Reality

SURreality: Considering

She'd have to wait.

Alison could accept this. That it was possible was enough for her. And it would take her time to figure out how she'd do it anyway.

She had a half-dozen Ho-oh, courtesy of her incessant restarts. Always frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the world, she'd never been one to even pause at the thought of wiping out the existence of her chosen trainer and everyone else. When she thought of it at all, she thought of it as fixing, undoing the damage of unlocked everything, beaten everyone, stagnant nothingness. A minority view, she supposed, judging by fanfic. Well, it had likely helped that she had been able to trade so easily. She hadn't even liked Ho-oh, but she'd collected them all the same.

But in the game, the most Ho-oh's sacred ash was good for was the revival of a team. Fainting, not death.

Although there was no death in the game, and so no way of ever trying, she felt certain it couldn't be stretched further. If there was no death there could be nothing with power over it. It was only within the story and the myths it came from that she could find what she wanted.

Hers were useless. It was the game they came from, the world within. Perhaps if she'd made herself one in a story – but likely something would have gone wrong. This world was in flux. She didn't think it wise to trust in her own will alone. If there was a way of succeeding in the world as it was, trying to force it differently would be a mistake.

The boy's had flown off. But she still had three moltres of her own, had passed them over while she looked through her pokeballs for the only one she truly wanted. Within the story of the game, within the world itself, there was only one, a god of legend. It didn't make sense to think that any trainer who walked in would possess that one.

But this world was flat and fake. There was nothing indigenous to it, just things that appeared as she watched, for her convenience and others. There was only what they brought and considered – a rattata on the path in place of a squirrel, a boy avoiding game trainers. But as she continued, didn't it become real, begin to stretch beyond the bare framework?

A hypothesis, then: Within the world lay a set of legendary pokemon as in the game. As in the various canons. Or they would be there, when the world had come fully into being and was more than grass and friendly forest and a half-made town.

So she'd travel to find that place, or to make that place exist to be found, however it came to work.

Because it didn't matter if this was a dream or not, or if she'd remember when she woke. If she could just do this, that would be enough.

She came to hedges.

They were as tall as she was, neatly trimmed and impossibly thick. The green reached to the very ground, hiding any roots, and there were no holes in the tightly packed, uniform leaves. They were arranged like penguin feathers, she found when she touched them – each leaf pushing straight out so that it was only the tip she saw, layered together to block any view into the inside.

A colossal waste of chlorophyll. She'd never liked hedges anyway. The most boring of all plants, and not even natives.

These were arranged in what she could only assume was a maze. It was ridiculous, impossible.

There was a sudden, momentary temptation. She tolerated these things in the game, they'd never been a source of frustration, Pokemon's puzzles had always been mild enough, and yet...She could pass a small tree with nothing but a just caught rattata, yet she couldn't simply level these absurd, pointless mazes with a charizard? And if not her, surely someone else – whoever the developers in the games were, they clearly never cared about utility, and in a world where six year olds fought with monsters, surely deciding to solve the maze by burning or ripping a path straight through had happened.