It was exciting exploring the slopes of Mt. Moon, my eyes peeled for any signs of the ‘terrifying legendary pokemon.’ While I’d grown accustomed to seeing new, strange pokemon on a daily basis in the three years since I’d awoken in this world, the mountainous slopes were an environment I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to explore.

The crags above Rock Tunnel were similar. But while those ‘mountains’ formed a similar ecosystem, they were much smaller — both in area and elevation — than the peaks that surrounded Mt. Moon. Combined with the fact that the mountains north of Lavender Town were practically impassable, with nothing more than overgrown pokemon trails to follow over the top, meant pretty much everyone stuck to Rock Tunnel if they wanted to get to Lavender Town from Cerulean. Which meant I hadn’t seen as many mountainous pokemon as one might expect of a kid who grew up next to one of Kanto’s biggest tunnels.

In contrast, the slopes of Mt. Moon were crisscrossed with dozens of trails from hikers, pokemon, researchers, and more. Almost as many trainers hiked over Mt. Moon as braved the depths beneath. There were pros and cons to each path — over the top you avoided the hordes of zubats, paras’, geodudes, and their respective fusions, but the weather near the peak could be just as dangerous and even more unpredictable, especially during the fall and winter months.

On the other hand, the pokemon that could be found on the surface had much greater variety, and, in my opinion, were much more interesting than those in the ‘tamed’ caves of Mt. Moon. You lost out on the chance to potentially resurrect some cool fossil pokemon if you went over the top, but that was always a long shot, especially without specialized digging and excavation gear.

On the surface, there were gogoats, machop, gligar, mankey, durant, heatmore, and so many more. If I was lucky, I might even encounter a jigglypuff or clefairy. It wasn’t quite the variety and rarity of Mt. Silver, but it was closer than anywhere else I’d been save the Safari Zone.

As I hiked, I kept on the alert mysterious terrifying culprit. But just as much, I watched for new and exciting species of pokemon. After years of battling as a youngster, I thought myself competent when it came to identifying the fusions of common pokemon. Rattata, pidgey, diglett, geodude, bellsprout...even when fused, they all had unique characteristics that made them easy to identify, if you knew what to look for. But with so many pokemon species wandering about that I was less used to encountering, I found identifying them much more difficult.

“Hm...I may need the hint for this one,” I finally admitted. Hobbes was transformed into the shape of the mysterious fusion we’d caught a glimpse of a few minutes prior, though with his disguise that wasn’t as much help as it might be. It was a quadrupedal pokemon, and I was almost certain one half of the fusion was nidoran♂. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out the other half.

Though it had nidoran's recognizable ears and horn, it had longer legs than a normal nidoran — closer to a dog or cat than a rabbit.

Hobbes looked at me, double-checking that I indeed wanted the hint, before he cleared his throat and let out a cry.

“Shoran! Sho, sho!”

I frowned. That was...less helpful than I thought it would be.

It was at times like these when I felt sympathy for Oak and the rest of the natives of this world. It was easy to imagine them all as idiots, especially after I had first arrived, for not cataloging all the different pokemon and their respective fusions. But it wasn’t as easy as I might have first assumed.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The average person, growing up in a small town, would generally only encounter pokemon native to their area, and even then, usually only the first-stage or middle evolutions. Only after going on their journey would trainers encounter a greater variety, but unless they traveled far or advanced beyond the first gym, they’d most often only see the more common pokemon native to their region.

This was the original reason for the pokedex in the games and show — for trainers to be able to identify what they were facing when they traveled far and wide, which in turn allowed Oak to develop his compendium of the different pokemon species and their evolutions. Yet there was no pokedex in this world, at least not that I knew of, and fusions immeasurably complicated things. Higher-leveled trained pokemon were almost always fused, so even someone who fanatically followed every conference battle might never see an unfused golem (despite the high frequency of geodudes) or other fully-evolved pokemon.

Further complicating things was the fact that not every fusion of the same two pokemon would turn out the same. Common wisdom dictated that each fusion had a ‘head’ pokemon and a ‘body’ pokemon, each determining different traits of the final fusion, but I had no idea how each was decided, what traits the ‘head’ and ‘body’ affected, or even if the common wisdom was correct. My only personal experience with fusions didn’t exactly have an abundance of physically-identifiable traits.

There were still so many unanswered questions about fusions, too — what allowed pokemon in the wild to fuse without the assistance of a DNA splicer? Could three pokemon, or a single pokemon with an existing fusion, fuse? What really was the difference between a fusion and certain evolutions like dugtrio, magneton, escavalier, or even just normal pokemon like exeggcute or maushold?

All of this together meant that — even for me, someone who had spent literal years watching, playing, studying, and otherwise interacting with various forms of pokemon media — identifying the pokemon that made up a fusion wasn’t as easy as one might expect.

So, I wasn’t too disappointed in myself for being unable to identify Hobbes’ copied form. I’d been able to identify the pokemon that comprised every other fusion we’d seen today. But that didn’t stop Hobbes from laughing uproariously at my failure, his repeated cries of ‘sho, shoran’ echoing off the cliffs around us. Porygon didn’t seem to entirely understand what was going on, but he was happy to join in on the fun, his bzzts and beeps happily adding to the cacophony of noise around us.

“Fine, fine, you’ve had your fun,” I said to no avail, my two pokemon continuing to laugh at my expense. “Not like either of you guessed it either,” I added, which only made my pokemon laugh harder. My only consolation was that Sableye had chosen to stay in his ball for the hike, so it remained a two-versus-one rather than three-versus-one.

Even as Hobbes kept laughing, I examined his form closer, hoping for a clue that would reveal the fusion’s origins. His tail had a slight, shiny tint of red, which immediately made me think it was part fire type. Liteo or pyroar? Neither of those looked like they fit, and of course neither had the ‘sh’ in their names that Hobbes’ cries of ‘shoran’ implied.

Perhaps my guess of fire type was incorrect? That was easy enough to test — I couldn’t think of a single fire type pokemon that didn’t learn ember at a low level, so Hobbes should have access to the move if it was. If that didn’t work…I might have to consider the possibility that Hobbes was somehow messing with me with a fake cry, though I wanted to save that possibility for the very last. If I incorrectly accused him of cheating I’d never live it down.

I waited for his and Porygon’s laughter to die down. It had already continued for much longer than I thought the ‘joke’ had warranted, but after a few seconds it was quiet enough that I thought my pokemon could hear me over their cries.

“Hobbes, can you try to use the move...ember...” my voice faded out as I stopped to listen.

Because despite my pokemon finally falling silent after I started to talk, the echoes of their laughter continued. It grew louder and shriller until it sounded as if a woman was being horrifically murdered just around the next bend, and I felt as if an invisible hand had reached into my chest and grabbed ahold of my suddenly pounding heart. Hobbes didn’t hesitate, transforming back into his base form and letting out a warning ‘di’ toward the source of the screech, while Porygon floated timidly behind my shoulder.

Much sooner than expected, it seemed we had found our target.