CH167 (781), A New Region, You Say?

Well, since I had the names of these new ghosts, I felt pretty curious about whether I would find anything on them inside my super library since I had found stuff on Ceruledge even though I had never heard about that line before as well. Hence, I decided to mobilize my second thought stream to help me. We both went ahead and used the words Brambleghast as well as Houndstone respectively to search through the super library. Surprisingly enough we ended up finding information on both Pokemon, which showed that humans had written down stuff on them, proving that they were not as unknown as I thought. It was just me and the alliance that had no idea of their existence.

The booklet I opened had images of the two ghosts and I had to admit they actually looked worse than I thought, especially Houndstone. The booklet also had an image of Greavard, and I had to say that at least this one looked fine enough. In fact, some might find it charming to look at, but evolution really did not do Greavard a favor at all, at least look-wise it didn't. Compared to that, both Brambleghast and its prevolution Bramblin looked underwhelming, but at least they still looked better than Houndstone. Nonetheless, after digesting Houndstones looks, I actually focused on the information written inside the booklets, and I was quite startled by the information I found.

I ended up finding information about a region called Paldea among the notes on Houndstone. Specifically, there was a mention of the region-wide laws enforced by the Paldean government to put a stop to the increasing attempts by certain individuals and groups to artificially create Greavard/Houndstone. I momentarily felt incredulous after reading that. Not because people were trying to forcefully create some ghost doggos since I already knew that there were bound to be scummy people in all places where a lot of people lived; No, I needed a moment to process that a region I had never heard about before called Paldea got mentioned.

It was a fact that I had heard nothing about Paldea while trying to establish the timeline for humanity's history I was working on. The doubt I was feeling then gave way to awe when I realized that I had stumbled upon information about a region that seemed to have gotten lost in history. I was not sure if Paldea was part of a past civilization or if it was actually a region established during the current/4th civilization that the alliance and I had no idea about. The thought alone was exhilarating, and my excitement went through the roof when I thought of all the new things that I could potentially find thanks to Paldea. After all, I could now search for information on the topic by using Paldea as the keyword.

The first thing that came into my mind was to search for a Paldean Pokemon Index (PokeDex) to see if I could find a list of all Pokemon that could be found in Paldea since I was pretty sure that there had to be a bunch of unknown Pokemon. Well, at least to me they would be unknown. I felt a jolt of happiness when I came across an index like I wanted. In fact, there were multiple indexes labeled as different editions going from the 1st all the way up to the 293rd edition. I naturally chose to take a look at the latest one first since that one should be the one that was the most up-to-date. I read the introduction and directly learned multiple important pieces of information. The first one was that this edition of the Paldea Index had apparently been jointly released by two Professors named Sada and Turo.

That both had the title Head Professor before their names was interesting since it meant that Paldea actually had two Head Professors, or at least it did at the time this index was released. None of the regions that were part of the alliance had two Head Professors like that, and I was not just talking about the present but also the past. I honestly could not understand why it happened in Paldea, at least at first. The foreword explained why the two professors decided to release a new edition, which also revealed why they shared the Head Professor position.

Apparently, the two Professors shared the same overall study subject with different focuses/specializations, and since both were as renowned/successful as the other they decided to just share the Head Professor position. Anyway, both Professors studied variants; Professor Turo focused on a particular set of type variants that all seemed to share a common ability in their ability pool called Terrain Drive, which seemed to have begun to be relatively common in Paldea during the last 100 years. That all of these variants also happened to be type variants meant that the whole group was made up of dual variants, which was definitely worth studying.

Professor Sada on the other hand focused on another group of type variants that had also started to become more common during the last century. Interestingly enough, these type variants also seemed to have a common ability in their ability pools called Protosynthesis. In fact, Professor Sada added a note that she suspected the "new" variants she studied could actually be the original form of the species, making them the ancestors/proto-form of their respective species. So, not only was she studying dual variants as well, but it was possible that the Pokemon she was studying belonged to the proto-line of the current species they were a part of/resembled.

Apparently, neither Professor had managed to discover the source of whatever caused these variations, but they mentioned that they suspected that it had something to do with a danger zone called Area Zero, which admittedly was a pretty badass title for a danger zone, though I had no idea what Area Zero was or why it was classified as a danger zone. Still, even without finding the reason for the variations, they did document more than 12 species of these variations that had a high enough number to actually deserve a dedicated entry to the Paldean Pokemon Index, which was why they published the 293rd edition.

