Starfall Exploration

Lane stared around the strangely multifaceted space, taking in its many competing sides. There were no walkways between each section, only little flat spaces in front of the largest machines, and a clear "hallway" through the center between them all.

As if there had been any doubt in her mind that no human tradition of construction had built this place, now she had the firmest possible evidence. This strange machinery might tower over Lane, but no human could've possibly fit between it all. Just how advanced are they, anyway? What does all this do?

She turned to inspect the closest machine. This one was made of several spheres of various sizes, with something green oozing and concentrating between them. She stuck her face up to the glass, but there was nothing like controls or a display here.

She looked upward at the next "segment," scrunching up her brow as she studied something a little more familiar. This equipment surrounded a central bladder, with filter material hissing quietly as air whooshed out.

Mew can fly. Maybe they can do more with gravity too. Who says which direction is down? Lane could already fly, sorta. She clambered forward past a sphere of glass as big as she was, dodging under the thin tube connecting them. Maybe if she wanted the next section to be flat…

She fell onto all four paws, balanced in front of the filter-device. She grinned in satisfaction, looking back at the wall that had been the floor only seconds before. Space stations do this too, don't they? When you're in zero gravity, any direction can be down. For a species that lived in zero gravity almost all the time, it made sense.

Lane inspected a few more machines, but none were more responsive to her than the first she poked near. The lights obeyed, but the rest of this stuff just quietly ignored that she even existed.

Frustrated, Lane took off again, scanning the room around her. The "hallway" between "rooms" split into three different directions here—back the way she'd come, and two unknowns. She picked one of those at random, and soon found the tunnel narrowing.

After a short distance, the machinery and wall-sections faded until she was floating through a smooth tube. Glass spun as thin as silk gave her a near uninterrupted view of molten rock outside, curved almost perfectly around the hallway.

She landed in the center of the tube, paws settling on the carpet as she stared up.

We couldn't build this. A single, uninterrupted tube of something clear, but utterly unyielding against her paws. Apparently strong enough for volcanic rock to lap right up against it without warping.

"How could cats build this?" she whispered, frustrated. "I always knew mew were the most powerful Pokémon ever. The best ones. But how could they do this?"

The room didn't answer.

The hallway didn't continue for much longer. She reached a doorway, a thin metal iris that expanded ahead of her in a liquid-smooth slide. The space beyond was a sphere that felt like fifty feet across, though her current size distorted her perception of scale substantially.

Various workstations were spread evenly along its every side, maybe a dozen in all. There were more inscrutable machines, though this time each one surrounded a central cushion of sorts, and all pointed "forward" with reference to the hallway.

As she stuck her head inside, the entire sphere lit up with an even white glow. Not as harsh as a Pokémon center—like the rest of the underground city, it was as gentle as moonlight. Lane didn't go far, just to where the hallway terminated with a rounded surface.

For an instant she saw stone through the walls, the floor shifted and changed. A display, turning everything but the chairs and little stations transparent.

She was out in low orbit, high enough that the atmosphere with its many clouds was only a light blue haze beneath her. And below that, far below, a dense jungle filling the southern steppes of the Guyana region. Not by that name—there were no political boundaries here, just the planet itself.

Alien script filled the room at random, not just on the walls, but hovering in place like little islands. It would've been utterly indecipherable to almost any other human—but Lane knew it. It was the same hieroglyphic syllabary that was often included with ancient mew carvings and trading cards—the one a human Lane had obsessed over, translating and memorizing and scribbling into every free inch of his school notebooks.

But even knowing what he did, there weren't many surviving samples of this language left. Plenty of the symbols he saw now were entirely unknown to him. But he could read a few.

"... separation. No … capacity."

Curved around the walls, her perspective warped until she could see around the whole planet—though the effect made her about as dizzy as turning up the FOV in a video game until it was far beyond anything she could comprehend. The walls flickered occasionally in pink, satisfying colors, with purple outlines tracing the path of a few objects.

She recognized one of them—that was the Devon station, the only currently inhabited research station. Those other smaller dots were probably satellites—many holding still relative to fixed points on the surface, a few arcing over the planet in predictable paths that the walls charted helpfully.

"Unknown primitive civilization," declared the subscript, beside every icon and outline. "No ... detected."

"You shouldn't be here," someone said from just behind her, so quiet that Lane hadn't even registered for the first few seconds.

She turned, and her ears pressed flat to her head, tail tucking under her. She landed, whimpering. "Please don't hurt me, Korina! I didn't mean any harm! I was just… curious, was all. You weren't there when I woke up, and—"

A paw pressed on her mouth, pushing it closed. "If you were worried about getting hurt, coming out here was the wrong choice. The Starfall isn't safe anymore, least of all the bridge. Besides, this is all just a relic now."

