Beyond Myth and Legend

The Annual Gathering of Legendary and Mythical Pokémon Researchers was everything that Lane could've imagined and more. Saffron's convention center was packed to the brim with scientific teams from all over the world. Today there would be lectures and panels and corporate sponsors gathering all that was known about these incredible Pokémon.

He reached down, pulling his attendee badge out from the mew hoodie he wore, flashing it at the security guards as he approached. A thick crowd of other hopefuls waited behind a flimsy fence, able to do nothing more than take photos of the experts arriving from regions all over the world.

Coming here hadn't been Lane's idea, but then again it hadn't been Lane's money either. He lingered near the top of the oversized stone steps, waiting for his friends to catch up.

They all had the same wardrobe, a stylized hoodie shaped and colored like their favorite Pokémon. Online people mostly called them "pokémaniacs," though Lane wasn't particularly fond of the term. Everyone had their favorite Pokémon, and most of those people could probably get their hands on one sooner or later.

The three of them might go their whole lives without ever even seeing the Pokémon that interested them. What little they could do to show support came from grainy online videos and old legends. Most pokedex software revisions couldn't even identify a mythical Pokémon.

"You sure you picked the right convention?" the guard asked, handheld scanner still going green. His eyes lingered a moment on the little ears poking out of Lane's hood, even if he wasn't currently wearing it. "There are real scientists in there. Are you three… entertainers or something?"

Lane adjusted the jacket, glaring as best he could while wearing pink. "You could say we're the biggest supporters of a convention like this." But before he could go into his usual spiel, the guard just rolled his eyes and opened the door, holding it for them.

"Enjoy the convention. Meals provided, doors lock at six."

His friends were too meek to argue—but that wasn't new. As soon as they were through the doors, Lane wrapped one arm around Elisa's shoulder, though he had to reach up quite a way to do the same thing to Dominic. "You guys really gonna let people talk down to us like that?"

Elisa peeled him away, fluffing up the little fake sprout on the back of her celebi jacket. "Yes, Lane. Because if we argue, they might not let us in." She held up a thick brochure, covered with marker lines outlining their plans. "The convention is what matters, not getting people to agree."

Lane nearly argued with her, but trailed off as they crossed from the atrium into the convention proper. Scientists from all over the world packed into booths of varying sizes, each one proudly displaying their findings. As usual, the least interesting but most marketable were up front—in this case, a bookseller marketing a mythology encyclopedia including 'the latest research'.

But his eyes were drawn to a dozen different booths further on, some of which looked like they might have interesting stuff. "So, split up till lunch?" Lane asked, grinning wider. "You saw all the food trucks outside, we can meet back up there."

"That wasn't the plan," Elisa muttered, taking his arm and pulling Lane to the side so they were out of the central line of traffic. "We're here to enjoy the convention together. It's not just about learning more about our Pokémon. It's supposed to be fun."

"I don't mind splitting up," Dominic said flatly. "I don't mind staying together. Just so long as I don't miss any of the stuff from Unova, it's cool. You two decide."

"You're supposed to be the tiebreaking…" Lane trailed off, biting back his frustration. "Fine, we'll stick with the plan. I want to go there first." He pointed down the first aisle, where the crowd was thickest. If so many scientists and businesspeople thought there was something interesting over there, they'd probably agree.

They didn't, as it happened. It was a new energy technology, apparently derived from the willing cooperation of some weird-looking cat Pokémon that had made friends with the residents of a town somewhere. They only had to get within half a dozen meters for Lane to know it wouldn't be interesting.

The other visitors seemed to think the same about them, giving them plenty of space in the center of the aisle. Instead of hounding them for attention like they did the other visitors, Lane watched the ones operating each stall become visibly subdued, avoiding eye contact and waiting for them to pass.

We care about your work more than anyone. You could at least treat us with some respect. He flipped the hood down from his jacket, the most he was willing to commit to formality.

There was something for each of his friends in time. Dominic spent almost an hour chatting with the historical society of some town in Unova, and even got to walk away with a disk containing hours of archival video of the victini everyone had seen there during a recent "natural disaster" they didn't want to explain.

Elisa stopped them at one of the social science booths, where an oral history of indigenous populations had been assembled. Apparently one specific tribe had a close relationship with Celebi. She purchased the whole thing.

Lane could only imagine finding anything that interesting about mew. In a whole convention hall about legendary and mythical Pokémon, there was only a single booth devoted to mew, tucked away far from the "cool" adventurers and explorers with the decidedly boring biochemistry people.

"A phylogenetic assembly of Pokémon's latest common ancestor," the booth proclaimed, in text so dull he'd missed it completely on his first pass. But then he caught a lab-tech pointing at his hoodie, and realized there was a tiny printout of a famous mew artifact tucked away near the back of the booth.

He strode purposefully over, not needing to fight for space. The other attendees made room, and what few there were inspecting this booth scattered as he got close.

