Taras Bulba
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This is an one-shot that I got the idea of writing when I heard about the quarterly writing contest. I've written a story or two at the Ultra RPG, so I figured I could put something here as well. Unfortunately, it took me a while to finish it.
If you enjoyed this story, please nominate it for the contest! Man, I shouldn't've finished it so late.
FINAL INSTINCT
Date: who cares?
It's over. It's all over. No more civilization, no more world, no more Kanto.
Sure, we're alive, but... that hardly counts.
When the bombs started falling, there were sixty-three of us in a lab near Pallet Town. Since we studied Electric-type Pokemon, we generated a lot of electric and magnetic fields. To avoid disrupting nearby electronic devices next door, our building was built with massive shielding of concrete and lead. This had the effect of blocking the radiation- and the electromagnetic pulses- from the bombs. We also had the good fortune to be working in a town small enough that nobody felt there was any reason to bomb it.
All we felt was a sudden rumbling. There had been no warning- I guess the federal government decided there wouldn't be any use in trying to start a general evacuation when the first missile would arrive in something like fifteen minutes. We would've gone to the windows to look, but our lab doesn't really have any windows. There are a few by the main entrance, shielded by baffles from the rest of the building. The first researcher to get there waved off everyone else the moment she saw the first mushroom cloud over Saffron City. She made us lock down the biosafety airlocks so the fallout wouldn't get through, and then she stood there braving the gamma radiation for a good three hours, counting off the other detonations for us- Cerulean, Jubilife, Goldenrod, something that must've been Korea- watching the end of the world so we wouldn't have to. The last thing we heard from her was that she was going outside and to keep the airlock sealed. Since she was irradiated now, she wanted to go out and live her last few days in the fresh air and sunlight. Doctor Larch- may she die without misery.
Unfortunately, the outside world doesn't have sunlight anymore, and certainly not fresh air. The dust clouds took care of that before sunset. Nuclear winter's well on its way.
The worst part is, we really can't go out of the building even though we have isolation suits for our biohazard labs. Since Pallet Town wasn't bombed, most of its inhabitants are alive, although they'd be considered to be walking dead now thanks to the radiation. If we let it be known that we're alive and clean, we might be mobbed by them. The director's invoked lifeboat ethics and forbidden us from giving any sign that the building's inhabited.
Nobody knows who did it. Was it a war? An accident? Terrorism? We'll never know. We were able to cobble together a radio transmitter by the end of the day and made contact with several other groups with working electronics. Most of them were irradiated as well. A surviving military unit said there's been no word at all from the West. China and Russia as well. It's probably for the best that we don't know who ended the world. I mean, which country would be heartless enough to bomb Japan... again? It would only hurt us to find out.
It's been two days. I wonder how long we're going to keep up this charade of survival. Or research. The director wants us to keep working, probably just for the sake of having something to do before our supplies run out.
That won't be long.
Date: Postwar four days
Well, something's happening out there, after all. We've picked up transmissions from that military unit again. Most of the imperial family survived the bombings, it seems. They're pulling together all the survivors who were exposed to the radiation, using surviving high-level Pokemon Trainers to maintain order. Apparently, they're using the surviving parts of the rail network to withdraw to the Sinnoh mountains. It's relatively radiation-free there. The stated intention is to die of radiation sickness without too much pain: a quiet death for Japan. They're bringing food and medical supplies along.
The convoy originating at Indigo Plateau is passing by here tomorrow. Perhaps we'll learn something. I'm considering just tagging along with them.
Date: Postwar five days
When the Indigo convoy learned about our situation, they made a detour to visit us. They said we're one of three groups in Japan who survived without being irradiated- the other two are somewhere around Hoenn and to its southwest. The Emperor and his government comprised a fourth, but they're going with the dying survivors to show solidarity. There was some speech about "No Emperor without Japan."
We should try to survive as long as possible, they said. There might be enough survivors in the rest of the world to preserve something of humanity, once they can reach us. We were left a communications antenna, a few cameras... and a large pallet of supplies. Enough nutrition and generator fuel for months. Our food was just about to run out, too. There were even a few HAZMAT suits.
Our local celebrity scientist, Professor Oak, was also in the convoy. The radiation must have utterly ravaged his body. His voice sounded very weak over the audio link. He's decided to include his old research notes in the supply dump, since we're still capable of doing some science here.
There was some trouble when the convoy left. It turns out that the soldiers had picked up some of the relatives and families of our laboratory staff, as well as Dr. Larch, who had told them about us. As a result, we lost several scientists to the convoy. The director wasn't happy, but he understood. In a time like this, family can be much more important than work- or even survival. For me, of course, this isn't a problem. My family lives in Goldenrod City, and has for generations. As there's no more Goldenrod City... I don't have any family anymore. I've grieved. Oh, have I grieved. And I'm going to grieve some more- but not just yet.
I have to go outside with the others now in our biosafety isolation suits and try to scrub the fallout off the supplies. We're going to hook up the cameras, too. There won't be much to see, except perhaps the odd dying Pokemon, but without windows we're starting to have our first cases of cabin fever.
Date: Postwar fourteen days
Two weeks now. The last "survivors'" convoy passed us on the surviving coastal freight line this morning. Before the end of the day, we'll be the only living people left in the entire province. By the end of the week, the entire island of Honshu.
There are still a few wild Pokemon staggering around the streets, very obviously dying. My heart goes out to them, but we can't go out to help them. Our isolation suits were permanently contaminated during that one supply run and we're unsure that we can even touch them ever again. We're saving up the HAZMAT suits for true emergencies. There's also the mob question again, though this time for Pokemon instead of humans. Our air filtration systems probably aren't strong enough to get rid of any fallout that could get through the front airlock.
It's the Pokemon that were in their Poke Balls, though, that I really feel sorry for. When the electromagnetic pulse came, the electronics inside the Poke Balls immediately fried. The Pokemon stored inside were simultaneously torn apart and crushed. We've seen some of the gory evidence lying on the street outside the lab using our cameras. The flies and roaches swarming around them don't seem to have gotten the message that the world is over.
I guess we'll leave the world to them.
And the ghosts. Lots of Ghost-type Pokemon swirling around in the sky these days. Appropriate.
Date: Postwar sixteen days
There's been a bit of a discovery. The people here are excited like they haven't been in weeks.
Some non-ghostly Pokemon are still alive- and healthy.
It's common knowledge that Poison- and Steel-type Pokemon aren't easily poisoned. We now hypothesize that this extends to radiation poisoning.
A Grimer and a Nidoran have taken up residence in the convenience store up the street, living off the food left behind there. On top of that, a Magnemite is hanging around our communications antenna. It draws off our electric power sometimes, but the director said we have enough fuel for our generators that there's no problem in feeding it for a while.