She gestured with her other paw, and the lights went out. For a few seconds, a few pink dots lingered, tracing the path of human satellites and the space station. Then they too went silent. "No more wandering around Starfall, Lane. You could've tripped into a plasma conduit, or got sucked into an exposed intake, or… Arceus only knows. There are a lot of ways to get killed on a broken starship."

She followed without argument, tucking in close to Korina. She thought about as little as possible, remembering well how easily the other cat had seen into her mind. She couldn't get too excited that she wasn't getting in trouble, or else she certainly would.

But her curiosity was insatiable. Even if she knew she was pushing her luck, Lane couldn't fly through a place like this and not ask about it! "Did you crash?" she asked. "Is that why you call it Starfall?"

"Crash," Korina repeated. Her tone was low and bitter, not remotely like her usually upbeat self. "I dunno, Lane. Mew live a long time, but not that long. I was born on this rock, same as you. The last mew ever—until you." She tilted her head backward, and a wave of force pulled Lane suddenly forward, until she rested on Korina's back.

Again her human senses rebelled—she was so close, and she was naked around a stranger! Didn't the Pokémon even care?

Apparently not. "There are logs. My great-grandparents probably knew how to read them. Maybe their grandparents knew how to make other parts of Starfall work. That's the trouble with being stuck in a starship big enough for thousands all by yourself. But we shouldn't be talking about something so awful… there are more important things to worry about!"

She took them back to the living area, where a simpler breakfast of dried greenish slabs of the seaweed-like substance from before were waiting for them. "I hoped this wouldn't happen so soon, Lane… but you're about to have a chance to prove yourself."

She froze, nearly dropping the not-bread from between her teeth. "Prove… how? I can't do anything!"

"Mostly just by not getting killed," Korina admitted. "Something happened, and there's somewhere I need to be. That means you get to hold down the territory for me until I get back."

She leaned across the table, pressing her nose up against Lane's forehead. She whispered into her ears, her voice somehow more intimidating that way. "That means no wandering down into Starfall to get killed by old machines. No upsetting the local Pokémon so much that they decide to try and eat you. No drowning or starving or freezing to death. How else can a lonely kitten get herself killed?"

Lane had no answer of course, just looked up at the Pokémon in growing anticipation. "Aren't you worried? Leaving me all by myself…"

"That you'll run away, you mean?" Korina's familiar smile returned. "You can try if you wanna. But then I'll know I can't trust you. When I find you, I'll have to tinker around with those little memories of yours, and keep erasing things until you don't run away again. Last time I said that, you didn't seem to like that idea."

"I don't," she mewed, through gritted teeth. "That's murder, Korina. If you take my memories away, it's like I was never alive in the first place. Might as well just drown me."

"Then don't run away," she said. "One day you'll grow up big and strong, Lane. You'll think about our time together, and wish you could stay in my nest. You'll be so grateful for the generosity I showed to someone who obviously appreciated the highest form of life. 'Thank you for saving me, Korina,' you'll say, bringing me a whole basket of Enigma berries you picked yourself earlier that day. 'If you sent me away like I deserved, I would've shriveled up and died in a few decades, and never even tasted the stars. Thank you for keeping me from flying back to the humans, where they would lock me in a box and study all kinds of things they don't deserve to know.'"

"I'd never say that second one," Lane protested, her plate empty. Just because Korina was being difficult didn't mean she was going to go hungry. "I think humans should learn everything there is. Why shouldn't they learn about mew?"

Korina lifted off from the table, plate forgotten. "I have no idea, Lane. But maybe when all their mew clones died in their lab, they should've got the hint. Instead of taking a butcher's cleaver to our genes until we could walk on this high-g nightmare sphere. Oh, and then their science experiment went predictably insane and almost blew up their whole world."

She lifted Lane up into the air with her, yanking her as abruptly as she'd done the night before. "I think you've lost your stupid question privileges for the rest of the day, kitten. Today you've got more practice. Tonight, you get your wish, and you get the nest to yourself. You can see if you really like it better that way."

Lane did not like it better that way, as it turned out. When Korina finally vanished that night, after another day of torturous flying practice, she nearly cheered. She was free to do what she wanted for a while—maybe to go back and figure out what else was lurking in Starfall.

Starship. I'm sleeping in a starship, built by tiny pink aliens who are also the ancestor to all Pokémon alive.

If Korina had been there, she probably would've curled up for some well-deserved sleep. But she'd gone, apparently for the entire night. And it might be a trap, she told you this was happening at every stage, trying to bait you into something stupid.

But after a few minutes alone with Korina's stuffed dolls, Lane lifted off into a hover of her own. She wouldn't make a break for it, not with a Pokémon as powerful as Korina trailing her. But that didn't mean she couldn't take advantage.

There was something even more important than exploring her new home. Lane needed to get to her phone before it died. Otherwise, she wouldn't be able to say goodbye.