8 - Meanwhile, Back In Twilight's Lab....
{The sort of tune where everything feels wrong, and everyone is depressed or worse}
Spike grumbled and stretched as the morning sun poked at his eyes. With a huff he stood up, smacked his lips together a few times, and trudged out of the room and down the hall. The light was on in the largest guest suite. Sweetie Bell and her parents had stayed there since Twilight gave them the bad news about Rarity, as Twilight insisted on taking them in until Rarity could be brought home. A smaller suite was across the hall, and sat prepared for another guest. Spike passed Sweetie Bell as she shuffled out the suite’s door; they absent-mindedly waved at each other in their partially awake state. As Spike passed Twilight’s room, he briefly peered in and blinked. The bedsheets were still slightly messy, and untouched. Again. For the second night. He sighed, shaking his head as he continued down the hall toward the basement stairs.
Minutes later, he opened the door to the lab. Twilight’s mane had frizzed something fierce, and maybe a little scary. Her horn was ablaze as she walked between three printing apparatuses, each of which ticked off another line now and then. Several lab benches held small items in ongoing spells, namely the soil, scorched moss, and the broken Safari Ball. The bags under Twilight’s eyes had grown huge, yet there was still focus and drive in her gaze. Spike ambled over to her, and said, “If you were waiting for the break of day, it’s already come and gone again. You need to sleep sometime, Twilight!”
Twilight didn’t even look up as she answered, “I’m so close, Spike! I have to finish this analysis so that we can follow Rarity’s and Trixie’s ponynappers! I can sleep once I have this analysis complete so that we can save Rarity and Trixie! I can’t stop now!”
Spike shot Twilight a wide-eyed look, equal parts deeply concerned and annoyed disbelief. “Twilight...can you hear how quickly you’re repeating yourself, and your own tone of voice? You’re wiped out. You can’t keep doing this. You are going to collapse, and soon.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take over?” Starlight stood at the door, levitating a mug of coffee. As she walked over, Twilight looked at her student. She promptly took the coffee from Starlight’s levitation spell. Starlight scoffed, “Hey!”
But Twilight was already halfway through the mug. She finished it off, and said, “Thank you, Starlight, very much. I needed that.”
“That was mine,” Starlight grumbled, still huffing.
“Oh. Oops,” Twilight mumbled. After a moment, she looked at a clock. She levitated a scroll with the Crystal Empire’s official insignia, stared Starlight in the face, and said, “Could you head to the train station? Sunburst should be arriving in about ten minutes.”
Starlight’s face lit up. “Really?? He actually came!?”
As Starlight dashed out the door, Twilight smiled to herself, shaking her head. She strode over to one of the printing stations, and sighed in relief as she read the most-recently added line. “Good, that’s one....”
The broken Safari Ball fell as the aura surrounding it disappeared. Twilight stumbled toward the bench with the soil.
Starlight ran onto the platform at a full canter as the train hissed, coming to a complete stop. The berth car’s door opened as the conductor called out where they were and where the train stopped next, but Starlight paid him no attention; her eyes darted among the passengers stepping off. There weren’t many on the early train, lending Sunburst to disembark in no time at all. Starlight took off and all-but tackled her half-awake friend, hugging the wind out of him.
“Ow, that actually hurt, Starlight,” Sunburst wheezed as she let go. “I’m delighted to see you too, of course, but...ow.”
“Sorry; just got a little carried away,” Starlight sheepishly answered.
Sunburst rubbed his side with his hoof and adjusted his glasses with his magic in unison. He held up a letter emblazoned with Twilight’s cutie mark. “It’s okay, but I really think we should get down to business. If Princess Twilight hadn’t personally sent me this, I would’ve attributed this talk of other-worldly abductions as modern science fiction.”
“What about abductions!?” snapped an aging unicorn stallion in a black top hat and black cape with red lining, wheeling about and advancing on the pair. His was a coat somewhere between cobalt and steel blues, with bright green eyes and grayed-out periwinkle mane and long thin mustache. He had exited the train just before Sunburst.
Sunburst scrunched his eyebrows, “I shouldn’t discuss the—wait, you look familiar. Have I seen you—yes, I believe I have! You wouldn’t happen to be Presto Lulamoon, The Terrific & Astounding, would you? I saw one of your performances a good ten years ago. That show was spectacular!”
“I’m not here for a show, young sir!” was his retort.