All this was definitely very interesting to read, and undoubtedly an incredible find, but it got dwarfed by the information I stumbled upon at the end of the introduction. Printed there was a set of two dates that revealed some mind-blowing information. The date that came first was 01.24.4864 N.S., while the second date was 01.24.3424 P.C. The first set of dates they used actually had the same calendar reference as the one we used to use for 2700 years before it was replaced by the new one after Professor Oak established the alliance, which was N.S. The reason I was sure that it was the same N.S. and not something else was the fact that both the old calendar and the current one added up to 4885 years this year, so the dates were close enough that this index could have simply been released 21 years ago.

Still, that was still a bit too ambiguous, but I had a simple way to check if that was true or not. Since this index had a rather lengthy foreword, there was a good chance that all of them did, so I used my 2nd thought stream to directly open the 1st Edition of the Paldean Pokemon Index, and as expected there was a foreword there as well. The index was pretty long, so I chose to skip right to the end to check the date and it took me skipping to the 6th page to get to the date, which made this one freaking long foreword.

Anyway, I saw that there was actually just one date, which was 01.18.1322 N.S. By comparing that with the end set of dates listed in the 293rd edition one could easily calculate that this index was released before they had established their new calendar. Since the Paldean Calendar seemed to have been set up in the year 1440 N.S., the 1st edition predated the Paldean calendar by 118 years. That was very interesting but did not prove that Paldea was part of the 4th/current human era, so after getting the date of the index's release, I went back to the beginning of the foreword and began to read it.

It appeared that it was a lady named Vivian Joy who wrote the 1st index, and from the words that followed it was clear that she did indeed used to be a member of the Joy family. The foreword did confirm that the date here was the one we used to use by simply mentioning that she along with the rest of those with her stranded in this new place belonged to an exploration fleet organized through the until then unprecedented cooperation between the people of Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Galar, Unova, Sinnoh, and Kalos.

According to Vivian Joy, the fleet first gathered at a large island chain to the east of Kanto, which I suspected was the Sevii Archipelago. She wrote that the fleet set out toward the east at the start of 1321 intending to find a favorable area further along the coast of the eastern continent. She did not mention anything about the reasons why the expedition was set up, or how many ships and people the fleet consisted of, but her later words made me suspect that there had to be a lot of people.

Anyway, it appeared that Joy tried to keep things "succinct" since this was just a foreword of a Pokemon Index and not a history book if you could call 6 pages brief, but she mentioned that a mega-storm hit their fleet three months into the expedition and that they had to weather the storm for nearly four months before they managed to escape since the waves/sea caused them to get dragged along the storm. They had apparently tried to interfere with the storm when after weathering it for a few days the storm showed no indications of dispersing. That attempt caused them to lose one of the two elite trainers they had leading the expedition, which confirmed that the storm was unnatural.

Nonetheless, they did manage to eventually escape the storm the classic way through sailing, but they were officially lost on the sea. Not to mention that they had ended up losing 3 ships to the sea/storm. They still had more than half of their food, so after consulting the compass, they decided to just continue the expedition since they were unwilling to head back. It took them nearly half a year, with stops at multiple smaller islands they stumbled upon but deemed too small before they came upon the giant Island they chose to settle on. There was a notation that the island seemed to be multiple times the size of Hoenn.

Anyway, after they made landfall, the Elite chose to set up at the beach they touched down and started to explore the island from there. According to what Joy wrote it had been slightly more than half a year when she wrote this on behalf of everyone to document the Pokemon they had come across during their exploration of the area around the beach, and she mentioned that there were quite a few Pokemon she had never seen/heard about before. The page that followed had the first Pokemon of the Index, which was a freaking Diglett look-alike that was apparently more than just a simple variant since it was called Wiglett. It was a water-type Pokemon that lived on/around the beach they landed on, and was the first new species they discovered.

Frankly, this thing looked like a split off of the Diglett line to me that became its own thing due to differing too much from the original, and I saw from the notes of Head Nurse Joy that she and the others suspected the same. Still, funny-looking Pokemon aside, I still had no explanation why the alliance had no idea of Paldea's existence or why no one from Paldea had tried to establish contact at some point. Still, I now knew for sure that Paldea belonged to this era and that it existed somewhere out there right now. Well, unless it had gotten destroyed sometime after the 293rd edition of the Paldean PokeDex got released, but what are the chances of something like that happening; Laughably low right?

Regardless, I stopped focusing on the 1st edition after looking at the image of Wigglet and turned back to the 293rd edition since that one should have the most up-to-date list of Paldean Pokemon. Once I had satisfied my most burning curiosity by browsing through the index, I would let my second thought stream search through my super library to see if I could find more on the history of Paldea to see why there was no contact between it and us. Worst case, I could check out the forewords of each edition of the index to see if their forewords had any useful information.

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