Lone Encounter

Things were supposed to go easy for Lane once he reached the expedition's destination. A few cameras, a few hours watching covertly from the underbrush, and Mew would be there. If he was very lucky, he'd get to meet her, and learn why mew were so hard to find.

There was just one problem: that didn't happen.

Not to say his next few days didn't go well. Spending time alone with Elisa was always fun, and without Dominic around she could be as overt as she wanted without getting embarrassed. It wasn't like they'd been traveling together for years now just because they liked the same rare Pokémon.

But as nice as that was, Lane was really here for the data his cameras would share with him the next morning. It didn't matter if Elisa complained—he squeezed out of the sleeping bag and went to recover the traps.

They weren't there.

Elisa found him beside the river in his boxers, knee-deep and searching for any glint of glass. Maybe something had knocked it down where he couldn't see, or a gust of wind had torn the branch he'd used. It had to be somewhere!

"What are you doing in there, Lane?" she asked, glaring. "Yesterday you said you didn't want to go swimming."

He splashed to shore, defeated. "It's my camera, Elisa. That was the last one, and it's gone too."

"What do you mean gone?" She offered him a camp towel, though didn't get close enough she'd get wet. "You sure you put them out? Maybe you… only picked the spots or something?"

Lane sighed, pointing to a bit of bent branch on a nearby bush. "I put it right here. I took photos of each one with my phone, in case I had trouble remembering. I'm telling you, it was right here."

He didn't even care he was muddy and disgusting all the way back to camp. "I didn't even get a single night's worth of pictures. Every single one of them, gone."

He looked back, and very nearly asked if she'd scooped them up before he got up. But that was stupid—he'd wake the instant she got up. She hadn't touched them.

"Maybe… your Pokémon doesn't like cameras?" she suggested, wrapping one arm around his shoulder. "This could be a good thing. Maybe Mew noticed us, and she's waiting back at camp!"

There was no mew waiting back at camp. By the time afternoon came, Lane could add a torrential downpour to the list of obstacles they'd had to face. But while they kept warm together, his mind was elsewhere. One camera going missing might be a little miscalculation in placement, but all of them? Someone was working against them.

Or maybe Elisa was right, and Mew just didn't like cameras.

The rain didn't let up, so when dinner came they were forced to make do with granola and some dried fruit.

"I'm sorry the trip didn't go well," Elisa said, stuffed Pokémon secure in her lap. It was the only part of her still dry, despite their best efforts to keep out the rain. "But I think we'll have to turn around. If things are dry tomorrow… there's no telling if they'll stay that way. We were stupid not to think of the weather."

"We have two more days of supplies!" he argued. Though even he felt weak as he said it. "We could keep looking!"

"How?" She nudged the side of the tent with a leg, dislodging a flood of droplets. "No more hidden cameras. At this point you're just waiting for that Pokémon to fly right into us."

He spent the better part of that night watching out the tiny tent window, and hoping for rain. But he didn't see rain or Mew any time after midnight.

"Don't bother with the tent," he said, resting one hand on Elisa's before she could throw the pokéball. "You can leave it. I'm staying."

"You're… staying?" Her eyebrows went up. "Alone in the jungle? Without the only trainer who could protect you? And two days' worth of food?"

"If you're feeling generous, you could leave a little of your food with me too?" he suggested. "I might be able to get four days if I really stretch it. Spend most of my time sitting still watching, that kind of thing. I've got some camouflage netting here, I was thinking of setting up a nest."

She wrapped one arm around him. "Lane, it's great that you're so determined. It's one of the things I always admired about you! But there's a line between bravery and insanity, and you're edging over it. What happens if you lose your phone next? Can you navigate back to Cayari from here without it? Forget some giant jungle predator, what will you do if you piss off a growlithe?"

He dug into a pocket, exposing a can of repel. "I've got this. I'll be fine, Elisa. You go."

After a year traveling together, he expected a little stubbornness to change her mind. But less than an hour later, he watched Elisa and Lopunny vanish across the river, leaving him alone in a city of the dead.

He got one last message from her as she was leaving, a simple text. "We'll wait for a week in Cayari before heading back. You better bring my stuffed celebi back in time, or else."

"Will do."

He meant it, though not by choice. Even with all the food left behind, he didn't have enough to last a week out here. The jungle overflowed, a bounty of fruits and berries of all kinds—but he'd never learned which were safe, and living alone out here felt like a bad time to learn.

Lane fought to stay because he had to, but some part of him knew he wasn't going to find anything. Whoever had taken the cameras was obviously determined to ruin his trip as completely as possible. If any mew lived near to the ruin, they'd be taking their secrets to the grave.