Starlight tapped at her chin, murmuring, “Lulamoon...ah. Trixie’s dad. So that’s who the other—”
Presto whirled around at her. “If you have information about Trixie, you’re going to give it to me right now!”
Starlight’s shoulders slumped as she looked the provoked stallion in the face. Presto had nearly forced his nose into hers in a most-unfriendly manner. Her eyes lowered as she sniffled. “Mr. Lulamoon, some creature came at us through a portal from another world. It threw something at me, but Trixie shoved me out of the way. It—” Starlight broke down into sobs. “It captured her in that small ball, a-a-and took her away! She gave herself up to ke-e-ep me safe! I’m so sorry, sir!!”
Starlight stood there, crying on the platform. Sunburst chewed on his lip, shrinking back with a face full of uncertainty. Presto sighed sadly, but put a hoof around her. He gently said, “You must be Starlight Glimmer. Trixie’s written at length about you in her letters. You’re about the only one she’d do that for. Thanks for being such a good friend to my daughter; it means so much to me to know she has somepony she can count on.”
The trio left the station as the train moved on. Starlight asked Presto about Trixie, and heard the stories only her dad could tell: Trixie’s first trick, her studying sleight of hoof, the elation that the family trade would go on, and the first time he could not follow how she performed an illusion. Sunburst offered very few words during the exchange. Twenty minutes or so later, they arrived at Twilight’s Castle.
Cookie Crumbles and Sweetie Bell both had busied themselves with tidying in the kitchen, to which Starlight’s head jerked backwards. Before she could say anything, the three heard some strained grunting from behind, and then made way as Magnum and Spike carried a keeled-over Princess Twilight Sparkle out from the lab and up the stairs, toward the hall that led to her room. Presto muttered, “Not her most-flattering expression....”
“She’s been awake for two days, Mr. Lulamoon, analysing every bit of data she retrieved, so that we can follow them to their home dimension,” Starlight answered, both quickly and defensively.
“And that’s where I come in,” Sunburst inserted. “Assuming her scans are complete, I’ll take the data and devise how to reopen the portal.”
Presto gave him an unamused look as he condescended, “And...you’re up to the task. Got it.”
“Um, yes, I am, Mr. Lulamoon,” Sunburst hesitated. “I serve Her Excellency Princess Cadance as the Crystaller and her magic consultant, and came here to help resolve this matter at Her Highness’s behest.”
Starlight nodded emphatically as Sunburst spoke. Presto closed his mouth, then tipped his hat as he said, “Ah, so you are a professional after all. I will help you, then.”
Sunburst frowned. “Um, I appreciate the offer, naturally, but I have to ask, how knowledgeable are you of conjuration magic and astral mechanics?”
“Well...,” Presto trailed off, his thought not fully formed.
“Okay, so you can’t help with writing the spell to open the portal to this other world,” Sunburst said flatly. “Maybe you could help with the casting and maintenance of the portal, then. How many gigajoules is your horn’s output?”
Presto blinked at Sunburst blankly. Sunburst frowned again. “I see. I am sorry, but I’m afraid there’s not much you can do to help me.”
Presto deflated. Starlight swiftly suggested, “Maybe you could help out with the others, use your talents to keep morale up? One of their family was also abducted.”
“So Trixie wasn’t the only one,” Presto snorted irritably.
Starlight shook her head. “No. Nor was she the first. Two different perpetrators, two different victims, but the same crime at the same place done by creatures of the same species under nearly identical circumstances, approximately fifteen minutes apart.”
Presto stared at her a moment before asking, “Why? What do these creatures want with ponies?”
“Twilight thinks they enslaved Trixie and Rarity, the other pony who was abducted,” Starlight said sadly. “Why us, and what purpose, we have no idea. We need to get into that world before we can hope to find out anything more.”
Presto glared at the floor. He looked up at Sunburst and hissed, “You do whatever you need to, to bring them home or start us on the road to bringing them home. Don’t hesitate to ask if you think there’s anything I can do to help. You hear me?”
“Of course. I, uhh...need to get to work,” Sunburst said.
