She was a little girl who looked no older than seven or eight.
She wore an oversized, tattered jacket that clearly wasn't hers. Her hair was a tangled mess, and her face was smeared with black grease, like a stray cat that had just crawled out of a coal heap.
She was crouching in a corner, hunched over a mechanical dog that looked like it had been completely junked.
The dog was missing one of its front legs. Its outer shell was eaten through with rust, the circuit board in its chest exposed to the open air, spitting tiny sparks.
Its two electronic eyes flickered on and off, clearly drawing its last power.
The little girl paid no attention to the dog's sorry state. With hands covered in chilblains, she reached out carefully and stroked the mechanical dog's cold metal head.
Her gaze was focused and gentle, as though she were handling something priceless.
Kairos stopped walking. He stood quietly at the mouth of the alley and watched.
The little girl reached into her pocket and pulled out an old battery.
It was nearly dead, almost certainly fished out of some trash heap. She slid it carefully into the battery slot on the dog's back, then pressed the power button with an expression full of hope.
A crackle of electricity followed.
The dog's left eye, dark until that moment, flickered to life with a faint red glow.
It lifted its head with effort, looked up at the little girl in front of it, and swept its metal tail weakly across the ground twice, producing a small clatter of sound. Two simple movements, nothing more, but the little girl's face broke instantly into a smile.
It was the first genuine smile Kairos had seen since arriving in this world.
There was no greed in that smile, no numbness. Only pure, unguarded joy.
"See, you can still move, right?"
The little girl clapped her hands in delight, her voice bright and clear.
But the tender moment lasted only a few seconds.
The old battery drained in an instant.
The red light in the dog's eyes flickered twice and went out entirely. Its head sank down, and it became once again a heap of cold, useless metal. The smile on the little girl's face froze.
She stared at the dog that had stopped moving, then reached out and nudged it.
"Wake up... come on, wake up..."
Nothing.
No matter how much she shook it, how much she called to it, the mechanical dog did not respond.
The light in the little girl's eyes dimmed, fading little by little.
Slowly, she let go. She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around her head, and crouched against the wall without a word.
Kairos stood in the rain, watching, lost in thought.
In this world wrapped in steel and neon, the distance between people had been stretched to its limits. Everyone lived on their own island, desperately grasping for something, anything, to fill the hollow inside.
So they threw themselves into killing, because only inside the arena could they feel that they were still alive.
So they threw themselves into gambling, because only in the instant of winning could they taste that fleeting, illusory satisfaction.
And yet none of it was real.
Killing left only emptiness. Gambling left only debt. False companionship left only a deeper loneliness.
Like that old battery: a brief flash of light, followed by a darkness that lasted far longer.
What they truly needed was not any of those things.
What they needed was a real companion.
One who would not stop when the battery ran out.
One who could feel joy, and sorrow, and anger. One who would simply be there.
A living presence, warm and made of flesh and blood.
Kairos drew a slow breath and looked up at the gray sky.
The rain struck his face, cold and biting, but something in his chest had begun to burn.
He knew now what he had to do.
In this cold, mechanical world full of counterfeits, what he wanted to bring them was not the sharpest graphics, not the most intense combat, not the most flawless virtual companion.
What he wanted to bring them was warmth.
The kind of warmth that could pass through a screen and reach somewhere deep in the soul.
The kind of warmth of coming home to find a light left on for you.
Kairos glanced once more at the little girl curled against the wall, then at the dead mechanical dog, then turned and walked back toward the apartment with long, purposeful strides.
Back in his room, he sat down at his workstation.
The crystal flame spirit was released from its capsule and hovered silently behind him.
Since this world had already maxed out its own tech tree, there was no beating it on a technical level. That left only content. After a brief pause for thought, Kairos made his decision.
It didn't take long.
A game with no corporate registration, no promotional budget, and not even a proper developer name was quietly packaged and uploaded to the largest independent game database in the world.
The game was simply called "Pokopia."
Once it was done, Kairos pulled the data cable from the port at the back of his neck and leaned back against the hard mattress with a long exhale.
Now there was nothing left to do but wait.
At the same moment, in a cheap rental unit in the lower district.
Rosie collapsed into a worn-out single-seat sofa, exhausted to the bone.
She was a full-time game streamer who mostly worked the stress-relief gaming section.
In name it was a stress-relief section. In practice, nothing in this day and age actually relieved stress.
Her subscriber base was modest, a few thousand real viewers at most, nearly all of them people just like her: ground-down, bottom-rung workers suffocating under the pressure of city life, the crushing cost of cyberware maintenance, and the endless corporate rat race.
Rosie rubbed her aching temples and, with practiced ease, grabbed the cheap neural interface cable and felt for the port at the back of her neck.
A mild electric tingle shot through her brainstem as her consciousness plunged downward, jacking into the hyperdream network to start the day's stream. A few hundred viewers trickled into the room, the comment feed sparse and scattered.
"Hey Pear, good evening. What terrible game are you going to torture us with tonight?"
"Just clocked off work, hydraulic fluid all over my pants, I'm done. Show me something wild."
"Don't even get me started. My supervisor made me rework code all day. I genuinely want to unscrew his head and kick it around like a ball."
Rosie looked at the comments, all that barely contained rage, and smiled with tired resignation.
The game library in this world cycled through the same old things. The front page was always "Mech Brawl Rampage," "Flesh Ascension," "Cyber Gang Showdown." Constant sprays of blood, severed limbs, sparks flying from colliding cyberware, or digital casinos packed with borderline content and money-trap mechanics.
The more you played that kind of game, the angrier you got. The more hollow.
