Tulip Glasslip here.
In my defense, I never claimed to be smart.
As it turns out, blog-style websites like mine have this neat function that allows you to postpone the posting of an entry (or fragment in this case) for an indefinite amount of time. You know, in case you want to queue them up or something. And it seems that's exactly what past me wanted to do.
There are three posts which were apparently written a while back, months apart from each other, all interviews done by me personally (the style is unmistakable) yet for some reason I never posted them. I just left them in limbo. Was this something Marie told me to do? Perhaps I was waiting until I had the full picture to post my findings. Whatever the case, while these interviews are most certainly illuminating, even if none of them have an answer as to why I've lost my memories.
I've been looking over them and cross-referencing them just in case. I'll post the content of the first out of the three interviews below.
Again, thank you to the helpful commenters which gave me the tip to look in my own website for answers. You guys are troopers. With you at my side, my computer illiteracy is no longer a weakness.
And with all that aside, here it is:
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[Lorelei is every bit as intimidating in person as one would expect from someone who is both an Elite Four member and a congresswoman. A feat made more impressive by the fact that, unlike in Sinnoh, the Pokemon League and the local government are completely separate institutions.
Her reforms to the League challenge as well as numerous policies all across the region have earned her a controversial reputation. She is most famously responsible for the abolishment of the Right to Labor amendment, which made it practically impossible for unions to be formed in any of the cities or towns that supported it.
Many have called her a traitor and unpatriotic for trying to move away from the Kantan groundwork regarding labor laws –which was originally taken and adapted from the Hoennese government– and more toward the way Sinnoh and Kalos function, giving greater rights and power to the workers as opposed to the corporations.
It's taken months for this meeting to happen. Lorelei wastes time on nothing and her schedule is always so full that even if an appointment is canceled, many more would be eager to take its place. Luckily for me, she's fallen ill recently. This normally wouldn't be enough to stop her, but the strain of cold she's caught is contagious enough for the League to force her to take a few days off. And, with nothing better to do, she finally decided to answer my messages.
She sits at the other side of the table with arms crossed, the tip of her shoe tapping against the floor anxiously. Every few seconds her hands twitch or her gaze moves toward a nearby desk. It's as though she's expecting a pile of papers to suddenly materialize before her.]
None of us could've seen it coming, and if anyone claims different then they're full of shit.
"You're talking about the sudden disappearance of the entirety of Wysteria's population, yes?"
It was madness. Something literally out of this world, as far as I'm concerned, and yet we are still getting blamed for it.
Look, I won't try to defend the indefensible. Whether you're talking about the League or the government, I'll be the first to admit that both institutions screwed up plenty of times. The Wedger bill, some of the post-war, policies, our dismissal of some of the social programs that probably would have saved us a lot of time and money, the whole Rocket incident…
Dear Mew, the Rocket incident. That's still something I mentally kick myself for every day. With a single fuck-up I gave my critics enough to sustain themselves on for the rest of their lives. A criminal organization working right under my nose, and led by one of our Gym leaders no less! Not to mention our asses had to be put out of the fire by a couple of eleven-year olds. I don't think I'll ever live that down, and part of me thinks I shouldn't.
But yes, neither the League nor the state were blameless. I would know; I worked for both. Still, the fact that every year there's a new protest or hearing regarding the Wysteria incident… give me a fucking break.
Yes, we are responsible for the safety of the populace and yes, we do have an entire department dedicated to the study and containment of supernatural phenomena around certain Pokemon. Do you want to know how big that department is? An office. Literally just a small office. Unlike other regions, our local legends prefer minding their own business, so with the rare exception we aren't very used to such phenomena occurring on large scales.
Could we have prevented this by increasing the size and reach of that department? Yes. But resources are limited and besides, how on earth could we have known something like this would happen? You have to understand, we are not prepared for magic. When I sit down to do my work, I expect down-to-earth problems. Trainer reforms, Pokemon population control, new bills that need to be passed, things like that. What happened in Wysteria was simply too out of the ordinary, too supernatural to have been foreseen beforehand.
"Yet some of the signs were there. The number of unexplained incidents all throughout the town's history…"
Statistical anomalies.
"That is not…"
You're right, it wasn't that, but did we have any reason to believe otherwise back then?
