart. He thought about calling out for someone, then decided against it. The chances of someone still being here seemed small.

Moving around the ruins, he quickly realized that it had been abandoned for a very long time. Decades, if not longer. Nothing of value or even recognition remained. Mushrooms and plants were growing on the sides of the buildings while patches of yellow grass grew within the walls.

Orion looked around, barely believing what he saw. He felt dismayed, his eyes slowly growing damp again. Pushing the sadness down, he suddenly thought of something and blinked away the tears.

What if…!

He ran through the ruins until he reached what had been the main hall. The staircase had crumbled atop of itself, and he moved to where he knew the stairs down into the cellar should be.

Rubble completely hid it, not even an edge of the way down visible. Still, he knew it should be there! Grabbing a bit of debris, he moved it away, then another, larger one.

He barely paid attention to what he was doing as he hurriedly tried to clear the entrance. There were computers down there that might still work. They could tell him what had happened. What was going on!

Had he been paying attention, he might have noticed when he grabbed a slab of concrete that should have been too big for him to move and shoved it away with only a strained grunt.

A cracked metal doorframe was finally beginning to show, and he increased his pace. Throwing debris left and right, he hurried on until the staircase was visible, and he stared down into the darkness below. Bits of rock and wall had fallen across the metal stairs, and he climbed over it into the cellar.

When he reached the floor below it, he barely saw anything, but he didn't need to. He knew the place by heart, and moving on memory, he walked into the room with the emergency generator. He'd had his uncle install it to make sure the eggs would never go without power, as some needed stable heating.

Please work, please work, he thought as he flicked a few switches.

For a short moment, it was quiet. Then he heard a soft whine followed by clicking and hissing, and slowly, the bulbs on the ceiling began glowing with a faint yellow light.

Staring around at the moldy walls, Irwin moved out of the room and towards his own. Passing the egg rooms, he looked inside and flinched. Broken and crumbled eggs were everywhere, and even if he hadn't been as knowledgeable as he was, he would have known that they were all lost.

Reaching his own bedroom, a small, dark, and now moldy room with a bed, closets, and a desk with a PC, he saw that his bed was different. The covers were not the ones he had put on them, but fluffy, with butterfrees and pink edges.

Ignoring it, he walked to the PC and suddenly panicked. What if it wouldn't turn on? Holding his breath, he pressed the on button and felt relief as the screen turned on, showing the pokeballs bouncing together. It was his custom boot sequence.

Grabbing the chair, he wiped away the thick layer of dust and sat down. As he did, he looked around and wondered how much time had passed.

"I'm definitely in the future… somehow," he muttered.

As the computer turned on, he noticed someone else had logged in: his sister, Synthia.

"Weird… normally she doesn't want to use the PC," he muttered as he changed the login to his own and waited for the screen to turn to the towering Mega Gallade, battling a red Mega Garydos.

A warning sign showed he had no connection to the pokenet, which didn't surprise him. What did where the hundreds of messages in his messagebox. There had been zero this morning!

Opening them, he quickly scrolled through them, and his mood soured more and more as he saw the dates and the rapidly angrier tone in the messages. The last one was dedicated two years into the future.

Looking around, Orion frowned. More than a few years had passed, surely?

Most messages were from trainers requesting their eggs, and when there was no response, they sent more worried than angry messages. Staring at one that was decidedly aggressive, Orion sighed.

"There's nothing I can do, Garry," he muttered, staring at the trainer's name.

Finally ignoring the messages, he suddenly noticed the date the machine was telling him.

"A hundred and eighty-seven years?" he whispered, his blood running cold. "That means… they are all dead?"

He stared dumbly at the screen until his eyes started burning.

"No. I need to figure out what happened and how to get back," he declared, shaking his head.

He was about to turn off the PC when his eyes landed on the pokenet transfer inbox.

"Maybe…"

Holding his breath, he opened the transfer box, noting two messages there. One was an automatic notice of return to sender. The other was a message telling him he had eggs to accept. Clicking on that one, he saw a message from the trainer from Sinnoh. There were two eggs attached to it.

