The mission had been straightforward. Infiltrate a suspected arms dealer's warehouse outside Veilstone City, gather intelligence on illegal Pokemon trafficking, extract without incident. Price had briefed them himself—forty minutes in, forty minutes out. Simple.

Then the world split open.

Not an explosion, not gunfire—something wrong, a tearing noise that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The warehouse floor had buckled. Light that wasn't light, colors that shouldn't exist, and the sensation of falling sideways through solid matter.

Then sand. Salt air. A sky that was almost right but not quite.

"Report." Price's voice cut through the disorientation, steady despite everything. He'd already drawn his sidearm, scanning the coastline with the kind of controlled urgency that kept men alive.

Soap groaned somewhere to the left, pushing himself upright. "Christ on a bike. Anyone else feel like they got put through a washing machine?" His Arcanine—Skye—shook herself vigorously beside him, orange fur bristling as she issued a low, uncertain growl at their surroundings.

Gaz was already on his feet, Echo circling overhead in tight, agitated loops. The Noivern's echolocation painted a picture of the terrain—cliffs to the east, open water to the west, and something moving on the beach ahead. Something that made him signal sharply to the others.

"Movement. Eleven o'clock. Looks like... civilians. Maybe."

Through the spray and confusion, they saw it.

A figure crumpled near the tide line, half-buried in wet sand. Beside them—a Pokemon, standing its ground against a pack of Walrein that had hauled themselves from the surf. The creatures were massive, tusks glinting, and they were circling with the patient hunger of predators who'd found easy prey.

The defender was wounded. Limping. But refusing to yield.

"The hell is this?" Soap muttered, already moving forward despite himself. Skye pressed against his leg, hackles raised.

Ghost's hand closed on his shoulder. "We don't know the situation. Could be a trap."

"Could be someone getting eaten, Lt."

Price made the call. He always did.

"Gaz, Echo keeps eyes above. Soap, Skye—flank left. Ghost, with me." He chambered a round. "We intervene. Figure out where the hell we are after."

---

The Walrein registered them too late.

Modern weapons weren't something these creatures understood. The first warning shot—fired into the sand at their flippers—sent them scattering in confused panic. Bellows of outrage and fear echoed across the beach as the pack retreated toward the safety of the waves, leaving their would-be prey behind.

The four soldiers stood in a loose defensive formation, weapons still raised, taking in the scene properly for the first time. The figure on the sand wasn't moving. Their partner Pokemon stood protectively over its trainer, breathing hard, clearly injured but watching the strangers with sharp, intelligent eyes.

Beyond them, the coastline stretched in directions that didn't match any map of Veilstone. The vegetation was wrong. The smell was wrong—cleaner, somehow, without the faint industrial undertone of modern civilization.

Price lowered his weapon slowly, holding his empty hand up in what he hoped was a universal gesture of non-aggression.

"We're not here to hurt you," he said, keeping his voice calm and even. "Can you understand me?"

The Pokemon's gaze tracked him. Wary. Evaluating.

Ghost hung back, skull mask turned toward the cliffs, watching for additional threats. Old habits. His voice came low through the fabric: "Cap. Look at the equipment they're carrying. That's not modern gear."

He was right. The researcher's satchel, the tools scattered nearby—hand-stitched leather, hand-forged metal. Nothing factory-made.

Soap had already knelt, keeping his movements slow and non-threatening. Skye pressed close to him, and he could feel the Arcanine's confusion matching his own. "Easy, easy," he murmured, not quite to the researcher, not quite to their Pokemon. "You're alright. We've got you."

Gaz approached from the other side, Echo settling on his shoulder, wings folded tight. His expression was carefully controlled, but his eyes held the same question they were all asking themselves silently.

Where are we?

How do we get back?

The mission had been straightforward. Infiltrate a suspected arms dealer's warehouse outside Veilstone City, gather intelligence on illegal Pokemon trafficking, extract without incident. Price had briefed them himself—forty minutes in, forty minutes out. Simple.

Then the world split open.

Not an explosion, not gunfire—something wrong, a tearing noise that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The warehouse floor had buckled. Light that wasn't light, colors that shouldn't exist, and the sensation of falling sideways through solid matter.

Then sand. Salt air. A sky that was almost right but not quite.

They'd regained consciousness on a shoreline that shouldn't exist. Salt air thick enough to taste, waves crashing against black volcanic rock, and a sky stretched wide with stars that felt wrong in their arrangement. No light pollution. No distant hum of civilization. Just the endless, ancient roar of the sea and the cries of creatures none of them recognized.