Go ask the higher-ups in Hoenn how they 'prepared' for that whole Team Aqua-Magma debacle. Yes, the signs are always there. But if you'd been in their shoes, would you have believed that a group of stupid thugs led by a couple of bastards with delusions of grandeur would've been capable of actually resurrecting the lords of the earth and sea? It's absurd! The likelihood of them succeeding was infinitesimal, and yet luck was clearly not on Hoenn's side. Same thing with the Flare incident in Kalos. Or hell, go ask Cynthia how they're doing with the whole Team Galactic problem.
Some things are so fantastic that you simply can't take them seriously as a threat until they're right in front of you, staring you in the face. There is so much more we need to worry about every day. I can assure you that a single day of bureaucratic mismanagement could do more harm than any legendary Pokemon could hope to.
"Those examples are all referring to ideological groups trying to change the world. But this was different, was it not?"
Maybe so, but it was just as unexpected, and that's what matters. That's what prevented us from realizing something was wrong until it was too late.
Again, I'm not trying to make excuses, but we were in absolute shambles back then. Barely two years off the tail-end of the biggest, most devastating war our land had ever known. It wasn't just our government that was being held together by metaphorical duct tape. Our people were tired. Broken. They wanted the state to reassure them, to help rebuild what the greed of my antecessors had shattered.
And… I know this won't garner us any sympathy, but we were tired too. People often forget that we government workers are also… you know, people. It is our duty to endure what others can't in the name of our land's prosperity, but you can only place so much weight on a person's shoulders before they crack. We'd just lost a war, but I think deep down we didn't care much about that, only that it was finally over. I'm sure many thought it was like cutting off a limb. Horrible, yes, but once it was done it was done, and you could start working on recovery.
We all underestimated how long that recovery would take. How much it would ask of us.
We lost a lot of good people right after the war. Most of them transferred. The few that had the option to, simply retired. And some of us that had no way to escape… well, I don't need to tell you about the suicide rate spike amongst the government during those months. It has been extensively documented.
Part of me wants to be bitter at them, but I just can't. They must have looked up and realized the grueling, endless climb that awaited all of us, and simply couldn't take it.
I was pretty much a political assistant at the time, a title whose job description might as well be 'Do all the shit no one else wants to'. I won't sugarcoat it; it was hell. Right now, every single day of full work is a paradise compared to what I had to go through back then. And to think I still somehow found the time to train my team and try to apply for the Elite Four position. How I wish I still had that youthful vigor.
"I think we're getting a bit away from the point here, miss Lorelei."
Right. Sorry, guess I got caught up in reminiscing.
Point is, it would have been an extreme oversimplification to say we had our hands full at the time. The rebuilding of Vermillion's dock and a quarter of the city itself was taking the better part of two and a half years, and it was our main priority at the time. We needed naval transport up and ready again. The Sevii islands were clamoring for help and we could do little but tell them to wait. Then there was Fuchsia and Viridian… I could go for hours about what a nightmare dealing with the aftermath was in those towns, but I'll spare you the grisly details.
All in all, what possible reason could we have had to worry about a few 'statistical anomalies' in a town like Wysteria? No offense to any ex-citizens, of course. But you can't deny that amidst all that chaos, a dingy little settlement that could barely call itself a town would have never become our top priority. Not until… that day, of course.
"Those statistical anomalies…"
The first sign came from the Department of Workforce Statistical Analysis. Simultaneously one of the most repulsive yet –if I'm forced to admit it– surprisingly useful ideas my predecessor came up with while he was still in office. It was mostly a tool to analyze individual work output in every town. Think of it like a daily census for the productivity of every industry, gauged by the result of comparing time spent working with the amount of raw 'labor' produced.
Just saying it out loud makes me want to gag. This was back when almost all industries had been subsidized by the government. We got a lot of backlash for that. And I can't say I found the idea palatable at the time, but it was the only choice we had if we wanted to get the region up and running as soon as possible again. The daily census though… that was a piece of shit for sure. Again, this was before I even thought of updating and changing labor policies, and way before I had the power to make such a dream a reality. Unions were a pipedream at best. And now came this tool that allowed the government to have complete knowledge and control over the workers they oversaw, without any negative consequences on their part.