This interests us in particular because of experimental subject 303F-ES017beta, a Pokemon used in studying the conductivity and effects of Pokemon-induced electric energy. 303F-ES017beta, also known as "Jaws," is one of the fifty or so laboratory Pokemon who are well-behaved enough to live in an onsite dormitory instead of a Mark Two Humane Pocket Monster Holding Cage. Jaws is a Mawile, making her a Steel-type, and thus immune to radiation. Also, unlike the many Magnemite we study here, she has hands. The investigator conducting her experiment is talking to her right now, asking if she's interested in being our eyes and ears in the outside world.
Date: Postwar thirty days
I haven't spoken into this audio log for two weeks. Honestly, there's been little to talk about. Each of us has already resigned ourselves to our fates in our own way, including the lab Pokemon. There was quite the commotion in the cages when we explained what had happened. There haven't been any suicides yet. Our director was adamant that anybody feeling particularly large amounts of despair had to see one of our psychologists immediately. They used to psychoanalyze Pokemon as part of our research, but now they guard the mental health of us human scientists too. I've noticed that I feel significantly better now than when the bombs fell. My work- determining the Eevee genetic makeup, a truly thankless job- keeps me busy enough that I can actually sleep at night.
Jaws has been busy as well. She's met several groups of surviving wild Pokemon. All of them are Poison-, Steel-, or Ghost-type, as we'd suspected. She's found all sorts of interesting salvage as well- preserved foods, clean water, and all sorts of equipment. We'd tell her to bring them over, but we don't have an easy way to decontaminate them.
Besides that, nothing. Nothing inside the lab, and nothing outside the lab.
Well, there is one thing. We're about to run out of DNA-cutter enzyme EcoR1. There's supposed to be a biochemical company down by the coast with a warehouse. The insulation and thick walls might be good enough that the reagents there are still good. There's been discussions about getting Jaws to help us with that.
Date: Postwar forty-two days
Jaws has returned from her mission. She seems to have accomplished it with flying colors; we now have several ice-cold boxes of biochemical reagents sitting by the main entrance, and a way to clean them off. Jaws, bless her, made several important discoveries on her journey down to the coast:
-The surviving wild Pokemon are starting to lay eggs. Our population dynamicist thinks that this is an innate repopulation response. It's possible that the few surviving Pokemon species contain the genetic code of the others within them in a form that can be called forth in subsequent generations. Perhaps once the fallout has decayed or been scrubbed, all four- or five-hundred-odd species of Pokemon will be seen on Earth again.
-Old habitat boundaries have been more or less erased. A member of any given Pokemon survivor species may now be found almost anywhere regardless of their favored habitat. The Zubat and Golbat have emerged from their caves. A few Aron and Lairon have been seen in the ruined cities, having come down from the mountains. Ghost-types are also prevalent: interestingly, Jaws met a Froslass on her way to the warehouse, and somehow negotiated for her to keep the samples chilled until they could be delivered here. Jaws hasn't gotten around to telling us what the Froslass wants in return yet, but we're suspecting that it wants food or a working refrigerator to live in.
-The most important discovery is one of those "why didn't we think of this years ago" things: some Poison-type Pokemon can scrub fallout! Jaws had the Grimer down the street demonstrate for us: he engulfed a fallen tree branch. Jaws then took out a Geiger counter she'd been issued from our military supply dump and ran it over the branch- clean! Apparently, the Grimer had taken all the radioactive particles into himself. We watched him dump them down the street. A Haunter accompanied Jaws and the Froslass back to our laboratory; from the gestures Jaws has been making, we think she had the Haunter scrub our new reagents in a similar way when she first got them. Hopefully, they're still good.
Going out on her own for the first time, making important discoveries, and making two valuable allies- Jaws is worth her weight in gold. It's amazing stories like hers that give us hope. Our atmosphere has lightened up a lot recently.
Date: Postwar forty-three days
Well, almost half of the reagents are still usable. This is much better than we'd hoped. We can do DNA-cutting enzymatic reactions again. The science continues- for another week or two. We're going to have to rediscover the ways of extracting and purifying such reagents from the original source organisms if we're going to continue as a scientific concern, since we can't rely on the biotech industry anymore. Fortunately, we have up-to-date collections of scientific protocols. We can figure something out.
The Haunter's decided to hang around as well. It was apparently getting lonely out by the sea by itself. I get the feeling that more Pokemon will come to this place in the future if they find that there are humans here. Since the Haunter's given us some assistance with cleaning off our isolation suits, some of us have been able to venture outside again. It takes forever to pressurize the oxygen canisters we have to carry around, but it's worth it. Our salvage teams have retrieved a lot of the supplies that Jaws had marked in the past: gasoline, rope, food, water, and batteries. Our life expectancy in this lab has been extended by several months, now that we have plenty of fuel for the generators. Some of the more blue-sky thinkers have floated the idea of recommissioning the big power plant out by Lavender. The military convoy told us that it somehow hadn't been targeted by the bombs. Perhaps one of them went off course. That's something to consider in a few years, if we're still here in a few years. I'll know we've entered that kind of mindset when the first pregnancies start...
Date: Postwar forty-nine days
Some heart-breaking transmissions are coming from the settlement in the Sinnoh mountains. They've built up Celestic Town, that tiny old place, to handle the population influx for as long as it lasts. It won't be long: at this point, the fatality rate has approached two-thirds of the survivors. The Emperor isn't included in that number- they still won't let him take off his HAZMAT suit unless he's in the fallout shelter built into the Celestic Ruins- but they're reporting that most of their time is now spent in digging the hundreds of thousands of graves that will be needed. Many more have simply requested cremation, on the grounds that there's nowhere to put several million graves. Dr. Larch is still alive. Her initial radiation dose, while lethal, was low enough that she's expected to live for another few weeks. It looks like she'll be helping to close down the sprawling residential expansions made to Celestic Town just two or three short months after they were opened. It really is tragic. Someone built a shrine in the centrifuge room. I think I'll go pray there.
Date: Postwar fifty-five days
We've finally made contact with the rest of the world. Rather, it's made contact with us. Some military group in the United States called NORAD managed to hack into the Global Trade System satellite network with a surviving supercomputer. With control over the GTS, they gained the ability to transmit Pokemon- and as much data as they wanted. This information was passed to the other military bunkers in the United States and Canada- thank goodness for old Cold War infrastructure!- and everyone linked up. They then somehow got word to an American nuclear submarine that was still aimlessly cruising the Pacific Ocean. It surfaced at Taiwan to see if anyone else could use the satellite uplink, after a fruitless visit to Hawaii and the Philippines- nobody there had the ability to link to orbit anymore. There were quite a few Taiwanese survivors, though, with a good chunk of infrastructure. Since they were always worrying about an invasion or bombardment from the mainland Chinese government, they'd used Ground- and Rock-type Pokemon to construct a huge number of shelters in the mountainous spine of their island. On the day of the bombing, they caught wind of the situation early enough to get almost a million of their population to safety. Sure, it amounts to a five percent survival rate, but this is markedly better than for any other country. The Taiwanese government had the equipment to link to the GTS as well, and it used one of the satellites in the geosynchronous-orbit constellation over Japan to send a burst message to anyone who was listening. The Celestic settlement heard them, and then notified us through the radio repeater at Almia.
