The Falsities of Reality (Open)

Memories. The tiny orbs of light were all that populated the absolute void that was Pooch's dream. So many of them floated past, taunting him, daring him to give chase. Yet whenever Pooch had almost caught a memory between his jaws or beneath his paws, it evaporated into nothingness, and with it hope of understanding himself. Why was he who he was? Why did he care about Caleb despite it being apparent that they had never met? He'd grown a lot since his early childhood, yet he couldn't remember anything of this growth. He didn't even know how long it had been since he'd left the care of his parents.

But he remembered his parents. Those memories, at least, allowed themselves to be captured. Memories of euphoric, indescribable emotions, of love, of happiness. Memories of anger, of frustration. These gave him but a taste of who he was, and they only gave him more drive towards searching for who he was.

A door opened. He didn't know how it got there, but it didn't matter. It called to him. It beckoned. Pooch stopped staring at his disconnected memories, stopped staring at the past, and began walking towards it. Somehow, within him, he knew that the answers were on the other side of that door. The key to his past, to his present, to himself.

With every step Pooch took, the door seemed to draw further and further away, but the canine persisted. "Don't go away... I need this..." Still it retreated further into the void, and still Pooch continued. He didn't notice when his environment changed, when pitch black became desert. He simply continued following the door, trusting that it would lead to the key.

And eventually it stopped. Eventually, it found itself closed on the side of a tower whose peak wasn't visible from the ground. At the moment that it lodged itself into the wall of the tower, Pooch knew that he wasn't simply in his mind anymore. No, he was somewhere else, in a world filled with the consciousnesses of many other Pokemon.

Not that it mattered much. No, all that mattered was the answer. The key.

On some instinctual level, Pooch knew that what he sought lay on top of the tower. Somehow, he knew that he couldn't go alone; he had to go with a companion. Somebody who he inexplicably knew was coming his way.