She had no appetite for anything drenched in violence tonight. Instead, she guided her virtual cursor deep into the indie game library, scrolling all the way to the bottom. The obscure titles, the ones that couldn't even afford a recommended slot, were never looked at under normal circumstances.
Then her hand stopped.
Among the screens full of garish, hyper-saturated neon covers, one unremarkable icon caught her eye. It was vivid in color, but the art style carried something retro, completely out of place among everything around it. A flower. She clicked on it.
The game was called "Pokopia."
The details page was startlingly bare. No flashy taglines, no popup promising legendary-tier cyberware with a first deposit, not a single corporate logo in sight.
The entire page held one line of text.
"The wastelands where trainers vanished. Walk with Pokemon. Rebuild what once was."
Rosie stared.
Trainers? Pokemon?
Both words were completely foreign to her, as though lifted wholesale from a language that had never existed.
She opened the public database and the global information archive on instinct, typed both words in, and ran a search.
The result appeared immediately.
"Search returned zero results. No related entries found."
Not a trace of either word anywhere. They simply didn't exist.
Stranger still, the game was entirely free. It could be played offline, and from what she could see in the settings, there wasn't even a built-in payment interface.
Every game in existence, no matter how much of a disaster it was, had ads shoved into it somewhere. Was this thing running purely on goodwill?
Driven by sheer curiosity, Rosie didn't hesitate. She clicked download and launched the game.
"Alright everyone, today we're playing an unknown indie game called... Pokopia. Looks pretty mysterious. I can't find any background info anywhere online."
A few comments scrolled past.
"A free game? Probably one of those traps that gets you to click a link and plants a virus on you."
"Pokemon? That name sounds like some kind of old nutrition supplement."
The loading speed was startling, almost instantaneous. Rosie's screen went dark.
No deafening heavy metal. No explosive visuals.
A piece of slow, soft acoustic guitar music began to play quietly in her ears.
Then a CG cinematic, rendered in a faded, nostalgic art style, opened before her eyes.
The frame revealed an enormous stretch of land. No skyscrapers clawing at the clouds, no acid-rain cloud cover blotting out the sky. Just blue sky, white clouds, crystal-clear lake water, and dense forest.
More striking still, the land was home to both humans and an extraordinary variety of strange creatures, all living together in apparent harmony.
The images in the CG shifted one by one.
Humans made their lives in timber villages and tended fertile fields. One person soared through the sky on the back of a great fire-breathing dragon.
Another sat by a lakeside, fishing alongside a small blue turtle. All manner of unusual creatures inhabited the mountains and forests around them, not locked in iron cages, not fitted with mechanical prosthetics to fight in arenas.
They accompanied the humans, and the humans accompanied them, each depending on the other, forming a whole and peaceful ecology.
Rosie couldn't look away.
Every natural environment she had encountered growing up was a corporate hologram, a fabrication. The real world had long since been stripped bare by heavy industry. Even the rats needed mechanical legs to survive.
To her, this imagery was nothing short of paradise.
Then the music shifted, dropping into something heavier, and the tone of the CG changed without warning.
The catastrophe came with no preamble.
No alien invasion, no comet strike, no natural disaster.
On one perfectly ordinary night, every human in the frame, the ones called trainers, dissolved into points of scattered light and vanished from the world entirely.
All that remained were the creatures called Pokemon, left standing in their places, bewildered.
Thriving settlements quickly became ghost towns. Streets that had once been full of life went silent and empty. With no humans to tend them, plants began to spread unchecked. The traces of a former civilization were slowly swallowed by wind and dust and ruin.
The vast world went completely still.
The final image of the CG held on a scene among broken walls and rubble.
There, a strange creature, purple all over, soft and formless as a lump of clay, lay curled in the shadow of the ruins. It stared blankly at the empty, crumbling street before it.
After a long moment, it began to unfurl. Bathed in a gentle white light, it stretched and shifted and reshaped itself, until it had taken the form of a human being.
Words appeared on screen, fading in slowly.
"The trainers are long gone. Only Pokemon remain."
"And you, wearing the body of a Ditto, will take human form and begin a new life in the wasteland."
The CG ended there.
After a brief, stunned silence, Rosie's comment feed exploded.
"What?? What's a trainer? What even is a Pokemon?"
"Did the opening CG just lay out the entire worldbuilding? So humans and these cute creatures used to live together?"
"Every human just vanished overnight and left these Pokemon behind? That's actually a pretty cool premise."
"This game feels really interesting. The art style is so soothing."
"That purple blob thing can turn into a person? It can mimic people?"
Rosie was just as lost as they were. For a moment she couldn't get a single word out.
She took a slow breath.
"I... this game feels like it was smuggled in from some parallel universe. The concept is unlike anything I've ever seen."
"Okay. I genuinely have to try this."
The screen cut to a character creation menu.
The system made things clear with a labeled note alongside the interface. The player's true self was the creature called Ditto. The human appearance was nothing more than a mimicry, a shape borrowed to move through the world.
Rosie put together a female human form that looked decent enough to her and hit confirm.
She entered the game.
The moment her vision fully brightened, she found herself standing in the middle of a stark and desolate ruin.
The ground beneath her feet was cracked and split in every direction. In the distance, only the rusted steel frameworks of old buildings remained.
The remnants of a dead civilization were scattered everywhere. The texture of this wasteland matched almost perfectly the lower-level streets of the cyberpunk world she lived in every day.
She was just about to explore when the comment feed erupted into laughter.
Rosie looked up, confused, and quickly switched to third-person view to check her character model.
One look and she couldn't hold back a laugh herself.
The character she had put together had perfectly normal proportions and clothing. But that face...
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~ Push the story forward with your Power Stones