The information managed to survive intact through this convoluted route. We've just finished building the satellite uplink dish with help from our Pokemon salvage party, and now we can link to the GTS. Data is flowing freely to and from orbit.
In other words, we've got Internet access again. We've had to completely reconstruct it from the ground up, but it's working. Still... no Nico Nico Douga, no 2channel, and no more Google. There's nothing to search for anyway; our IP address is now two digits long: 17. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry.
At least this means that Pokemon can travel freely between survivor colonies on the Pacific Rim. We've had a few visitors from the American and Taiwanese groups already. Lots of excitement in the lab.
We also finally found out just what happened in World War III. It turns out that NORAD was the US-Canada nuclear warfare center, so they had a front-row view of the action.
It's nobody's fault, and everyone's fault- Cold War leftovers seem to have flared up by themselves. It began when the "Dead Hand" Russian nuclear fail-deadly measures accidentally activated themselves. Hundreds of missiles were automatically launched, just as they would've been if Russia's military leaders were destroyed in a first strike. India and Pakistan panicked and launched next. NORAD wasn't sure if it should've started fighting as well, but there were already tens of missiles screaming towards American targets- and then China launched.
Everything went south from there.
When China came into play, NORAD finally decided to launch as well. The general who gave the order immediately left the base. He wasn't sure whether he could live with himself, I've been told, so he decided to just stand outside and wait for the end. At this point, missiles were going everywhere, including even Africa and Australia. The missiles which destroyed Japan were Chinese in origin. They also destroyed South Korea, but didn't hit Taiwan with anything more than conventional missiles. It seems like China was saving it for an amphibious invasion... before the American nuclear bombardment arrived. They managed to release a few enraged Gyarados and destroy a city or two, but the evacuations had already happened.
At this point, no single country's untouched. "Dead Hand" was very... comprehensive. The Antarctic research bases may have survived, but nobody's heard from them, or anyone else in the Southern Hemisphere. The American nuclear sub's swinging down to visit Australia next and see if anything's left there.
There's also one astronaut left in orbit. The Space Shuttle came back to Earth with the rest of the space station crew, but that one astronaut stayed behind to see if Europe, Africa, or western Asia have any survivors.
It feels a little weird to be part of the rest of the world again. After two months, I was getting used to living in a box.
Date: Postwar sixty-two days
I went outside today.
You know, it's fairly pleasant inside the lab. We have climate control, air scrubbers, and clean floors. Some of the light fixtures have natural-light bulbs, too.
Outside, it's cold. Cold, and dark.
The nuclear winter has begun in earnest. Even from inside my HAZMAT suit, I could feel the biting cold. It's those dust clouds that block out the sky, of course. The sun can't get through them, so we don't get any sunlight or warmth. There's this gray light that's enough to see with, but it makes the world look dirty and dead. Which, well, it is.
I asked to go with Jaws on a salvage run mainly to experience this nuclear winter for myself. It was unpleasant but necessary; this is our world now, and we need to know it.
Today, we visited the downtown Pallet Town Poke Mart to retrieve medicines and other things to keep our experimental subjects happy and healthy. We took an antiquated pickup truck that had few enough electronic components that it wasn't rendered undrivable by the electromagnetic pulse. It took about ten minutes to drive down the debris- and dust-covered roads to the town center. The Poke Mart was rather small- it didn't cater to Pokemon League Trainers, so it didn't have very much stock. Jaws asked a nearby Nidorino to break down the door for us, saving me the trouble of using my hammer. We were able to put the useful things into the pickup truck's cargo bed and take everything home in one trip.
Jaws has become very matter-of-fact about these things. She spends every day out in a nuclear wasteland, directing humans or Pokemon on important errands, so she's become something like a professional post-apocalyptic tour guide.
She signaled me to make a right turn off the main street on our way back, wanting to make a detour and show me something. Later on, she "told" us that she'd done this because another Pokemon had mentioned strange happenings in the woodlands outside town. Our lab was in the suburbs and fields, so we hadn't seen anything of this. All we knew was that all the vegetation had died out by now.
It was an astonishing sight. Grass-type Pokemon of every species we'd seen in the region had gone up to the wild-growing plants before they succumbed to radiation sickness. Snowdrift-like piles of weird white spores surrounded their decaying corpses. I'd never seen anything like them before, so I collected a few samples for analysis. As we drove back home from the woods, Jaws noticed a Bellsprout's corpse in a flower garden, with more spores. I collected those as well. It's a good thing we keep a sample-collection kit in the pickup truck.
Our cargo was well-received back at the laboratory, but it was the spores that got the most attention. Every microbiologist in the building is clamoring to look at them. Maybe we'll find something interesting.
Postwar sixty-three days
The spore analyses are in. It looks like these spores are mostly similar to the "Cotton Spores" often used as defensive weapons in Pokemon League battles. However, it's what's inside that counts. They contain the genomic content of the plants that the Pokemon were near when they died! Somebody put one in culture medium and got it to grow into something identifiable as an oak seedling. This is obviously a way to keep local plants from going extinct. It must be taking place across the entire world.
How are the preserved genomes protected from mutations? It looks like DNA-proofreading enzymes are present in very high concentrations inside these Cotton Spores, just as they are in Poison-type Pokemon. We've hypothesized that this is why Poison-types are so resilient.
Today's salvage expedition reported that they caught sight of a Bulbasaur hiding these spores in safe places. Unlike the other Grass-type Pokemon, Bulbasaur survived thanks to their additional Poison typing. Apparently they're continuing the work of their dead brethren in preserving the world's plants.
Postwar three-hundred-sixty-five days
It's been a year now.
The Emperor is expected to arrive by mid-afternoon. At this point, the Celestic Town settlement has completely collapsed. Radiation sickness has claimed all but less than a hundred people, who are now resettling at our laboratory in the new underground extension. They were either kept clean or given the best anti-radiation medicines we have. These include the Emperor, of course, as well as those considered living national treasures- artists, musicians, and other masters of the traditional Japanese arts. I guess whoever's still alive a generation from now will remember Japanese culture.
They're bringing Doctor Larch's coffin. After what she did for us, it's only right that we bury her.
I'm making this log after all these months to note that we're still surviving. Some science still continues with the dwindling supplies we have. We've also shifted more into applied and observational sciences, since those don't require chemicals.
Power's less of a problem now. We tapped the gasoline reserves at one of the surviving container ship ports. We're making long-term plans as well. Work gangs of HAZMAT-suited scientists and volunteer wild Pokemon managed to re-erect the power lines leading to the Power Plant to the northeast. The reactors themselves were left in perfect condition by the evacuating workers. We'll have them started up before winter. We'd better- the previous winter was awful.
