It was a dreary and stormy evening the day my life changed drastically. Before I get into all that I should introduce myself , Alexander Drake a fairly normal twenty year old guy all things considered. I have short thick messy black hair and job that barely pays for my rundown one bedroom one bathroom house as well as a small amount put into the rainy day funds under the mattress. Sure it wasn't some glorious existence but I lived alone in two thousand and twenty three America which was quite the achievement let me tell you.-

I was never very athletic to be honest so I had a little bit of a gut on me but thanks to both a fast metabolism and only enough money to eat a single decent meal a day I was by no means fat. I suppose I also got lucky in the genetics area though as I was a solid eight out of ten if my female coworkers and casual hookups were to believed. Never really cared for trying to make myself look good and was likely to wear a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with some sarcastic saying on it to literally any event.-

I did have one rather big flaw that I mostly kept to myself but those who knew me long enough were aware of. I had a near crippling level of apathy about everything since as far as I could tell there was honestly no real reason why I should care about anything. I wasn't emotionless , no far from it , but I simply accepted that there was no point to getting stressed over things out of my control which was basically everything. For some people they strived for something greater than human but I accepted that it simply didn't exist.-

Life is quite fair in that regard as you were born and no matter what you do you will eventually die as nothing more than a human , just like everyone else. So as far as I was concerned why should I do more than the bare minimum to survive until my apportioned fate if it didn't matter. Obviously I am aware of that now that my situation is vastly different but as I said near crippling levels of apathy. That all changed though on this fateful day when I learned the hard way that reality is much more complicated than any realized.-

See I was off on this particular day and as a result had a decent amount of free time on my hands. Most of my free time was usually dedicated to sleeping as was the only way for me to experience what it may be like to be more than just another human. Today though I had been doing my most recent hobby , playing pokemon. To be honest despite growing up with the franchise in high popularity I had never even given it so much as more than a momentary glance.-

I had unfortunately been forced to grow up and realize that the world was a terrible place at the tender age of seven due to bullying. I'm not talking about like harmless stuff like name calling and mocking but full on getting punched in the gut and isolated by all of my classmates for years on end bullying. For a couple of years after we moved away from that area and I started to get treated like a normal person I was cruel and angry at the world. But after seeing that anger got me nowhere I eventually settled for cold apathy , sad right?-

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Anyways my coworkers and the few people who might be considered friends had pestered me to no end about pokemon this and pokemon that until I decided to give in and see what all the fuss was about. Apparently the forth generation and bellow was where the games made the most sense and came highly recommended. My coworker Jerome suggested I play pokemon emerald and fire red first , then pokemon heart gold or soul silver and finally pokemon platinum to really get the full feel for the franchise. I refused to watch the anime though since everyone said that it was rather childish.-

It wasn't all that expensive to get all these games and the console to play them either. About two hundred dollars from my rainy day fund after taxes since I got everything from a reliable game shop second hand. Thirty for each of the ds cartridges , seventy five for the ds lite itself including the charging cable and twenty five for each of the gba cartridge games. I started with pokemon emerald and went through the story within two of my days off. Despite clearly being meant for children the game was actually pretty comprehensive in it's mechanics.-

Obviously the level system made the type system slightly less valuable to memorize when a higher level tended to mean a pokemon could tank an attack of a type it was weak against if the level difference was high enough and the opposite was true. If a pokemon out leveled it's opponent it could still seriously harm or even "knock out" a pokemon strong against that type of attack. This was where things got a bit unbalanced as it was totally doable to just have your character run back and forth in a specific area defeating the random encounters repeatedly to over level your party of six pokemon thanks to the exp system in levels.-

Otherwise though the game had a fairly good thing going for it that made it fun to try and play through the game with various limitations. My personal favorite was the "adult" version of the game where if a pokemon was "knocked out" in battle you had to store it in your pc box and release it because it was "dead". This meant I was forced to be more invested in actual strategy then just brute forcing my way through the story and gyms.-

Once I got too comfortable playing with emerald I moved on to fire red then heart gold after that and finally I was playing through Pokemon platinum for the first time when everything changed. I'd like to say that it was some grand spectacle but in all honestly it was not. One moment I was watching the credits of the game after defeating the champion Cynthia and the next everything went black. I am pretty sure I was instantly killed by the bolt of lightning that I had no way of predicting. I am also pretty sure SOMETHING had grabbed my soul at the moment of my death as When I woke up I was very much no longer on earth. My first thought of course was 'What the Fuck?'.