Starlight led Sunburst away from the parlour and downstairs into Twilight’s laboratory. The three lab benches appeared mostly clean, although the specimens and the print-outs still sat there. Sunburst started at the bench with the moss, perusing the data readout at speed. Starlight began with the same for the soil. She did not make anywhere near the kind of progress that Sunburst did. After a few minutes, she set the paper down, sat down, and rubbed at her temples. Sunburst was still going through the moss’s data at the same rate, with the same posture and the same intrigued expression. Starlight blinked at him, then forcibly blinked between eyes shut and wide open, holding each for a little under a second several times each. She shook her head slowly and massaged her temples some more. Sunburst had nearly finished the first set of data when he asked, “You said she was at this for two days straight, without sleep?”
Starlight nodded, then noticed Sunburst hadn’t looked up. She said, “About forty hours on end, yeah. I don’t know how she stays awake so long.”
“Her Highness is a very talented spellcaster indeed,” answered Sunburst as he set down the first print-off. As he adjusted his glasses, he continued, “And I can see she, too, knows astral mechanics very well. She knew to examine an object from that other world, something directly touched by the portal, and a living thing struck by the portal’s released energy. Her analysis is very thorough; none of the common variables of astral travel will catch us by surprise. This will be much easier than expected. Between the three, I can determine exactly where we need to go, and how to write the portal creation spell.”
Starlight shook her head again. “I can’t make heads or tails of what all this says.”
“I can. While it’s still amazing you traveled through time with your magic, crossing dimensions is a whole other animal. Don’t feel bad, Starlight. There are precious few who understand astral mechanics,” Sunburst answered as he finished the first data set. As he began on the one by the Safari Ball, he said, “But I’ll need you to test the spell. There aren’t any other unicorns in a hundred leagues who have enough raw power to open the portal, Princess Twilight is in desperate need of rest, and the other princesses are all busy.”
Hours passed. Sunburst had read through each of the data results three times apiece before he began writing the spell, and often referenced different points on each data set while he laid out the diagram. In the middle of him writing, Starlight joined the others upstairs for a time, and watched Presto perform. She could see exactly where Trixie learned her flair for showponyship and some of her style, especially for tricks that required the power of suggestion. But Presto’s show was very different from Trixie’s: while Trixie used a stage and performed large-scale tricks, Presto was a master of close-up magic. In the middle of his routine, he actually performed the old cups-and-balls shtick so brilliantly nopony had the first clue how he did it, just that his horn was unpowered, and he used clear glass cups to boot. The grown-up ponies laughed at Sweetie Bell asking how he did his act, and Presto reciting the old line, “A good magician never tells his tricks.”
{And back to the scene of the crime}
Elevenses had just passed when Sunburst emerged from the lab with a just-finished scroll in his satchel. He and Starlight departed for the Everfree Forest. En route, Starlight asked, “Hey Sunburst, earlier when you said something about ‘common astral variables,’ what were you talking about?”
Sunburst grinned. “I see you want the good news first. Those variables are remarkably similar between our world and this other. Specifically, that means we won’t have to worry about transmogrification across the portal, the flow of time is nearly perfectly identical, the atmosphere there is breathable, we won’t have any significant changes in gravity, length of days, chemistry, use of magic, cognitive ability, size, entropy, background radiation, metabolism, or memory, and the other world is astrally stable, which means we won’t have to worry about the other end of the portal bouncing to different places each time the spell is cast. I wouldn’t have known all of that if Princess Twilight’s examination hadn’t been so exhaustive.”
Starlight nodded. She grimaced, and asked, “Since you said ‘good news,’ what’s the bad?”
“The minor bit of bad news is that we’ll have to be at the same place to use the spell. Without analysis of the other world, moving where the portal forms will unpredictably change where it comes out on the other side; it’s not like we’re using something with fixed ends, such as that mirror,” said Sunburst.
“And the rest of it?”
Sunburst sighed. “The bigger bit of bad news is that with you using the spell, the portal will be open for only a few minutes. We’ll barely have a chance to look around. If it were one of the princesses casting, we’d have much more time, like a few hours.”
“You mentioned the time spell; you know I matched Twilight blow-for-blow during that mishap. I’d say that makes me about as strong as she is,” Starlight chuffed.
“You’re really not,” Sunburst timidly began. As Starlight scowled in disbelief at this remark, he said, “It’s just the truth of it, Starlight; you shouldn’t get offended. While you did match Princess Twilight blow-for-blow as you said, you weren’t repeatedly using that time spell. Not only did it take three specific beings to the same point in time, it took them to the same place as well. Casting a spell like that is a tremendous power drain, and she used it over, and over, and over. You used the spell only once.”