The wild Pokemon don't seem to know what to make of us. Some of them joined up with Jaws and the salvage teams, but the majority are more aloof. Obviously, we aren't in a Trainer-Pokemon relationship, as we don't even have Poke Balls. They give the impression that they're getting along perfectly fine without us, and they're only helping us out because we have food. We've had to start a hydroponic Berry plantation in the basement to have something to pay them with. It took a while to find seed that was irradiated mildly enough that it would actually grow. We came really close to just randomly searching through Cotton Spores to find ones that carried Berry plant DNA.
Jaws and a few other Pokemon have grown a lot since we started using them as scouts and explorers. She, the Haunter, and the Froslass were the ones who carried out the warehouse mission for us, and now they've become the nucleus of a full-scale exploration and salvage team. They've become very intelligent both in terms of outdoorsmanship and mental flexibility. Jaws has even mastered a good chunk of Japanese Sign Language. The surviving Pokemon of this world might be evolving in their own way to survive where humanity has prevented itself from doing so.
An event happened this morning to reinforce this. Around the time when our astronomical projections said dawn had to be, the clouds of dust hanging in the stratosphere suddenly blew away, revealing a glorious sunrise.
We have a telescope hooked up to our little antenna farm outside, found for us by Jaws. This allowed us to see what was responsible for the clouds being blown away.
It was the Ho-oh. Ho-oh and the three legendary birds of our region: Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres. We don't know if they did this because of the Emperor, or just because this is the first anniversary of the bombings.
The legends have survived, and they've made it clear: this world isn't going to end just yet. They'll be legendary still for generations to come.
We may have survived. But seeing clear blue skies over us, with sunlight coming down in the first time in almost a year, makes me think... we might actually live.
Postwar one thousand days
Two-and-a-half years, or just about. Some things are becoming clear to us as we continue to watch the world outside.
Today, the Emperor addressed the other survivors over satellite link, in part to discuss these things. I'll play it into this audio recorder for posterity's sake:
People of the Earth. It has been one thousand days since the tragedy which first befell our nation some seventy years ago made itself known to the rest of the world. I bring greetings to the surviving nations: the Pan-American Transitional Legislature, the Antarctic Bases Union, the Second Republic of China, the ANZAC Commonwealth, the Jerusalem Remnant, and Switzerland. I also extend greetings to the remaining autonomous people who may be listening in on this transmission, especially the Last Astronaut.
Many of us survivors are scientists, or scientifically trained. I myself trained as a marine biologist in my youth. We have not been able to help but make some observations of what is going on outside. In the preceding months, we have discovered that the wild Pokemon of this world have ingenious innate mechanisms for preserving themselves and the biodiversity around them. Grass-type Pokemon sporulate the plants around them. Other Pokemon have taken up the DNA of dead animals around them for safekeeping in their own genomes. The diversity inherent in Pokemon themselves has also been preserved; recent egg surveys have discovered that the eggs that fail to develop contain stillborn Pokemon of species different from their parents. Left to their own devices, the many hundreds of Pokemon species we saw before the bombs fell will appear once more, once the radiation subsides. The surviving Pokemon have also evolved to live in this new environment. Those of us who work with Pokemon outside have found that their intelligence and strength has grown to meet the challenges of this dying world.
Perhaps we should not say that it is dying.
This world can be remade, and thrive once more. By human hands, it would take centuries even to assemble the necessary equipment. The Pokemon, on the other hand, have already begun. I move that we should acknowledge this: Earth now belongs to the Pokemon. I and the scientists here propose the following measures:
We use some of our remaining scientific resources to help develop supplies that the Pokemon can use in their future civilization, if they manage to build one. The scientists with whom I reside have been developing seeds with medicinal effects for this purpose. I have also heard that some of the American labs have investigated the possibility of artifacts with inherent psychic energy- teleportation, telekinesis, and weather control have been speculated to be possible. If we develop and manufacture these, it will make life easier for the Pokemon who are already working to rebuild.
We should gather up all the remaining humans who are still residing by themselves. We still have enough aircraft and aviation fuel to cover the terrain of our respective territories. Outside of the expected humanitarian reasons, there is also the fact that humans are spread so thinly now that we need as many of us working together as possible to achieve anything. It is thanks to this that we are now operating a de facto single world government, after all. Also, it is because of lack of coordination that civilization, and eventually humanity, was lost in Africa and central Eurasia.
This concept of unified humanity is needed for the last, and most audacious, proposal. We ought to leave Earth. We made Earth uninhabitable for ourselves, and nearly did so for the Pokemon as well. For so long, we have depended on them for friendship, labor, and even food. After this great betrayal, we should prevail on them no longer, but do them a favor for once. The Transitional Legislature has informed us that although Tampa, Florida was destroyed, the spaceship construction and launch facilities nearby have mostly survived. That, in fact, is where the space station astronauts landed. We ought to center our best engineering efforts there, and construct one or more spaceships to take us to the Moon. This has been possible for decades, but humanity has not had sufficient motivation to do so. Now, perhaps we can do something great, to offset the great evil we perpetrated. A colony fleet!
Think on this, and make your opinion known. It is a comfort to me personally that even in these harsh circumstances, democracy still survives. I will prepare formal ballot measures for us to decide on this question.
I thank you for your time.
Postwar two thousand days (Lunar Era Year Zero)
The first colony ship launches today. Several hundred thousand of us will, over the next few decades, take the trip to the moon. I myself have a berth on the third ship to go up, which will be christened the Clefable when it's completed next week. I wasn't able to go on the first ship because I'm with the team working on developing a type of seed that can temporarily improve Pokemon eyesight. Once we finish manipulating the genome, we can grow it in our hydroponics garden and try to insert it into the Cotton Spore reserves as well. It's been dubbed the "Eyedrop Seed." We might pair it with the genetically engineered apples being developed in the Americas.
I also finished my Eevee project, at least. My data was helped by the discovery that some Eevee had survived and become Poison-type. The new species was named "Toxeon."
There are now just over nine hundred thousand humans left, mostly Taiwanese. It was the quirks of Cold War thinking that allowed so many of them to get to safety. All of those who were exposed to lethal intensities of radiation have already succumbed, and many of those with lower doses will probably die of cancer. However, we still survive, and we still have hope. Lots of it, now.
Most of us will go to the moon, in the greatest migration in human history. A few hundred will stay in the tunnels beneath the island of Taiwan and maintain a small human enclave isolated from the rest of Asia, and the world. Even if we talk of leaving Earth to the Pokemon, we can't just leave her entirely alone, can we?
In the meantime, we will set foot on the Moon once more, put out roots, and grow and hopefully flourish. Pokemon of Earth! If you ever find and play back this recording, remember this. We, humanity, watch over you from the moon above. We could not take care of the Earth, and so we handed it to you. Your instincts served you well, and you made it fit to live on again. Take good care of it. Remember us, and we will return from the moon to visit you, by and by.
Postscript
This written record is a transcript of the human audio recording found buried in ancient ruins by Team Raider. Some of the few humans living on Earth today read it and decided that it was probably authentic. The Wigglytuff Explorers' Guild thanks you for reading this and hopes that you'll find something just as exciting in your explorations one day! As these ancient humans learned, cheerfulness and hope can get you through even the end of the world. Smiles, indeed, go for miles!