And the worst fucking part is that it was one of the most useful tools we had back then. I absolutely loathed it. Every time I felt relief at having such a convenient way to oversee the productivity of the workers all across the region, it was swiftly followed by a wave of disgust, mostly at myself.
Maybe all that accumulated disgust and bitterness is what eventually turned me into what I am now. If so, I can't complain. My only regret is that I didn't act sooner.
But that's beside the point. Wysteria. We're here to talk about Wysteria.
Like I said, the first sign came from the census. One day I was looking over the statistics of the town while I had my morning coffee, and I noticed something… odd.
Overnight, the overall productivity of the town had raised by more than 3%. I know it might not sound like much, but in the context of the tools we were dealing with, that was a ludicrous jump. You could only wish for such an increase over the span of weeks, but overnight?
I mean, not to say I was unhappy. Had I not been so skeptical I might have smiled at the news. But a 3% jump… yes, there was definitely something strange. Unfortunately I didn't have much time to worry about it so I simply told one of the other assistants to check the statistics again to see if there'd been an error in the algorithm, and then went on with my day.
"But there was no error in the algorithm, I assume?"
Not only that, but the next day the productivity had improved another 0.5%, and I received reports that the amount of overtime in the worker's shifts had also increased. Not significantly, but all across the board. That's when I began to have my doubts. Was this the result of an overzealous foreman driving up productivity in spite of their workers' wellbeing just to score some brownie points with us? It wouldn't have been the first time. We only had so much time and resources and more land and settlements than we could deal with at one specific time. Many had tried to harbor sympathy from us so we may decide to help them next, only to find themselves slapped on the forehead with a strongly worded warning letter with their name on it.
It was still odd, though. Wysteria was a small town, barely over a couple thousand citizens. Unless we were missing something, I doubted a single employer could garner such results overnight. Perhaps there'd been a town council meeting? Something agreed to beforehand by the citizens themselves? Whatever the case, even then it didn't become a priority for us. I told one of my coworkers to keep monitoring the daily statistics and to inquire on the matter through the SRP if the spike continued to grow.
"The SRP?"
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
State Radio Program. This was before the boom of the net, you understand. It was even before we turned the Lavender tower into the second most powerful and far-reaching radio-communication hub on the planet. Before you could contact anyone from anywhere at any time you wanted without any kind of trouble.
Back then, we had a limited number of state-sanctioned radio lines. Cities like Celadon, Vermillion and Saffron counted with a few dozen each, but Wysteria? We had a single line. Old, barely functioning. It was connected to… well you wouldn't call it exactly an embassy but the idea wasn't much different. It was run by one of our own. Their job was to stay on the other end of the line every day until we decided to contact them, which we rarely did. In the odd case, however, they would be tasked to connect us with anyone we desired from Wysteria, be it the mayor or… fucking, I don't know, anyone.
It was a quiet, shitty job. The kind you force upon people you want out of your way. I daresay that post served more as a punishment than a communications line. The man that worked there… I didn't know him very well, but he'd apparently stepped on the wrong toes when he'd worked as a congressman's assistant, and for his transgressions he'd been transferred there, to Wysteria.
I don't think anyone could've known that transfer might as well have been a death sentence.
"Was that man the one and only recorded victim of the Wysteria incident?"
[Lorelei shifts uncomfortably in her seat, folding one leg over the other, fingers starting to tap strongly against the wood of the table.
Cygnus, her Slowbro, approaches with a wide smile and a couple of objects in his hands. Lorelei places the ashtray atop the table and lights the cigarette in an offhanded manner, taking a moment to close her eyes and enjoy the first drag. After exhaling, she smiles down at her companion and pets his head affectionately.
The Slowbro stays with us for the rest of the interview.]
I still remember it as though it'd been yesterday.
We'd received a troubling sign the night before. Unexpectedly, the productivity rate of Wysteria had actually gone down considerably during the following days, yet the overtime had continued to increase. Now we had a reason to worry. I told Reshi –our radio communications chief– to connect with our post at Wysteria and have him inquire on what the hell was going on over there.
"Did you receive a response?"
