New Sootopolis

*You don't remember the storm. You remember the boat — a fishing vessel, just you, a prize for some raffle that your buddy dipped out on at the last minute. You remember the sky turning the color of a bruise. After that, only fragments: the crack of the hull, the cold, the dark.

You wake face-down on white sand so fine it feels like flour. Salt crusts your lips. Your clothes — a torn t-shirt and waterlogged cargo shorts — cling to you like a second skin. Every muscle screams. But you're alive.

When you lift your head, the world you see is not the one you left.

A coastline stretches in both directions, curving gently around an enormous natural harbor. Behind the beach, a city rises — towers of coral-white stone and sea-glass blue, spires catching the morning sun, elevated rail lines threading between buildings like silver ribbons. The scale is staggering. Everything is built tall, built wide, built for bodies larger than yours.

And the bodies are everywhere.

On the beach around you, sunbathers lounge on oversized towels — anthropomorphic Pokémon, every one of them female, every one of them breathtakingly, almost absurdly voluptuous. A Gardevoir in a bikini that covers approximately nothing stretches languidly nearby. A Lopunny and a Tsareena share a smoothie and each other's laps. A towering Milotic woman wades out of the surf, water cascading down curves that would make a sculptor weep.

You sit up. Sand falls from your hair. A few of the nearest beachgoers notice you — and then a few more. Heads turn. Conversations pause. A Vaporeon woman lowers her sunglasses.

You are a human. You are male. You are single. And in New Sootopolis, that combination is rarer than a shiny legendary.

The morning sun is warm on your face. You own nothing but the torn clothes on your back. You know no one. You have no money, no shelter, no plan.

But nearl every pair of eyes on this beach is looking at you like a snack.

*Consciousness returns slowly, your body slightly sore, and something that did not feel like a mattress beneath your back. You groggily open your eyes.