If you enjoyed this story, please nominate it for the contest! Man, I shouldn't've finished it so late.
FINAL INSTINCT
Date: who cares?
It's over. It's all over. No more civilization, no more world, no more Kanto.
Sure, we're alive, but... that hardly counts.
When the bombs started falling, there were sixty-three of us in a lab near Pallet Town. Since we studied Electric-type Pokemon, we generated a lot of electric and magnetic fields. To avoid disrupting nearby electronic devices next door, our building was built with massive shielding of concrete and lead. This had the effect of blocking the radiation- and the electromagnetic pulses- from the bombs. We also had the good fortune to be working in a town small enough that nobody felt there was any reason to bomb it.
All we felt was a sudden rumbling. There had been no warning- I guess the federal government decided there wouldn't be any use in trying to start a general evacuation when the first missile would arrive in something like fifteen minutes. We would've gone to the windows to look, but our lab doesn't really have any windows. There are a few by the main entrance, shielded by baffles from the rest of the building. The first researcher to get there waved off everyone else the moment she saw the first mushroom cloud over Saffron City. She made us lock down the biosafety airlocks so the fallout wouldn't get through, and then she stood there braving the gamma radiation for a good three hours, counting off the other detonations for us- Cerulean, Jubilife, Goldenrod, something that must've been Korea- watching the end of the world so we wouldn't have to. The last thing we heard from her was that she was going outside and to keep the airlock sealed. Since she was irradiated now, she wanted to go out and live her last few days in the fresh air and sunlight. Doctor Larch- may she die without misery.
Unfortunately, the outside world doesn't have sunlight anymore, and certainly not fresh air. The dust clouds took care of that before sunset. Nuclear winter's well on its way.
The worst part is, we really can't go out of the building even though we have isolation suits for our biohazard labs. Since Pallet Town wasn't bombed, most of its inhabitants are alive, although they'd be considered to be walking dead now thanks to the radiation. If we let it be known that we're alive and clean, we might be mobbed by them. The director's invoked lifeboat ethics and forbidden us from giving any sign that the building's inhabited.
Nobody knows who did it. Was it a war? An accident? Terrorism? We'll never know. We were able to cobble together a radio transmitter by the end of the day and made contact with several other groups with working electronics. Most of them were irradiated as well. A surviving military unit said there's been no word at all from the West. China and Russia as well. It's probably for the best that we don't know who ended the world. I mean, which country would be heartless enough to bomb Japan... again? It would only hurt us to find out.
It's been two days. I wonder how long we're going to keep up this charade of survival. Or research. The director wants us to keep working, probably just for the sake of having something to do before our supplies run out.
That won't be long.
Date: Postwar four days
Well, something's happening out there, after all. We've picked up transmissions from that military unit again. Most of the imperial family survived the bombings, it seems. They're pulling together all the survivors who were exposed to the radiation, using surviving high-level Pokemon Trainers to maintain order. Apparently, they're using the surviving parts of the rail network to withdraw to the Sinnoh mountains. It's relatively radiation-free there. The stated intention is to die of radiation sickness without too much pain: a quiet death for Japan. They're bringing food and medical supplies along.
The convoy originating at Indigo Plateau is passing by here tomorrow. Perhaps we'll learn something. I'm considering just tagging along with them.
Date: Postwar five days
When the Indigo convoy learned about our situation, they made a detour to visit us. They said we're one of three groups in Japan who survived without being irradiated- the other two are somewhere around Hoenn and to its southwest. The Emperor and his government comprised a fourth, but they're going with the dying survivors to show solidarity. There was some speech about "No Emperor without Japan."
We should try to survive as long as possible, they said. There might be enough survivors in the rest of the world to preserve something of humanity, once they can reach us. We were left a communications antenna, a few cameras... and a large pallet of supplies. Enough nutrition and generator fuel for months. Our food was just about to run out, too. There were even a few HAZMAT suits.
Our local celebrity scientist, Professor Oak, was also in the convoy. The radiation must have utterly ravaged his body. His voice sounded very weak over the audio link. He's decided to include his old research notes in the supply dump, since we're still capable of doing some science here.
There was some trouble when the convoy left. It turns out that the soldiers had picked up some of the relatives and families of our laboratory staff, as well as Dr. Larch, who had told them about us. As a result, we lost several scientists to the convoy. The director wasn't happy, but he understood. In a time like this, family can be much more important than work- or even survival. For me, of course, this isn't a problem. My family lives in Goldenrod City, and has for generations. As there's no more Goldenrod City... I don't have any family anymore. I've grieved. Oh, have I grieved. And I'm going to grieve some more- but not just yet.
I have to go outside with the others now in our biosafety isolation suits and try to scrub the fallout off the supplies. We're going to hook up the cameras, too. There won't be much to see, except perhaps the odd dying Pokemon, but without windows we're starting to have our first cases of cabin fever.
Date: Postwar fourteen days
Two weeks now. The last "survivors'" convoy passed us on the surviving coastal freight line this morning. Before the end of the day, we'll be the only living people left in the entire province. By the end of the week, the entire island of Honshu.
There are still a few wild Pokemon staggering around the streets, very obviously dying. My heart goes out to them, but we can't go out to help them. Our isolation suits were permanently contaminated during that one supply run and we're unsure that we can even touch them ever again. We're saving up the HAZMAT suits for true emergencies. There's also the mob question again, though this time for Pokemon instead of humans. Our air filtration systems probably aren't strong enough to get rid of any fallout that could get through the front airlock.
It's the Pokemon that were in their Poke Balls, though, that I really feel sorry for. When the electromagnetic pulse came, the electronics inside the Poke Balls immediately fried. The Pokemon stored inside were simultaneously torn apart and crushed. We've seen some of the gory evidence lying on the street outside the lab using our cameras. The flies and roaches swarming around them don't seem to have gotten the message that the world is over.
I guess we'll leave the world to them.
And the ghosts. Lots of Ghost-type Pokemon swirling around in the sky these days. Appropriate.
Date: Postwar sixteen days
There's been a bit of a discovery. The people here are excited like they haven't been in weeks.
Some non-ghostly Pokemon are still alive- and healthy.
It's common knowledge that Poison- and Steel-type Pokemon aren't easily poisoned. We now hypothesize that this extends to radiation poisoning.
A Grimer and a Nidoran have taken up residence in the convenience store up the street, living off the food left behind there. On top of that, a Magnemite is hanging around our communications antenna. It draws off our electric power sometimes, but the director said we have enough fuel for our generators that there's no problem in feeding it for a while.
This interests us in particular because of experimental subject 303F-ES017beta, a Pokemon used in studying the conductivity and effects of Pokemon-induced electric energy. 303F-ES017beta, also known as "Jaws," is one of the fifty or so laboratory Pokemon who are well-behaved enough to live in an onsite dormitory instead of a Mark Two Humane Pocket Monster Holding Cage. Jaws is a Mawile, making her a Steel-type, and thus immune to radiation. Also, unlike the many Magnemite we study here, she has hands. The investigator conducting her experiment is talking to her right now, asking if she's interested in being our eyes and ears in the outside world.