Elisa's worries over an attack were unfounded, however. Despite what trainers liked to think, wild animals were generally too afraid to bother humans, and he only ever had to use a few sprays from his can of repel.

A greater danger was an empty sleeping bag and an empty tent, and watching his meager rations melt away. He watched for two days through the narrow blinders of a crude mesh shelter. Plenty of forest creatures passed him—mankey, and butterfree and fomantis. The dead city had been colonized by Pokémon.

But none of them were little pink cats, flying or otherwise.

The missing cameras were only the beginning of his misfortune, unfortunately. He woke near dawn to a tent that collapsed around him, and found half the stakes had slipped out and vanished during the night.

The next day it was the camp cleaning station that slipped into the mud, dumping his soap uselessly all over the soil and leaving him to stew in his own juices from then on.

But while the expedition proved increasingly cursed, Lane kept on watching. There was still a chance Mew was out there somewhere, and he'd never forgive himself if he gave up.

I'll never see this jungle again. If I go home now, I give up my chance.

At least it didn't rain on his last day. He could cook by a proper fire, wearing his jacket for warmth and enjoying the last warm meal he'd brought. Rice with curry, as bland and flavorless as freeze-dried meat could ever taste.

"I should've realized I wasn't going to find you," he said to the campfire, prodding it with a blackened stick. "The smartest, cleverest people all over the world went hunting, and you never talked to them. Why should you care about us?"

He glared back into the open tent door, where Elisa's little green doll watched him with plastic eyes. "Yeah, I know. I'm losing it out here. I should be more afraid of some yamask wandering out of the ruins, not some extinct legendary."

"I'm not extinct." It wasn't a voice, but Lane heard it clearly anyway—high and feminine, and a faint edge of cruel. "Aerodactyl are extinct, or they should be. But you couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? It's always nosy with you Pokémon Trainers. Can't just relax and smell the Gracidea with everyone else."

The voice had no apparent orientation, but came from all around. He spun in the stump, and nearly fell off when he saw the creature sitting on Elisa's camp chair.

There was no way for him to obsess over something for so much of his life and not instantly recognize one when he saw it. Her fur was visibly soft, like an expensive fabric right out of the dryer. Yet she didn't actually sit so much as float over the chair, her body splayed on something glowing and pink. It popped as he watched, in a flash of light vibrant enough to briefly blind him.

By the time he was clearing his eyes, the mew was gone.

"Wait!" he called, rising to his feet and shining his headlamp madly around in all directions. "I came all this way to talk to you! Can't you at least stay a few minutes?"

"Talk to me?" the voice responded, low and dangerous. But still it had no direction, nowhere for him to look. "You think you're so clever, lying to each other all the time. But don't lie to me. I know humans always come to take for themselves. You're a trainer."

"I'm not!" he yelled back, defiant. "You can go ahead and search through my things. I've never been a trainer. I don't have a single pokéball."

There was a faint flash of light behind him, and suddenly Mew was in his tent. She zoomed around over his things, upending his backpack all over the floor. She never actually touched anything, just pointed and it obeyed.

She really is a psychic type.

Even in a few seconds, Lane was learning more than most accounts of mew had ever included. He reached covertly for his pocket and the phone within, but suddenly his arm went numb.

"Don't even think about it," came Mew's voice, taunting. "You think you're the first ones to ever build? But your little pictures are evidence enough to bring more eyes."

The Pokémon hesitated only over Elisa's doll, licking at its nose with the affection of a motherly cat. Then she vanished again, reappearing inches from his face.

"No lies," she said. "Why? I tried to make you leave, like I sent away all the others. Why did you stay?"

She drifted past him through the air, and his arm came unstuck. He didn't fight it, replacing it carefully in his lap. Maybe he could convince her to let him take a picture later—if not, it would be better not to scare her off.

"I was right, you're a girl!" he exclaimed, practically bouncing up and down in his seat. "This is amazing Mew, you have no idea! It could've been anyone, and you actually came to talk to me!"

She spun in the air, as though swimming through an unseen ocean. "You didn't answer my question, human. But I thought of a better one anyway, so forget it."

She floated up past his face, nudging the ears on his hood with one tiny paw. "This is pathetic, my ears don't look like that. And the tail… that's way too short compared to your body. Are you trying to look like me?"

Maybe Lane should've been terrified. She was right in front of him now, within arm's reach. This was probably closer to a mythical Pokémon than any human had ever been.

"I mean, yeah. Mew are the best Pokémon in the world, obviously I do."

Even on a little Pokémon face, Lane recognized a smile when he saw one, even if Mew's was so toothy it unsettled him. "Is that so?"