"If they degraded…." he muttered, suddenly afraid to click them.

It was known that if eggs remained in the inbox too long, they would sometimes turn bad. Clicking the receive button, he looked at the red machine on the desk. There was a flash, and then one egg appeared. As soon as it did, it crumbled.

"Shit," Orion muttered. With a resigned sadness, he wiped the egg remains away and held his breath as he clicked the button again.

A second egg appeared, white with yellow spots. It wobbled slightly, and he held his breath but remained whole.

Orion slowly took hold of it, feeling the small pokemon inside move happily.

Finally, a little bit of luck! he thought.

The egg in his hands shook again, and as he watched, he saw thin lines begin to appear.

"You poor thing," he muttered, stroking the egg. "You must have been here all this time, unable to hatch."

He walked around his room and placed the egg on his dusty bed. Examining it, he knew it would be a few hours to a day before it would hatch, which proved a thing he'd wondered about a few days -years- ago. A little bit of time did pass for the eggs in that inbox. Enough for a pokemon that should have hatched in months to hatch in days.

Looking around, he walked to the closet and pulled it open. It was filled with skirts and girl shoes, and he cursed.

"I guess she took my room after I never returned," Orion muttered, sighing sadly.

Pushing the clothes to the side, he checked if there was anything of his remaining in the small storage area behind it. He was surprised to find a few stacked boxes. Moldy like all the other things, they had still mostly survived the passage of time.

Curious about what was in them, he pulled them out and put them on the desk before opening them.

He was overjoyed to see his dark leather vest folded neatly. Made from Taurus leather, it was a gift from his mother when he turned fifteen, slightly oversized but cool even then. Taking it out, he was happy to see it had stood the test of time, though the silver rings on the front had lost their gleam.

Holding the vest, he felt his emotion surge again. Would he ever see his mother again?

Taking a deep breath, he put the vest on, taking solace in the familiar feeling. Then he looked through the rest of the box. There were some of his old jeans and a second pair of old hiking boots, the jeans old and worn by time, but the boots serviceable.

If he didn't know better, someone, probably his mother, had folded everything and put it away for him. Opening the second box, he saw it was filled with books, papers, and a folded map.

Taking out the top book and the map, he saw it was of the entire Ferrum region: the sea on the west, south, and east, showing some of the southern islands and even covering most of the northern mountain ranges. Crosses and question marks covered it.

"Weird," he muttered as he looked at the book.

Diary of Synthia.

"She had a diary?” he said as he returned to the bed and sat beside the egg.

Flipping the small book open, he saw the first date was a few weeks after… Well, after he'd disappeared, he guessed.

"Big brother still isn't back, and the others think he ran off to become a trainer. Mother is secretly really worried but tries to keep up a tough face," he read out loud. "I don't believe any of it! I'm sure something must have happened! He would never just leave us. Not without telling us where he was going."

Yeah, Orion thought as he stared at the book. As much as he had dreamed of becoming a trainer, he'd have never just left them.

Flipping through the pages, he noticed that Synthia didn't really use the diary every day but sometimes didn't write anything for weeks or months on end. Most entries were short messages until a year after he had gone missing.

"It's a year now, and nobody is looking anymore. But I am! First Dad and then Orion. There is no way that this is a coincidence. Something happened, and I'm going to find out what! I've started scouting the entire region, scratching off every area I've been to, and I'll continue till I find him. If not here, I'll go to Sinnoh!"

Orion stared at the pages, unable to keep the tears from pooling in his eyes.

"Thanks for believing in me, little sister," he whispered, wondering when he'd become such a crybaby.

He continued reading through the diary. Besides many short and annoyed messages from Synthia, he found a lot about the pokemon she was catching and how she trained them. There were also many entries about the places she visited and hints that might show where he and their father were.

Reading through a paragraph of her trip to a distant mountain range, Orion wondered why she'd thought he or their father had been there.