Date: Postwar thirty days
I haven't spoken into this audio log for two weeks. Honestly, there's been little to talk about. Each of us has already resigned ourselves to our fates in our own way, including the lab Pokemon. There was quite the commotion in the cages when we explained what had happened. There haven't been any suicides yet. Our director was adamant that anybody feeling particularly large amounts of despair had to see one of our psychologists immediately. They used to psychoanalyze Pokemon as part of our research, but now they guard the mental health of us human scientists too. I've noticed that I feel significantly better now than when the bombs fell. My work- determining the Eevee genetic makeup, a truly thankless job- keeps me busy enough that I can actually sleep at night.
Jaws has been busy as well. She's met several groups of surviving wild Pokemon. All of them are Poison-, Steel-, or Ghost-type, as we'd suspected. She's found all sorts of interesting salvage as well- preserved foods, clean water, and all sorts of equipment. We'd tell her to bring them over, but we don't have an easy way to decontaminate them.
Besides that, nothing. Nothing inside the lab, and nothing outside the lab.
Well, there is one thing. We're about to run out of DNA-cutter enzyme EcoR1. There's supposed to be a biochemical company down by the coast with a warehouse. The insulation and thick walls might be good enough that the reagents there are still good. There's been discussions about getting Jaws to help us with that.
Date: Postwar forty-two days
Jaws has returned from her mission. She seems to have accomplished it with flying colors; we now have several ice-cold boxes of biochemical reagents sitting by the main entrance, and a way to clean them off. Jaws, bless her, made several important discoveries on her journey down to the coast:
-The surviving wild Pokemon are starting to lay eggs. Our population dynamicist thinks that this is an innate repopulation response. It's possible that the few surviving Pokemon species contain the genetic code of the others within them in a form that can be called forth in subsequent generations. Perhaps once the fallout has decayed or been scrubbed, all four- or five-hundred-odd species of Pokemon will be seen on Earth again.
-Old habitat boundaries have been more or less erased. A member of any given Pokemon survivor species may now be found almost anywhere regardless of their favored habitat. The Zubat and Golbat have emerged from their caves. A few Aron and Lairon have been seen in the ruined cities, having come down from the mountains. Ghost-types are also prevalent: interestingly, Jaws met a Froslass on her way to the warehouse, and somehow negotiated for her to keep the samples chilled until they could be delivered here. Jaws hasn't gotten around to telling us what the Froslass wants in return yet, but we're suspecting that it wants food or a working refrigerator to live in.
-The most important discovery is one of those "why didn't we think of this years ago" things: some Poison-type Pokemon can scrub fallout! Jaws had the Grimer down the street demonstrate for us: he engulfed a fallen tree branch. Jaws then took out a Geiger counter she'd been issued from our military supply dump and ran it over the branch- clean! Apparently, the Grimer had taken all the radioactive particles into himself. We watched him dump them down the street. A Haunter accompanied Jaws and the Froslass back to our laboratory; from the gestures Jaws has been making, we think she had the Haunter scrub our new reagents in a similar way when she first got them. Hopefully, they're still good.
Going out on her own for the first time, making important discoveries, and making two valuable allies- Jaws is worth her weight in gold. It's amazing stories like hers that give us hope. Our atmosphere has lightened up a lot recently.
Date: Postwar forty-three days
Well, almost half of the reagents are still usable. This is much better than we'd hoped. We can do DNA-cutting enzymatic reactions again. The science continues- for another week or two. We're going to have to rediscover the ways of extracting and purifying such reagents from the original source organisms if we're going to continue as a scientific concern, since we can't rely on the biotech industry anymore. Fortunately, we have up-to-date collections of scientific protocols. We can figure something out.
The Haunter's decided to hang around as well. It was apparently getting lonely out by the sea by itself. I get the feeling that more Pokemon will come to this place in the future if they find that there are humans here. Since the Haunter's given us some assistance with cleaning off our isolation suits, some of us have been able to venture outside again. It takes forever to pressurize the oxygen canisters we have to carry around, but it's worth it. Our salvage teams have retrieved a lot of the supplies that Jaws had marked in the past: gasoline, rope, food, water, and batteries. Our life expectancy in this lab has been extended by several months, now that we have plenty of fuel for the generators. Some of the more blue-sky thinkers have floated the idea of recommissioning the big power plant out by Lavender. The military convoy told us that it somehow hadn't been targeted by the bombs. Perhaps one of them went off course. That's something to consider in a few years, if we're still here in a few years. I'll know we've entered that kind of mindset when the first pregnancies start...
Date: Postwar forty-nine days
Some heart-breaking transmissions are coming from the settlement in the Sinnoh mountains. They've built up Celestic Town, that tiny old place, to handle the population influx for as long as it lasts. It won't be long: at this point, the fatality rate has approached two-thirds of the survivors. The Emperor isn't included in that number- they still won't let him take off his HAZMAT suit unless he's in the fallout shelter built into the Celestic Ruins- but they're reporting that most of their time is now spent in digging the hundreds of thousands of graves that will be needed. Many more have simply requested cremation, on the grounds that there's nowhere to put several million graves. Dr. Larch is still alive. Her initial radiation dose, while lethal, was low enough that she's expected to live for another few weeks. It looks like she'll be helping to close down the sprawling residential expansions made to Celestic Town just two or three short months after they were opened. It really is tragic. Someone built a shrine in the centrifuge room. I think I'll go pray there.
Date: Postwar fifty-five days
We've finally made contact with the rest of the world. Rather, it's made contact with us. Some military group in the United States called NORAD managed to hack into the Global Trade System satellite network with a surviving supercomputer. With control over the GTS, they gained the ability to transmit Pokemon- and as much data as they wanted. This information was passed to the other military bunkers in the United States and Canada- thank goodness for old Cold War infrastructure!- and everyone linked up. They then somehow got word to an American nuclear submarine that was still aimlessly cruising the Pacific Ocean. It surfaced at Taiwan to see if anyone else could use the satellite uplink, after a fruitless visit to Hawaii and the Philippines- nobody there had the ability to link to orbit anymore. There were quite a few Taiwanese survivors, though, with a good chunk of infrastructure. Since they were always worrying about an invasion or bombardment from the mainland Chinese government, they'd used Ground- and Rock-type Pokemon to construct a huge number of shelters in the mountainous spine of their island. On the day of the bombing, they caught wind of the situation early enough to get almost a million of their population to safety. Sure, it amounts to a five percent survival rate, but this is markedly better than for any other country. The Taiwanese government had the equipment to link to the GTS as well, and it used one of the satellites in the geosynchronous-orbit constellation over Japan to send a burst message to anyone who was listening. The Celestic settlement heard them, and then notified us through the radio repeater at Almia.
