Legends: Arceus (1 - Prologue)

Sadalla was getting pretty tired of just waiting and never being able to interact with his creations, so he decided to use his Erathalian Avatar to go to the world of Pokémon. Sadalla decided to do what might be the most cliche thing he could. He literally dropped from the sky into the newly established Jubilife Village in the region of Hisui. He was wearing a backpack that had a special form of space magic that acted as a real inventory from a video game. He had nearly 900 years of training at this point, and while no mage on Erathalia could use inventory magic due to low efficiency, Sadalla had a large enough pool of magic to deal with it.

It was currently 1906 ARI, and the Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn regions had just united into the Yamato Region. Jubilife Village was a small settlement founded in Hisui, the island region just north of Yamato, by a joint group of Alolan, Kalosian, and Yamatoan adventurers. The steam engine needed for his first task had been invented in Galar at the beginning of the previous century, and Sadalla anticipated the arrival of the dynamo and batteries any day now. If he were to place serious bets, he would probably choose Unova as the likely spot, due to its increasing population relative to Galar and Kalos.

Sadalla completely wrote off Yamato because they had recently had a much bigger revelation than the dynamo and batteries. They had come up with the first Pokeballs. These were made by taking the apricorns, a weird type of mutated acorn native to Yamato and Hisui, and hollowing them out. The hollowed-out apricorn was then split in half, and a hinge mechanism secured by a small button was added, forming a capsule.

The current versions were crude, but they made use of a special property of the specific variant of magic used by Pokémon. This property allowed the magic to be sealed in the Pokémon, and then collapse the Pokémon into small sizes that could fit inside of a capsule. The most effective way to trigger this property was a chemical found on the inside of the apricorns, but how exactly it worked, and which apricorn variety worked best, was not well understood.

The pokeballs also had limited durability, making the miniaturized Pokémon capable of breaking out. The most stable known variant of these early designs fixed this by using a red apricorn top piece and an iron base. Some other versions that showed promise used a mix of blue and red apricorns, and a design using a mix of yellow and black apricorns also existed.

As Sadalla landed on the outskirts of Jubilife Village, this was the current status quo. Pokeballs were being experimented with, but were far from maturity. Jubilife Village was a settlement in the southwest of Hisui, and to its immediate north was a settlement of the Diamond Clan, a group of settlers to Hisui that worshipped a variant of the local "Almighty Sinnoh" faith, that believed the creator of Hisui was the ruler of Time, Dialga. In the farthest reaches of Hisui's north, in the icy tundra, lay the Pearl Clan, who held the opposite variant of the faith, believing that Hisui was created by the ruler of Space, Palkia. 

Sadalla wasn't particularly interested in the local religion. He was the actual creator of Hisui, and the rest of the world, so whether people worshipped Dialga or Palkia was irrelevant to him. What legitimately concerned him, however, was that Hisui was not exactly in a peaceful situation right now. The diverging faiths were becoming increasingly radical, and their faith was impacting Dialga and Palkia. The two dragons were beginning to force their seals open, and it was causing the fabric of space and time was becoming unstable.

As the two clans began to edge towards brawling, Jubilife Village had become a sudden spark of hope. Jubilife Village's leader Kamado was a refugee from Kalos, where there was no real religion present. Xerneas, Yveltal, and Zygarde were just seen as extremely powerful Pokémon with important roles in the world, and not beings to be worshipped.

Zygarde certainly attracted plenty of reverence in its role as protector of ecosystems, but that was partly due to it being significantly more active than the other two, and how it often razed towns to the ground if the people became too corrupt or evil. It couldn't do too much against empires or large tribes, and only rarely inflicted casualties among the humans, but pursuing justice against individual towns had become a common way to address its grievances. Kamado's former home had been destroyed by Zygarde for similar reasons, and Kamado held specific disdain for it as a result.

As Sadalla entered the settlement, this was the status quo. Three factions, a weird religion, and chaos beginning to envelop the region.