Three days now. Three days of cataloguing impossibilities.

The Pokémon here were different. Wilder. More dangerous. Soap's Arcanine—Skye—had saved them twice already from territorial water-types that rose from the surf like nightmares made flesh. Gaz's Noivern circled overhead, refusing to land, sensing something in the air that made his instincts scream. Even Price, steady as bedrock, had gone quiet after the second night when he'd watched a herd of massive Walrein migrate across the beach in silence.

But the pokemon weren't the strangest thing.

The stranger was.

---

Day One

Ghost had spotted them first.

"Contact. Eleven o'clock. Near the rocks."

Price had raised his rifle, peering through the scope at the figure walking the shoreline.

A person. Alone. Moving with slow, deliberate steps along the water's edge, just out of reach of the tide. They wore something that looked like period clothing—rough-spun fabrics, layers against the cold, nothing modern about it. Their face was obscured by distance and the perpetual mist that clung to these coasts.

"Survivor?" Gaz had asked, already calculating. "Local?"

"Maybe." Price lowered the rifle slowly. "Keep eyes on. Don't engage yet."

They'd watched the figure walk the same stretch of beach for hours. Back and forth. Never straying from the path. Never acknowledging the team's presence on the ridge above. When the sun had begun to set, the figure simply...

Vanished.

---

Day Two

The figure returned at dawn.

Same stretch of beach. Same slow, methodical pacing. Soap had scrambled down the ridge to get a closer look, Skye at his heels, the Arcanine's hackles raised and a low growl vibrating in her chest.

"Easy, girl," he'd murmured. "Easy..."

He'd gotten within fifty meters before the figure simply... faded. One moment there, solid and real. The next, mist and shadow, dispersing on the wind like they'd never been.

Soap had returned to the camp pale and quiet.

"Ghost?" Price had asked. Not a question about the apparition.

"Not a Pokémon," Ghost had said, voice certain. "I've seen enough of those things by now. That's something else."

---

Day Three — Now

The storm came from nowhere.

One moment, clear skies. The next, clouds like bruised flesh rolling in from the ocean, carrying wind that bent the coastal grasses flat and rain that fell in sheets thick as walls. The team had barely managed to secure shelter—a shallow cave formation in the cliffside, protected enough to keep their gear dry but cramped enough that they were forced into close quarters.

Skye huddled near the entrance, ears flat, whining softly. Echo's wings were folded tight against his body as he pressed into the cave's depths, yellow eyes wide with fear.

"Never seen him like this," Gaz murmured, running a hand along Echo's mane. The Noivern shuddered under his touch.

"Animals sense things we don't," Price said. He sat near the cave mouth, rifle across his knees, watching the storm through narrowed eyes. "Could be atmospheric pressure. Could be something else."

"Something else," Ghost repeated flatly. He stood at the very edge of the shelter, shoulders against the stone, arms crossed. His mask faced the rain like a challenge. "That's becoming a theme."

Soap snorted, but there was no humor in it. "Aye, well. Gettin' tossed through time, hunted by things that shouldn't exist, and now we're sharin' a cave with a ghost. Just another Tuesday, innit?"

"Wednesday," Gaz corrected automatically.

"Fuck off."

The wind howled. Lightning split the sky, illuminating the coastline in stark white—rocks like teeth, waves like living things, and there, on the beach below, a figure standing motionless in the deluge.

Price was on his feet instantly, rifle raised. "Contact."

"I see them." Ghost's voice was flat.

The figure stood at the water's edge, exactly where they'd appeared each day before. But now they weren't walking. They were facing the cave. Facing them.

"Are they..." Soap trailed off.

The lightning flashed again. The figure was closer. Halfway up the beach now, moving with terrible slowness against the wind. Their clothes were soaked through.

The mission had been straightforward. Infiltrate a suspected arms dealer's warehouse outside Veilstone City, gather intelligence on illegal Pokemon trafficking, extract without incident. Price had briefed them himself—forty minutes in, forty minutes out. Simple.

Then the world split open.

Not an explosion, not gunfire—something wrong, a tearing noise that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The warehouse floor had buckled. Light that wasn't light, colors that shouldn't exist, and the sensation of falling sideways through solid matter.

John Price gasped, lungs burning as if he'd been holding his breath underwater for minutes. Sand. Salt air. The roar of waves against rock.

"Report," he managed, pushing himself upright. His hand sank into coarse, pale sand unlike anything he'd felt in other beaches he was familiar with. The grains were sharper, almost volcanic.