The information managed to survive intact through this convoluted route. We've just finished building the satellite uplink dish with help from our Pokemon salvage party, and now we can link to the GTS. Data is flowing freely to and from orbit.
In other words, we've got Internet access again. We've had to completely reconstruct it from the ground up, but it's working. Still... no Nico Nico Douga, no 2channel, and no more Google. There's nothing to search for anyway; our IP address is now two digits long: 17. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry.
At least this means that Pokemon can travel freely between survivor colonies on the Pacific Rim. We've had a few visitors from the American and Taiwanese groups already. Lots of excitement in the lab.
We also finally found out just what happened in World War III. It turns out that NORAD was the US-Canada nuclear warfare center, so they had a front-row view of the action.
It's nobody's fault, and everyone's fault- Cold War leftovers seem to have flared up by themselves. It began when the "Dead Hand" Russian nuclear fail-deadly measures accidentally activated themselves. Hundreds of missiles were automatically launched, just as they would've been if Russia's military leaders were destroyed in a first strike. India and Pakistan panicked and launched next. NORAD wasn't sure if it should've started fighting as well, but there were already tens of missiles screaming towards American targets- and then China launched.
Everything went south from there.
When China came into play, NORAD finally decided to launch as well. The general who gave the order immediately left the base. He wasn't sure whether he could live with himself, I've been told, so he decided to just stand outside and wait for the end. At this point, missiles were going everywhere, including even Africa and Australia. The missiles which destroyed Japan were Chinese in origin. They also destroyed South Korea, but didn't hit Taiwan with anything more than conventional missiles. It seems like China was saving it for an amphibious invasion... before the American nuclear bombardment arrived. They managed to release a few enraged Gyarados and destroy a city or two, but the evacuations had already happened.
At this point, no single country's untouched. "Dead Hand" was very... comprehensive. The Antarctic research bases may have survived, but nobody's heard from them, or anyone else in the Southern Hemisphere. The American nuclear sub's swinging down to visit Australia next and see if anything's left there.
There's also one astronaut left in orbit. The Space Shuttle came back to Earth with the rest of the space station crew, but that one astronaut stayed behind to see if Europe, Africa, or western Asia have any survivors.
It feels a little weird to be part of the rest of the world again. After two months, I was getting used to living in a box.
Date: Postwar sixty-two days
I went outside today.
You know, it's fairly pleasant inside the lab. We have climate control, air scrubbers, and clean floors. Some of the light fixtures have natural-light bulbs, too.
Outside, it's cold. Cold, and dark.
The nuclear winter has begun in earnest. Even from inside my HAZMAT suit, I could feel the biting cold. It's those dust clouds that block out the sky, of course. The sun can't get through them, so we don't get any sunlight or warmth. There's this gray light that's enough to see with, but it makes the world look dirty and dead. Which, well, it is.
I asked to go with Jaws on a salvage run mainly to experience this nuclear winter for myself. It was unpleasant but necessary; this is our world now, and we need to know it.
Today, we visited the downtown Pallet Town Poke Mart to retrieve medicines and other things to keep our experimental subjects happy and healthy. We took an antiquated pickup truck that had few enough electronic components that it wasn't rendered undrivable by the electromagnetic pulse. It took about ten minutes to drive down the debris- and dust-covered roads to the town center. The Poke Mart was rather small- it didn't cater to Pokemon League Trainers, so it didn't have very much stock. Jaws asked a nearby Nidorino to break down the door for us, saving me the trouble of using my hammer. We were able to put the useful things into the pickup truck's cargo bed and take everything home in one trip.
Jaws has become very matter-of-fact about these things. She spends every day out in a nuclear wasteland, directing humans or Pokemon on important errands, so she's become something like a professional post-apocalyptic tour guide.
She signaled me to make a right turn off the main street on our way back, wanting to make a detour and show me something. Later on, she "told" us that she'd done this because another Pokemon had mentioned strange happenings in the woodlands outside town. Our lab was in the suburbs and fields, so we hadn't seen anything of this. All we knew was that all the vegetation had died out by now.
It was an astonishing sight. Grass-type Pokemon of every species we'd seen in the region had gone up to the wild-growing plants before they succumbed to radiation sickness. Snowdrift-like piles of weird white spores surrounded their decaying corpses. I'd never seen anything like them before, so I collected a few samples for analysis. As we drove back home from the woods, Jaws noticed a Bellsprout's corpse in a flower garden, with more spores. I collected those as well. It's a good thing we keep a sample-collection kit in the pickup truck.
Our cargo was well-received back at the laboratory, but it was the spores that got the most attention. Every microbiologist in the building is clamoring to look at them. Maybe we'll find something interesting.
Postwar sixty-three days
The spore analyses are in. It looks like these spores are mostly similar to the "Cotton Spores" often used as defensive weapons in Pokemon League battles. However, it's what's inside that counts. They contain the genomic content of the plants that the Pokemon were near when they died! Somebody put one in culture medium and got it to grow into something identifiable as an oak seedling. This is obviously a way to keep local plants from going extinct. It must be taking place across the entire world.
How are the preserved genomes protected from mutations? It looks like DNA-proofreading enzymes are present in very high concentrations inside these Cotton Spores, just as they are in Poison-type Pokemon. We've hypothesized that this is why Poison-types are so resilient.
Today's salvage expedition reported that they caught sight of a Bulbasaur hiding these spores in safe places. Unlike the other Grass-type Pokemon, Bulbasaur survived thanks to their additional Poison typing. Apparently they're continuing the work of their dead brethren in preserving the world's plants.
Postwar three-hundred-sixty-five days
It's been a year now.
The Emperor is expected to arrive by mid-afternoon. At this point, the Celestic Town settlement has completely collapsed. Radiation sickness has claimed all but less than a hundred people, who are now resettling at our laboratory in the new underground extension. They were either kept clean or given the best anti-radiation medicines we have. These include the Emperor, of course, as well as those considered living national treasures- artists, musicians, and other masters of the traditional Japanese arts. I guess whoever's still alive a generation from now will remember Japanese culture.
They're bringing Doctor Larch's coffin. After what she did for us, it's only right that we bury her.
I'm making this log after all these months to note that we're still surviving. Some science still continues with the dwindling supplies we have. We've also shifted more into applied and observational sciences, since those don't require chemicals.
Power's less of a problem now. We tapped the gasoline reserves at one of the surviving container ship ports. We're making long-term plans as well. Work gangs of HAZMAT-suited scientists and volunteer wild Pokemon managed to re-erect the power lines leading to the Power Plant to the northeast. The reactors themselves were left in perfect condition by the evacuating workers. We'll have them started up before winter. We'd better- the previous winter was awful.
The wild Pokemon don't seem to know what to make of us. Some of them joined up with Jaws and the salvage teams, but the majority are more aloof. Obviously, we aren't in a Trainer-Pokemon relationship, as we don't even have Poke Balls. They give the impression that they're getting along perfectly fine without us, and they're only helping us out because we have food. We've had to start a hydroponic Berry plantation in the basement to have something to pay them with. It took a while to find seed that was irradiated mildly enough that it would actually grow. We came really close to just randomly searching through Cotton Spores to find ones that carried Berry plant DNA.