"This is about mew, isn't it?" he asked, pointing at the single gigantic diagram that was their centerpiece. The rest of the booth described their sampling methodology, and the models they'd used, but none of that was interesting. "Is this its genome?"

There were three people working the booth, and he watched their silent argument over who would deal with him. Eventually the youngest, female scientist approached. "Part of it. Do you, uh… have an interest in genetics?"

"Oh, yeah," he lied. "DNA is my jam." No, that wasn't sciency enough. He pointed down at the diagram, face reddening. "Why are there so many holes?"

She followed his gesture, though mostly seemed to be watching the cat ears on his hood. "It's one of the limitations of phylogenetic trees. By sampling from as many Pokémon as possible, we can increase our certainty that a given genetic expression was present in our common ancestor. It gives us suggestions of the evolutionary process that occurred after speciation. We have good estimates for when different Pokémon broke away. Our research shows a surprising percentage of genetic overlap between species, even those separated by whole regions."

She kept going for a little while, saying things Lane understood even less. He got the gist—the more Pokémon they studied, the more complete their hypothetical mew genome became.

"What does all this tell you about mew themselves?" he asked, as soon as she finally gave him a break. Probably she'd been trying to scare him off with how smart all this was, but Lane wasn't going to be intimidated so easily. "Does what we know show us anything interesting?"

The scientist bit her lip, glancing over her shoulder at the one Lane guessed was her heavily bearded boss. He didn't rescue her, and she fished around under the table for a moment, emerging with a stack of identical research papers. She slid him one. "Here, you can read for yourself."

Lane could take a hint, but that didn't mean he'd listen. He flipped through it a few pages, to a computer model of a skeleton. He selected a bit of bold text at random. "You don't think their bones were strong enough for locomotion in gravity, really? That seems like a problem with the model."

She groaned in response, lowering her voice to hiss at him through gritted teeth. "It's ongoing research. We're trying to get funding, but I don't think anyone is going to stop to talk to us while someone dressed up like a mascot is taking up all the space."

Lane almost argued with her—really, the worst thing he could've done was ignore her, and stay even longer. But research like this probably did deserve to be funded.

He flipped the paper closed, tucking it under one arm. "Do you know if anyone was studying the real thing? I could bother them instead."

"Real thing." The scientist with a white beard had apparently been listening the whole time, because he approached as well. "I'm sorry young man, but there's no evidence that mew have survived to present day. We're not talking about shaymin here, you can't just go north and watch the migration.

"That's what makes our research so important. No one will ever see a mew in person, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from their genetic legacy. There's far more to learn from what Pokémon became than one ancient ancestor. But if you want someone else to pester, try cryptozoology. There's always someone with too much money and not enough common sense trying to raise money for some fool's errand. I'm sure you'd fit right in. Either that, or take off your ridiculous jacket and go to university like a responsible adult."

Lane didn't argue his choices with the crotchety old professor. Even if his students were unpleasant, the paper they'd authored promised to be interesting. It was only guessing about what mew were really like, but that was more than even the oldest myths gave him. He tucked it away with care, and rejoined his friends.

"How about cryptozoology?" he asked, pointing across the hall to the oversized banner. "Maybe that's what we should be doing. We wouldn't have to wait for other people to find Pokémon if we discover them ourselves!"

"It's mostly about idiots wasting money," Dominic said, though he followed anyway. "We'll never find anything smarter people didn't. It's just rebranded Pokémon Ranger crap."

Lane slowed to a stop as they approached the cryptozoology section. Dominic was right about one thing, it was mostly vendors. If anyone who shopped here was an idiot, Lane was prepared to make himself the stupidest pokéfan in Saffron.

Most of this stuff wasn't about catching Pokémon, just seeing them. Motion-activated remote cameras, scent testing kits, trail identifiers. Probably would've been more useful to him if he was a trainer out to catch a rare species for his team—but Lane couldn't care less about the league. This was so much bigger than all that.

"That's a lot of cool stuff," Elisa said, as she joined them in the hallway leading back out. "I only see one problem: when are you going to use any of that? Set those up in the city and you'll just see lots of urban Pokémon. Maybe if you're lucky you'll catch a garbageman emptying the trash."

"I don't know yet," he admitted. "Not back home, not here in Saffron. Somewhere others have failed. Maybe there's wilderness too remote for any university to fund. I have some real data about mew now, from…" He frowned. "Phylogenetic?"

"You don't know what that means," Dominic said. "Be real for a minute, Lane. If you were going to find a mew anywhere, it was going to be at the convention. They're probably just extinct."

"At least they can't travel through time," Elisa added. "Someday they'll probably find a fossil or something. I'll never even get that."

Lane retreated a few steps, back towards the convention. "You know what, you two get lunch, I'll meet up with you later. I'd like to look around a little more."

Everyone's so convinced they're all gone that nobody even bothers to look properly. The data's in here somewhere, I just have to assemble it.