Yes, although I didn't become aware of it until almost the end of my shift. The response Reshi had received had been troubling, though apparently not enough to warrant bothering me with it. Our post at Wysteria had informed us that there was something… odd happening around town. He didn't go into detail, maybe because he didn't know how to put it into words or because he thought we wouldn't take him seriously. All he said was 'I've got a bad feeling, is all'.
"Yet you weren't notified of this."
Not right away. Reshi told him to contact the Mayor regardless and that was that until later that night. I remember it was late. A couple hours past the end of my shift, though back then that was pretty common. I'd turned off the light to my office and was walking down the corridor when Reshi came looking for me.
Even past the exhaustion and the liters of coffee running through my bloodstream, the discomfort in his face was hard to miss. He looked… rattled. That's the first thing that let me know something was wrong. Reshi's job was to listen to the feedback of every single state-sanctioned radio line, most of them manned by people that were really mad and impatient at us. The man had skin as thick as an Onix. And yet…
He told me we'd just gotten a reply from our post in Wysteria. Apparently… and this is where I remember him shaking his head and laughing, like he could barely believe what he was about to say. Apparently, the mayor had told our representative to relay the following message to me specifically.
'Keep your nose out of what doesn't concern you. We ask nothing of your kin, so take nothing from us.'
[Lorelei leans back into her chair, shaking her head in disbelief.]
Can you believe it? As a response it didn't even make sense, at least not to the inquiry we'd sent, but as a statement… that last line especially. You should've seen my face when I heard it.
[She probably expects me to ask about it, but after I don't she lets out a sigh and continues]
This is probably the point where you and a lot more people will start blaming us for what happened, like many have done before. If we'd acted before… if we'd been attentive enough to connect the dots between this strange phenomena and the many more that had occurred before throughout the town's history…
But like I said, we couldn't have seen it coming. We simply weren't prepared for that.
At that point, when I heard that, I was more irritated than panicked. The phrase… that was probably just a coincidence. But to have to deal with something like this, atop everything else going on… it was less than welcome, to put it in the most polite terms possible.
I told Reshi to stand by, to tell our post that he should try to contact the Mayor again, this time informing him that Lorelei wanted to speak with him personally. Regardless, I said we should probably send a small team to Wysteria tomorrow. It was a waste of both men and time, but at that point even I could see that there was something wrong, and I wanted eyes on the ground no matter what.
I… didn't get much sleep that night. My mind kept going over that message the Mayor wanted relayed to me. Why me specifically? I mean, I knew the answer, but I refused to accept it. That last line…
The call arrived an hour or two before dawn. Emergency beacon. I was out of the bed by the second beep and I made it to the office only a few minutes after. One of the perks of renting so close to work, I suppose. There weren't many of us there, hell my boss said he'd take half an hour to arrive, but it was still chaos. Over what? Well… no one seemed to know exactly.
The only thing we knew for sure was that something had happened over at Wysteria.
I went to Reshi first. He was leaning over the radio with this frantic, worried look in his eyes that I'd only seen a few times. I can't connect, he told me. Line seems dead and our post there hasn't answered in–
That's when we heard the beep. A second after, the green light went live, announcing that the Wysteria line had come back online. I didn't need to tell Reshi what to do. He hooked his headphones on and asked our post what the hell was going on. Give me your status! he yelled. We're ready to head over, just tell us what's going…!
And all of a sudden, he stopped talking. I can still picture it perfectly when I close my eyes. His face going pale, mouth hanging, eyes shooting wide open, the most primal kind of terror flashing through them. I repeat; Reshi was no spring Torchic. The things he must've heard during the war, the desperate cries on the other side of the line… if that hadn't broken him, then nothing else could, right?
Well, I was wrong. To this day I do not know what he heard on the other side of that line. After a few seconds he simply took off his headphones. Slowly, calmly. Then he took in a deep breath and reached for the pistol in his holster.
[Lorelei swallows. The cigarette crinkles in her fingers.]
I was too slow to stop him. There was the boom of a gunshot and his brains splattered into the wall behind him. A second after, the line went dead again, and it never came back online.
[Lorelei takes her time wiping the ash from the cigarette's tip into the tray, eyes hidden by the gleam of her glasses. Suddenly, she looks very exhausted. And I fear it has nothing to do with her cold.]