Frowning, he continued, finding that years between entries began growing. Finally, there was a longer message that spanned an entire page. It was dated roughly sixteen years after he had gone through the portal.

"I can't continue to look for you, Orion. I hope you are still alive, but I've searched everywhere I'm allowed to go, and I can't find even a hint of you. The only thing I can imagine is that you went through one of the portals that have occurred over the years. According to my research, they occur both across time and space. Knowing this and having looked all over the known world, I can only conclude that you are either in another world or another time."

Orion frowned. "Portals?" he muttered, wondering why he'd never heard of those. There was a muddled section on the page, almost as if it had gotten wet before the lines continued.

"I thought about no longer writing in this diary… but I think I'll keep doing it. It's grown on me over the years.

Now, for something more happy! I've become a mother! Can you believe that? Two little boys running around and reminding me of you! I wanted to call one Orion but decided against it. What if you ever do come back? Well… I've gotta go. I'll try and add something in a short while."

"She became a mother, that's… great," Orion muttered, leaning back against the wall. "I shouldn't have gone through that portal," he said, wiping his eyes.

It took him a while to regain his composure, then he continued reading.

The time between messages grew even more while the messages turned shorter, sometimes no more than bullet points. Most were about Synthia's children, and he read it feeling weary. She wrote about moving to Celestic and living there for a while before returning home to the ranch when their uncle died of old age. There was a slightly longer message on the following page, stating that their mother had died and was buried nicely.

Staring at the message, written so calmly and collectedly, Irwin felt a tiny seed of anger. He'd missed everything! Even his mothers- he cut off his thoughts, using the tricks he'd learned to deal with his father's disappearance and numbly focused on the book.

The messages afterward were mostly about the pokemon she was dealing with and how to run a ranch.

All of this changed when he reached a date fifty-seven years later, and his growing sadness made way for surprise and worry.

"The war is coming closer. If this continues, it will reach Ferrum in a few days. Nobody knows what started it, but it's horrible! No news has come from Kanto in days, not after the legendary pokemon Zekrom battled with Giratina. Things are getting dire, and the pokemon everywhere have started acting strangely. Instances of them attacking each other and people have grown. Even some of the pokemon on the range are acting oddly. What's going on?"

Orion quickly flipped to the next page, barely believing what he was reading. He vaguely knew about Giratina, having read about it, though he had no idea what type of pokemon it was. Zekrom was a name he'd never seen before, but it had to be powerful if it could fight with something like Giratina!

The next message was two days later, and the final one.

"Tecno City was ruined in a massive tidal wave. Only a few people made it out alive. The pokemon in Ferrum Forest have started going crazy. I'm leaving the ranch and heading out to Neos City. The lightning gym there is the final safe place. We have to teleport with an alakazam and were told we couldn't bring anything but the clothes on our back, so I'll leave this here. I'll add what happened when I return… but just if I don't. Orion, you're probably dead by now, and if you aren't, you must have been portalled to a time or place so far away that you never managed to return. But… if you read this, know that I never gave up! Synthia."

Orion stared at the old, yellowed diary, then quickly wiped his eyes again. Thinking for a moment, he walked to the desk.

It took him a few minutes to find that all the ink in the pens had dried, but he found an old pencil with enough of a tip to use. Flipping to the next empty page, he hesitated, then began writing.

"I've found your diary, sis. I'm sorry I wasn't there to help, but I'm back now. I have no idea what happened or if any of our family is still alive. I want to say that I'll try and find a way back… but I don't think that's very likely. Because if I had managed that, this diary wouldn't be here. I think? Anyway, I don't really know what to do. I guess I'll start by finding out what has happened, and for that, I'll need money and pokemon to defend myself with. Love, Orion.

Staring at the page, Orion nodded and closed the book before putting it in the jacket's inner pocket. He added the pencil, then folded up the map and added that too.

Finally, he looked at the egg on the bed.

I guess we are the only ones left of the old world, he thought, feeling an intense kinship with whatever pokemon was in the egg, even without it hatching.