Starlight grumbled, “Well, when you put it like that, I suppose I can’t argue the point. Speaking of Twilight, how long do you think she needs to rest before she’s ready to use the spell herself?”
“Assuming everything is A-OK, Her Highness should wait for tomorrow night at the very earliest, likely the day after,” Sunburst answered.
Frowning, Starlight said, “She really doesn’t like it when ponies use her honourific. She’d rather just be ‘Twilight’ to everypony.”
“Sorry, force of habit.”
They arrived at the meadow. Starlight led Sunburst over toward where the portal was, and found the remaining mosses were still burnt. Sunburst unfurled the scroll, which rolled out much further than for what Starlight had braced herself. Half an hour of reading and rereading the spell, Starlight stood upright and gave Sunburst a nod. He stood behind her and slightly to her left as her horn powered up to a piercing glow. Rather than the spell forming into a ray, the magic swirled in a series of tiny specks of light. With point after point leaving her horn, the spell looked like a collection of spinning tendrils tracing an oval. A moment of this passed, and then all the little “strings” broke loose. The ellipse was there, exactly as it had been two days prior.
Sunburst urged, “Let’s hurry. We don’t have long, three minutes tops, likely only two, or less.”
The two leapt into the ellipse. Without much of any time to look at the strange colours between worlds, Starlight and Sunburst landed in The Great Marsh of Pastoria with a dull splotching thud. Both of them groaned in the brown brackish mess than now covered them. They struggled to their feet. Starlight grumbled, “Yuck. We have to lay down planks or stones or something so that nopony else ends up in this...ick.”
“We really don’t have time for that. But on the bright side, the spell works perfectly,” Sunburst said, sticking his tongue out at the mud. He looked up and commented, “I hear the sea. The smell was a clue we’re close, but close enough to hear it? A few hundred metres at most.”
A delighted gasp snatched both of their attentions. They turned to see a human girl, no older than twelve and slightly tanned, standing there, in tall black rubber boots, yellow slacks, a white top and a purple windbreaker. She had a lean, athletic build, and the sort of face that warned of a future filled with breaking boys’ hearts. Her brown hair was in an evenly-done single French braid, and her brown eyes and expression screamed that she was doing her darnedest to not squeal happily at the top of her lungs. She euphorically squeaked, “Ponies...!! Oh my God, they’re so cute!!”
Starlight took a defensive stance as she growled, “Be on your guard! She’s coming for us!”
“You can’t be serious,” Sunburst answered incredulously. “She looks like she just saw a litter of kittens, not like she means to enslave.”
“You have got to be on my team!” the girl cheered as she threw a Safari Ball.
Starlight yelled, “Look out!”
Firing a teal ray, Starlight shot down the Safari Ball, shattering it into more than six pieces. The sudden look of shock, sadness, and even a bit of betrayal on the girl’s face would have reduced her father to tears. Sunburst simply looked stunned. He breathed, “...unbelievable.”
“You will not enslave me!!” Starlight barked. She then telekinetically grabbed the girl’s bag of Safari Balls and yanked it off her hip, continuing, “You will not enslave anything else!!”
Baring her teeth, Starlight rapidly fired into the bag as the girl screamed, horrified. Twenty-six shots, twenty-six shattered balls. The girl’s eyes glistened as the corners of her mouth turned down, her lower lip quivering, and her shaking hands moving toward her face. As she started sniffling and sobbing, a chime sounded somewhere, followed by a serene mare’s voice. “You’ve run out of Safari Balls. Your Safari game is over.”
A small yellow creature suddenly appeared with a small pop, and then disappeared the same way along with the girl as her waterworks really began. Starlight’s mouth had fallen open in livid shock. Sunburst shook his head, and saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see a human boy of about the same age as that girl, with a dark brown complexion, and well-kempt coarse black hair kept short, and wearing the same kind of boots, pre-damaged blue jeans, and a red and blue thick-striped shirt standing there, throwing another of those balls at an oversized, floating Venus flytrap. It hit the strange plant, which faded away in a shower of green sparks. A few seconds later, the boy jumped with a jubilant fist pump and indistinct but triumphant whoop. Sunburst blurted, “...this is sick and twisted....”