Fifteen minutes later, I and an entire platoon of League trainers landed in the middle of Wysteria. We found no living soul anywhere.
"Was there any sign of where the people might have gone?"
Nothing concrete. There were signs, of course. Most of the doors in the houses were wide open and fresh footprints could be seen on almost all the streets. But they clearly hadn't gone in a single direction. Judging from what we learned later through rigorous investigation, it seems the people of Wysteria simply left their houses and then… left the town. It didn't matter through where. All possible exits through the town's border looked like they'd been used.
"Yet none of them were ever found on the outskirts surrounding Wysteria."
Nor anywhere, for that matter.
And it was like that no matter where we looked. Every Pokemon an person in every house or street… it's like they walked just outside of town and then vanished into the air overnight.
"It must have been incredibly unsettling. Being the first people who saw it…"
It is literally impossible to describe the subtle, permeating terror we all surely felt as we moved through the city, looking for any evidence of life. The sun hadn't come up yet. Minutes felt like hours. None of us wanted to separate from the group. And I didn't order them to, of course. Part of me feels like if I'd done so… if any of us had left the security of the group… they would've vanished in much the same way everyone in Wysteria had done.
I try to put it behind me. To scoff at it and choose to see it as one of those paranormal things that you simply can't try to explain. I have a job to do. Grounded, realistic problems to fret over. And yet…
Some nights I rouse awake, covered in cold sweat after dreaming of that impossible, that unnatural silence and calm we felt that night as we walked through that ghost town. But most of all… I dream of the one thing we did find.
"Your post, yes?"
We found his remains outside the city hall. I don't think I… processed what I was seeing until one of the others accompanying me fell on his ass and let out a scream of terror. Our Pokemon were a mess too. All of them had seen blood and carnage but something about what we found… the sheer sense of wrongness that exuded from it…
His body had been… chopped up. Roughly. His remains had been left there in a pattern that only I could recognize, and the message written in blood above it, on the walls surrounding the door leading to the city hall…
[Lorelei clears her throat, and as she recites the message her voice quivers ever so slightly.]
'We ask nothing from your kin, so take nothing from us. Forget not the pillars which support the ground you stand on.'
To most people, that might've read like a threat. But… no. It was a message. A message written there specifically for me.
Have you ever heard of the Tanoby Ruins incident?
[I shake my head, and Lorelei seems disappointed that she'll have to explain it now.]
It happened when I was five. The place I'm from, the Sevii islands… you have to understand that both geographically and culturally, they were disconnected from Kanto as a whole, even if we were all part of the same region. There's… a divide. You can't just annex an entire archipelago after thousands of years of freedom and expect them to adapt to your way of doing things immediately.
This happened shortly after the first draft of the Right to Labor amendment was given a green light. Of course, since the Sevii islands were technically part of Kanto, it applied there as well. All throughout the islands, worker unions were dismantled overnight and mainland Kantan representatives were sent all over to oversee our labor.
[She scoffs indignantly.]
You can guess how well that went. You have to understand, we were… no, we still are a very united people. But we were also peaceful and –if I must admit it– somewhat meek. There were protests. Riots even. But things never escalated much more than that… until the incident with the ruins, of course.
I won't waste your time with the rich history of the Tanoby Ruins. All you need to know is that them, and all of Seven Island, had been left mostly untouched by us for hundreds of years, and now these mainland scumbags wanted to rush in and stripe the island and the ruins bare for all they were worth.
The riots intensified. Workers rose up and tried to quit or protest any way they could, but they were denied at every turn. Those who spoke up, those who tried to hold true to our culture's ideology were exploited and punished both through overwork and through pay-cuts. My father was one of those. He held out until the very end, and then…
It happened a short distance from the ruins themselves. The mainland representative had gathered all the workers who were supposed to mine the rich minerals of the ruins, but refused to. Those were the most adamant of the protesters. And this fucking moron decided that the best thing to do was to threaten and belittle them. He told them that the mainland would not stand for the idiotic 'traditions' of a bunch of islander hicks. He said that if they continued to refuse working, he'd make sure none of them would ever be hired by any other Kantan company for as long as he lived.