Ghost appeared from the treeline twenty meters east, weapon raised and scanning. His posture screamed threat assessment, every muscle coiled for violence. "No hostiles detected. No friendlies either." His voice carried that flat, controlled tension Price recognized—the Lieutenant was fighting to keep disorientation from clouding his judgment.

Soap groaned somewhere to Price's left, sitting up with sand clinging to his mohawk and gear. "What the bloody hell was that? Felt like someone stuffed me in a washing machine set to 'obliterate.'" He blinked rapidly, taking in the unfamiliar coastline stretching before them. "Captain... where's the compound? The target?"

Gaz emerged from behind a formation of weathered black rock, Echo circling above them in agitated loops. The Noivern's screech carried an edge Price had rarely heard—confusion, perhaps even fear. "Veilstone should be northeast. Maybe fifteen klicks." Gaz checked his GPS, then again. His jaw tightened. "Satellites are down. No signal."

Price's cigar case had survived whatever the hell had happened. He extracted one, lighting it with practiced hands despite the tremor he'd never admit to. The familiar ritual steadied something in his chest. "Everyone intact? Wounds?"

A chorus of affirmatives, though Soap rubbed his left knee—the one with the brace—and Ghost's hand kept drifting to his ribs where Price knew old scars sat.

"Right then." Price exhaled smoke into air that tasted cleaner than any he'd breathed in years. Too clean. Absent of engine exhaust, industrial runoff, the electrical hum of modern infrastructure. "Gaz, get Echo to recon. Soap, Ghost—perimeter check. Something's wrong here, and I want to know what before it finds us."

They moved with the efficiency of men who'd survived the unsurvivable together. Soap unslung his rifle, covering Ghost's advance toward a ridge of jagged cliffs. Skye paced at his heels, the Arcanine's fur bristling as she scented air that carried no familiar markers.

The Cobalt Coastlands spread before them in sweeping vistas of azure water and golden sand, punctuated by those strange black rock formations that jutted from the earth like broken teeth. Beautiful. Pristine. And utterly, devastatingly empty of anything resembling modern civilization.

---

The theft happened seventeen minutes after they'd established a temporary rally point.

Price had set his pack against a sun-weathered drift log while he consulted a physical map—useless without landmarks he recognized, but better than nothing. Soap's rations sat beside it, the Sergeant having emptied his pockets to take inventory.

Movement. A blur of motion too fast for exhausted eyes to track.

"Oi!" Soap's shout came half a second too late. He spun, hand reaching for the knife at his hip.

Ghost's weapon was up instantly, tracking toward the treeline where underbrush rustled with hasty retreat. Price glimpsed a shape moving with the desperate speed of a creature that knew it had been caught.

Skye barked once, sharp and alert, but didn't pursue. Her ears flattened, a low whine building in her throat. The Arcanine had cornered frightened Pokémon before. This wasn't the same.

The underbrush crackled. A trail of disturbed vegetation marked the thief's path heading toward the cliffs.

"My rations," Soap muttered, disbelief coloring his voice. "The wee bastard took my sodding rations."

Price stood, cigar clamped between his teeth. The theft was inconvenient. The implications were worse. A hungry Pokémon meant a desperate one—and desperate creatures did unpredictable things.

"Track it," he ordered. "But we need that guide more than we need a confrontation. If something lives out here, it knows this terrain better than we ever will."

---

The trail led them through a maze of tide-carved rock and salt-crusted vegetation.

Soap took point, following the disturbed underbrush with Skye's nose as backup. The Arcanine moved carefully, uncertain in this unfamiliar terrain, but her tracking instincts remained sharp. Ghost flanked right, disappearing into the shadows of a rock overhang where his mask blended seamlessly with the dark stone.

Gaz stayed close to Price, Echo circling in tighter loops overhead. The Noivern's agitation had settled into watchfulness, those large ears swiveling to catch sounds the humans couldn't perceive.

"Through here," Soap called, voice low. He gestured toward a narrow gap between two cliff faces—a natural corridor that led deeper into the coastal labyrinth. "Recent disturbance. Broken stems, displaced rocks. Our thief went this way."

Price followed, boots finding purchase on slick stone worn smooth by ancient tides. The passage opened into a small grotto, half-shadowed, with the sound of rushing water echoing off the walls.

And there it was.

The creature had cornered itself—or so it seemed. The grotto had only one visible exit, and TF141 now blocked it.