“A game!? This is a bucking game to these...things!?!” Starlight ejaculated. The boy turned and saw Starlight and Sunburst, appearing highly interested as he raised both eyebrows and pursed his lips. Starlight fired a shot into the mud at his feet, snarling, “Don’t you even try it...!!”
The boy’s wide-eyed face was more than alarmed as he put both hands up with fingers spread wide and backed away. Sunburst muttered in exasperation, “They stuff random monsters into these pocket dimensions?? Why would they do that? What could this hostile ownership possibly gain for them?”
Starlight, however, appeared primed and ready to kill something. She shot at every thrown Safari Ball she could see, even at some a good fifty metres away. The safari-goers hastily retreated out of Starlight’s range or behind cover, most of them looking shocked, others angry, and sadness from others still. She fumed, “Making a game out of enslaving everything in sight, and getting their foals in on this too?! What in the hoof is wrong with these humans!?”
Sunburst looked over in time to see the portal waiver slightly. “Starlight,” he began, “let’s just go. There’s nothing more we can do here right now, and the portal will collapse in a moment.”
Sighing, Starlight nodded sadly, looking very tired all of a sudden. She levitated both of them out of the mud and through the portal, which disappeared in a burst of light eight seconds later.
So...yeah...Starlight just blew a gasket. That poor kid might not wanna train Pokémon anymore, after one (as far as she's concerned) turned on her like that. 
Sunburst kept himself in check, but we've seen that short fuse from Starlight a few times now. But hey, the dude got them through, at least for the moment.
It's gonna be a fun time once Twilight's recovered from the magical marathon and comes to call. But what will she do, and how does she intend to track down Rarity and Trixie? You'll just have to keep reading to find out.
I've got real-world costs that take precedent over snagging a copy of Sun (m' sister-in-law is vying for Moon, which would allow the necessary trading. I would've said m' missus, but her interest in the entire series fell apart somewhere around Victory Road in White), namely the stupid car. 
Please, no spoilers.
I'm thinking of keeping up this looking back at Twilight and company every fourth chapter or so. What do you think, yea or nay? Let me know.
And, as always, thanks for reading; I do appreciate it. 
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Until the two parts cross over properly, looking back and forth isn't a bad idea.
And oh yeah, Starlight has an anger problem, but if it can be properly directed it can be useful. Like in this story.
Um, I'm not complaining about the updates, but are you sure your baby is being adequately cared for, time investment wise?
7727415
I appreciate your concern. But with me working nights now, about the only time I get to see her is for a few hours before she goes to sleep, and when she first wakes up. Nights off are when I do m' writing, 'cuz I can't exactly do things like cut the grass, vacuum, or fix things around the house in the wee hours...unless I wish to see a very unhappy missus and a crying baby. M' wife tends to m' daughter most of the time.
orig13.deviantart.net/926d/f/2016/319/c/8/more_words_by_aprion-daoi19g.jpg
No pressure though
Such a great story so far.
7727576
Oh, if I had the time to just write, I'd be doing just that. But alas, there are bills to pay, and that takes a job, which seriously cuts into m' time and stamina. Makes me sad.
Glad you like. Next chapter is already looking like it's gonna be a fun one. Just give me the time to get it down and done right, and I'm sure you'll enjoy.
7727953 I know the feeling. We never have as much time or energy as we'd like to devote to the things we enjoy doing. Be it writing, hobbies, or just spending time with family. But hey, all good things in due time right?
So no hurry. It takes as long as it takes. 
I'm with Starlight on this one. The moment you have "talking Pokémon" that can hold an intelligent conversation, but they are still treated as mere animals - things get somewhat dark.
"Anything living that isn't human therefor is a Pokémon, therefor capturing it is a-okay. It can talk? Oh, that just makes it more interesting."
I like the weird balance between lighthearted comedy and serious accusations about slavery and questioning the ethics of the Pokémon world.
Treading a bit of a thin line there, though - there is such a thing as an "uncanny valley" effect when a reader expects the characters to take a situation seriously and it is then treated comically instead. (Or... maybe that's just me.
) Hasn't been a problem so far though! 
Alternate scenario - "Twilight gets caught"
...
I totally want to see Starlight going all-out in her "revenge". As in, magic-wise.
When she felt betrayed by Sunburst "because of his cutie mark", she invented a spell to remove cutie marks. You know, the magical expression of a pony's destiny. She found a way to break destiny.