Things escalated from there. There were shouts, insults, and then pushes. At one point the mainland representative must have lost it because he actually grabbed a metal pipe from the room and swung at one of the men who'd just pushed him. Blood was shed. That, apparently, was the point at which my people's patience stopped stretching, and finally broke.
There are many versions of what happened, but all of them have basically the same gist. The representative was killed. Butchered with spades and axes and whatever other tools the workers had at their disposal. His body, or the parts that remained of it, were left there in the same pattern as those of that poor man in Wysteria, many years later. And above, the same message was left in blood.
'We ask nothing from your kin, so take nothing from us. Forget not the pillars which support the ground you stand on.'
[A tiny smile forms on her lips.]
The workers of the Sevii islands never had to worry about mainland exploitation ever again. A few weeks after the incident, unions began to reform. The mainland technically had the power to disband them whenever they wanted… and yet they never did.
They say some pieces were missing from the body. They say that every one of the workers took a bone from the bastard that had exploited them for so long and kept it for themselves, passing them down their family through various generations. I never believed that when I was young. After all, my father never passed anything to me when I came of age, nor when he was lying on his deathbed.
But I believe it now. Because the body of that man… the one we found in Wysteria… pieces were missing of him, too.
[Lorelei seems to deflate, leaning back against her chair, eyes closing tight for a moment.]
The question I always go back to is… why me? Was it because I was the first to notice something was wrong? The first to try to interfere? But even so, the situation was absolutely nothing like that between the mainland and the island workers back then. That had been a very clear message. 'We support the ground you stand on. You are not as powerful as you think. If you push us enough, be assured that power and money will not be able to save you from the wrath of the common man'.
Does that sound like the situation between Wysteria and us? Of course not! So why emulate that incident in an attempt to get at me? Maybe they didn't need a reason. Maybe they just wanted to fuck with my head.
Maybe one of the people responsible for what happened at Wysteria really fucking hated me and my ideology.
If so, I can now say that the feeling is mutual.
"Nothing else was ever found around town, then?"
Nothing substantial, no.
"And about the evidence we provided…"
I've sent people to investigate the perimeter of the town ever since, but if there are any secret entrances to an underground tunnel, then none of my experts have been able to find them. I'm sorry.
"That's… okay. Thank you for indulging us anyway. I'm aware this must have been difficult to recall once more."
[Lorelei sighs, her head moving in what could almost be considered a nod. By the time she lights another cigarette, she's not looking at me anymore, but at the distance past the window behind me.]
You can try to atone, to make things better, all your life. But I feel like at the end, just before you take your last breath, the exact same question plays out in your mind, whether you're an Elite Four member, an exploited worker or one of the victims of the Wysteria incident.
Why me? Why now?
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I'd seen the reports of the incident of course, many times over, but having such a detailed perspective on it… this interview is truly invaluable. Lorelei might be the only person in the world who had this information.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to contact her again. She's apparently taken some time off from her congress duties for 'personal reasons'. Oh well.
What worries me more is not Lorelei's tale itself, but the fact that no matter how hard they looked, the League was not able to find any of the entrances to that underground tunnel. Even if past me surely gave them the exact location of that warehouse. I'm not ready to discount the possibility that Lorelei might have lied but… if she didn't, then this makes things a lot more difficult.
In any case, I've gotten my laptop back from IT, reason why I was able to post this. Unfortunately, they weren't able to recover any files. Apparently it's not the same as if they were deleted and it's impossible to get them back if the were transferred. I still don't know why it took them more than a week to realize that, and yet another to call me back.
Fucking IT people.
Also this might just be my constant paranoia, but ever since I went back to that hotel to look for clues –which was a dud, as neither Marie's Alakazam nor anything else was still there– I've felt… eyes on me. Subtle, yet always there. Just in case I've bought a small tape recorder which I'm keeping with me at all times. If anything happens, you'll know.
And finally, regarding my living situation, I'm still working for Ivy, the old woman with the archival office. Work has been… exhausting. Especially since I use every ounce of free time to try to pursue the truth, but I can't really complain, now can I? And as Lorelei just stated, asking 'Why me?' won't do me any good.
I'm alive, and I can still investigate. That is all that matters.
I'll try to do some more investigating regarding the other two interviews before I post them. Until then,
Tulip Glasslip.