Jaws and a few other Pokemon have grown a lot since we started using them as scouts and explorers. She, the Haunter, and the Froslass were the ones who carried out the warehouse mission for us, and now they've become the nucleus of a full-scale exploration and salvage team. They've become very intelligent both in terms of outdoorsmanship and mental flexibility. Jaws has even mastered a good chunk of Japanese Sign Language. The surviving Pokemon of this world might be evolving in their own way to survive where humanity has prevented itself from doing so.
An event happened this morning to reinforce this. Around the time when our astronomical projections said dawn had to be, the clouds of dust hanging in the stratosphere suddenly blew away, revealing a glorious sunrise.
We have a telescope hooked up to our little antenna farm outside, found for us by Jaws. This allowed us to see what was responsible for the clouds being blown away.
It was the Ho-oh. Ho-oh and the three legendary birds of our region: Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres. We don't know if they did this because of the Emperor, or just because this is the first anniversary of the bombings.
The legends have survived, and they've made it clear: this world isn't going to end just yet. They'll be legendary still for generations to come.
We may have survived. But seeing clear blue skies over us, with sunlight coming down in the first time in almost a year, makes me think... we might actually live.
Postwar one thousand days
Two-and-a-half years, or just about. Some things are becoming clear to us as we continue to watch the world outside.
Today, the Emperor addressed the other survivors over satellite link, in part to discuss these things. I'll play it into this audio recorder for posterity's sake:
People of the Earth. It has been one thousand days since the tragedy which first befell our nation some seventy years ago made itself known to the rest of the world. I bring greetings to the surviving nations: the Pan-American Transitional Legislature, the Antarctic Bases Union, the Second Republic of China, the ANZAC Commonwealth, the Jerusalem Remnant, and Switzerland. I also extend greetings to the remaining autonomous people who may be listening in on this transmission, especially the Last Astronaut.
Many of us survivors are scientists, or scientifically trained. I myself trained as a marine biologist in my youth. We have not been able to help but make some observations of what is going on outside. In the preceding months, we have discovered that the wild Pokemon of this world have ingenious innate mechanisms for preserving themselves and the biodiversity around them. Grass-type Pokemon sporulate the plants around them. Other Pokemon have taken up the DNA of dead animals around them for safekeeping in their own genomes. The diversity inherent in Pokemon themselves has also been preserved; recent egg surveys have discovered that the eggs that fail to develop contain stillborn Pokemon of species different from their parents. Left to their own devices, the many hundreds of Pokemon species we saw before the bombs fell will appear once more, once the radiation subsides. The surviving Pokemon have also evolved to live in this new environment. Those of us who work with Pokemon outside have found that their intelligence and strength has grown to meet the challenges of this dying world.
Perhaps we should not say that it is dying.
This world can be remade, and thrive once more. By human hands, it would take centuries even to assemble the necessary equipment. The Pokemon, on the other hand, have already begun. I move that we should acknowledge this: Earth now belongs to the Pokemon. I and the scientists here propose the following measures:
We use some of our remaining scientific resources to help develop supplies that the Pokemon can use in their future civilization, if they manage to build one. The scientists with whom I reside have been developing seeds with medicinal effects for this purpose. I have also heard that some of the American labs have investigated the possibility of artifacts with inherent psychic energy- teleportation, telekinesis, and weather control have been speculated to be possible. If we develop and manufacture these, it will make life easier for the Pokemon who are already working to rebuild.
We should gather up all the remaining humans who are still residing by themselves. We still have enough aircraft and aviation fuel to cover the terrain of our respective territories. Outside of the expected humanitarian reasons, there is also the fact that humans are spread so thinly now that we need as many of us working together as possible to achieve anything. It is thanks to this that we are now operating a de facto single world government, after all. Also, it is because of lack of coordination that civilization, and eventually humanity, was lost in Africa and central Eurasia.
This concept of unified humanity is needed for the last, and most audacious, proposal. We ought to leave Earth. We made Earth uninhabitable for ourselves, and nearly did so for the Pokemon as well. For so long, we have depended on them for friendship, labor, and even food. After this great betrayal, we should prevail on them no longer, but do them a favor for once. The Transitional Legislature has informed us that although Tampa, Florida was destroyed, the spaceship construction and launch facilities nearby have mostly survived. That, in fact, is where the space station astronauts landed. We ought to center our best engineering efforts there, and construct one or more spaceships to take us to the Moon. This has been possible for decades, but humanity has not had sufficient motivation to do so. Now, perhaps we can do something great, to offset the great evil we perpetrated. A colony fleet!
Think on this, and make your opinion known. It is a comfort to me personally that even in these harsh circumstances, democracy still survives. I will prepare formal ballot measures for us to decide on this question.
I thank you for your time.
Postwar two thousand days (Lunar Era Year Zero)
The first colony ship launches today. Several hundred thousand of us will, over the next few decades, take the trip to the moon. I myself have a berth on the third ship to go up, which will be christened the Clefable when it's completed next week. I wasn't able to go on the first ship because I'm with the team working on developing a type of seed that can temporarily improve Pokemon eyesight. Once we finish manipulating the genome, we can grow it in our hydroponics garden and try to insert it into the Cotton Spore reserves as well. It's been dubbed the "Eyedrop Seed." We might pair it with the genetically engineered apples being developed in the Americas.
I also finished my Eevee project, at least. My data was helped by the discovery that some Eevee had survived and become Poison-type. The new species was named "Toxeon."
There are now just over nine hundred thousand humans left, mostly Taiwanese. It was the quirks of Cold War thinking that allowed so many of them to get to safety. All of those who were exposed to lethal intensities of radiation have already succumbed, and many of those with lower doses will probably die of cancer. However, we still survive, and we still have hope. Lots of it, now.
Most of us will go to the moon, in the greatest migration in human history. A few hundred will stay in the tunnels beneath the island of Taiwan and maintain a small human enclave isolated from the rest of Asia, and the world. Even if we talk of leaving Earth to the Pokemon, we can't just leave her entirely alone, can we?
In the meantime, we will set foot on the Moon once more, put out roots, and grow and hopefully flourish. Pokemon of Earth! If you ever find and play back this recording, remember this. We, humanity, watch over you from the moon above. We could not take care of the Earth, and so we handed it to you. Your instincts served you well, and you made it fit to live on again. Take good care of it. Remember us, and we will return from the moon to visit you, by and by.
Postscript
This written record is a transcript of the human audio recording found buried in ancient ruins by Team Raider. Some of the few humans living on Earth today read it and decided that it was probably authentic. The Wigglytuff Explorers' Guild thanks you for reading this and hopes that you'll find something just as exciting in your explorations one day! As these ancient humans learned, cheerfulness and hope can get you through even the end of the world. Smiles, indeed, go for miles!