When she wanted to get her revenge on Twilight, she revised Starswirl's time travel spell and essentially hacked the cutie-map - an artifact provided by the Tree of Harmony, quite probably the very source of Harmony in Equestria - to create an entirely new time travel spell that far surpassed what Starswirl the Bearded was capable of.
Now, these "crazy humans" have foalnapped her best friend as part of their "sick game".
... I want to see Starlight reverse-engineer that Pokéball.
I want to see her to develop a counter spell to it. A spell that, if shot at a trainer, would instantly release all his Pokémon from their balls, explosively. And in the trainer's face, if she can aim it right.
And then I want to see her create a "human-ball" that isn't limited in what it can capture....
But seriously though, I'd hope for some brief role reversal at some point later in the story;
A short stay in Ponyville, where it really sinks in that the ponies aren't "pets" to be kept, but their own people. With their own civilization.
Staring at Canterlot Castle in the distance... A poster of Manehatten at a train station... Ponies selling wares at a market...
Perhaps an incident with one of the humans being trapped in a pocket dimension for a short time, and their release quite possibly coinciding with some random Everfree-wildlife attack (though no outright serious demand that the human fight against the monster, other than perhaps some sarcastic remark to that effect or a request for help dealing with the creature).
. . .
I haven't actually been keeping up with the games since ... a long time ago, but, wasn't Clefairy (or some other Gen1 / Gen2 Pokémon) said to be of alien origin or something? Maybe in an episode in season 1 of the anime?
I could kind of see how first contact in the Pokémon world would look like - the humans would treat the aliens as Pokémon to be caught.
...That is, until the aliens started throwing their own "Pokéballs" at the humans.
7738688
Yes, precisely the observation I made. I suppose Meowth from the anime would be an exception, since it wants to go with Jessie and James.
I'm greatly amused at your quick alternative story about Twilight lecturing Aengus.
As to Starlight and reverse-engineering, going nutsy-cuckoo on that particular human realm...let's just say I have ideas. Outlining a plot helps, but there's always room for a few minor changes that do not completely alter the planned arc.
And the alien from the original set...that would be Mew. And then Giovanni and company got a hold of a few of its cells (only a few ways to do that), and genetically modified them, and grew a second one, stronger, faster, etc., than the original. And they gave it a name that we who played the games still acknowledge as an immediate danger: "MewTwo." Years later, now two others who did not know about all that have a pair of Equestrian ponies....
7739277
Uhm... Rarity? Aengus? You might want to maybe not advertize the fact that "pony-Pokémon" can learn more than the typical four moves.
If you do, you're painting a big juicy red target on Equestria.....
Plus, I'm sure Team Rocket (or whatever is its equivalent these days) may take a sudden interest in unicorns.... and where they came from.
I know right?
Also, even if I haven't played Pokémon since Gen 2 - bought Gen 3 for GBA some years ago on eBay, for the sake of nostalgia, but sadly got ripped off with a crappy pirated copy of the game with broken save-functionality - I still occasionally absorbed some knowledge through your typical youtube channels, like Vsauce or Game Theory and the like.
So, "once, long ago, Pokémon and people were the same", and "they even got married" suddenly makes an entirely different kind of sense - it meant that humans at some point actually treated (some) Pokémon like proper people rather than mere animals.
And of course Meowth wants to stay with Jesse and James - he (probably?) doesn't have anyone else who treats him like a person.
I highly doubt Meowth could have gone to school, gotten an education, and then started a business if he had chosen so. I don't think "human law" extends to Pokémon!
Oh wait I was right, it was Clefairy. There's an episode in season 1 of the anime where they actually pilot a space ship and attempt to leave the planet (and fail).
Aaaand now I'm imagining that hundreds or thousands of years ago, an alien research vessel full of Clefairys crashed on the Pokémon world... and the poor alien researchers got captured and treated as Pokémon. Fast forward to present day, and none of their descendants even know of their alien heritage or culture.
Until another research vessel approaches the planet... and the aliens don't like what they see......... DUN DUN DUUUUUN
Doesn't mean Mew isn't alien too, though.
But yeah, Pokémon fanfic idea right there.
Also also, wasn't there a group of fanatics in the Pokémon universe that stood for Pokémon rights or something? One of the "Team Rocket"-equivalents. They were against Pokémon battles, so they fought everyone in Pokémon battles so they could
stealliberate their Pokémon. Or something like that.......They may have been on to something.
I hope the little girl demands a refund