Ladies! Gents! In-betweeners and outsiders of all ages! Are you ready to feast your famished eyes on a seven course meal of delicious, destructive, decadent devastation?! Are all of you's prepared to bear witness to the uprising of the downtrodden, the beginning of the dead-end's rule, the demonic revolution against society's better angels? Anyone who is not steadied against the thought of, the sight of, the
experience of destruction in human form, evacuate the building immediately, or don't say we didn't warn ya!
Introducing! The undefeated! The incorrigible! The despicable! The unstoppable! The one, and only!
IT'S YA BOI!
GUZMAQUEST
Welcome, everybody, to GuzmaQuest, wherein Team Skull takes on the cosmos! Or, at least, the galaxy! Well, the planet. Maybe just Alola.
You know what? We're going to start at the local supermarket, and try and work our way up from there. Basics, first.
Press Start
In the mainline games, Mario storms the castle, defeats Bowser and his minions, and rescues Princess Peach from the turtle's clawed clutches. In the mainline games, Link slays Ganon, the ever-reincarnating personification of hatred, and peace is restored to the land of Hyrule. In the mainline games, Donkey Kong goes ape on King K. Rool's hindquarters and recovers his stolen banana hoard. Star Fox shoots down Andross. Captain Falcon outwits Black Shadow. Kirby beats back Nightmare! Samus slays the evil space pirate Ridley and saves the last Metroid!
In the mainline games…!
In the mainline Pokemon games, Guzma got suckered into a bad deal, crossed some lines he didn't realize he was crossing, and in the aftermath, disbanded Team Skull and resolved to work to become a better, more law-abiding person.
Things went differently, here.
The details are important, but also, not so much. The exact causes, the points where events diverge? Sometimes they're obvious, and sometimes they aren't. The end results, in the end, are all that matters.
GuzmaQuest is built on a single, simple, solitary premise:
what if the Nintendo villains had won?
The Game Begins with Game Over
No more games. No more playtime. Reality
squeezes, and the breath is choked out of everyone's hopes and dreams. The wicked gain power, and the righteous are cast down.
Or, to paraphrase Wario: You have a rotten day.
Life, uh, goes on.
The bad guys rule the world now, sure. But they
rule the world. That means there's a world to
be ruled, and
that means that the world's still turning. This new reality, same as the old reality, is overseen by the
Bosses.
"Boss" is the title for those Nintendo villains that won the day and rose to newfound prominence. Ganondorf is a Boss: he rules over Hyrule. Ridley is a Boss: he owns a whole spectrum of space, raiding and destroying planets to his wicked heart's content. Bowser is a Boss: he's got his own story going on, and it's a little convoluted, but the
point is, a Boss is a Nintendo villain in charge of their own political power. Some do their ruling overtly, others covertly, and some others do their own thing, refusing to call what they do "ruling" at all. But they are all, all the bad guys, Bosses, with subordinates and rules and responsibilities and everything else that being a Boss entails.
(There is
one exception to this overarching premise: a singular setting where the bad guys did, in fact, still lose. You'll discover which one it was … eventually.)
Guzma is the Boss of Team Skull, and indirectly, the Alolan Isles.
Destruction in Human Form!
Guzma, for those unaware, is the illustrious, impeccable, unimpeachable leader of Team Skull, the baddest dudes and dudettes to ever bug the isles of Alola, and the best Pokemon trainer to ever
bug out on your behind!
(He's a delinquent. He's a charismatic delinquent with a crew of knuckleheads and a penchant for Bug-Type Pokemon.)
It's a very
large crew though, capable of covering an entire region of the Pokemon world. All of Alola knows Team Skull as the graffiti-spraying, street-sign-stealing, loitering, littering, occasional-Poke-napping ruffians that add… we'll say a little "local color" to the Alolan peoples' lives. By extension, this means -
(Ah, and petty vandalism. Can't forget that.)
- this means that Guzma himself is known across Alola as the instigator of every antic that Team Skull engages in. There's a lot of truth to this idea; Guzma's wild and free-living attitude extends throughout Team Skull, and their constant confidence and continued ambition are also reflections of who Guzma is.
Brash. Loud. Rebellious.
Infamous. Misfits and outcasts, too. The gritty parts. That's how Guzma likes to think of himself, and therefore, that's how Team Skull
is.
But not powerful. As much as Guzma grandstands, and as much as Team Skull buys into the hype, his actions have never spoken as loudly as his words.
Not until recently.
Out of the Aether
In Pokemon: Sun and Moon, Lusamine sought to fuse with the Ultra Beast Nihilego. Perhaps, at one point, she did so while searching for a way to rescue her husband from Ultra Space. By the time she accomplished her goal, though, it was all only for the purpose of being the most beautiful being in all existence. That, and nothing else: not immortality, not power, not knowledge, not understanding, and
not battle prowess. Though her new form granted Lusamine great power, it was power she
refused to use in direct combat, for fear of sullying her newfound perfection with minor blemishes.
In GuzmaQuest, she had no such compunctions.
The long and the short of it is, the Alola Region now belongs to the Aether Foundation in all but legal documents. Lusamine's word is effectively law, and the island's inhabitants have had to adjust to this fact of life.
Team Skull can, perhaps, be considered plausible deniability. You and your Team are mostly left to live how you like, well provided for, and even placed in a position of authority over the islands' inhabitants. Call Team Skull a subsidiary of the Aether Foundation. But come down to it, call it like it is: Guzma works for Lusamine. He is happy to, in fact.
(This doesn't have to
stay the case, mind you. Perhaps the readership is content to remain Lusamine's right
tentacle hand forever, sure. But perhaps you all intend to one day rebel? Perhaps you "merely" seek to gain enough personal power that you may split Team Skull off from the Aether, and live truly independently. Perhaps you have some other option in mind, something that'll shake the status quo to its very core! The choice is yours; the only problem might be convincing
Guzma, first.)
Now, all this begs the question: how
did Lusamine gain all this power? Sure, she fused with an Ultra Beast, but those creatures are powerful, not inassailable. There's a whole wide Pokemon world out there teeming with the likes of Mewtwo, Rayquaza, Arceus, the various Pokemon Leagues and the ultra-powerful trainers that would
certainly take umbrage with someone taking over an entire region! What gives?
Well, that's the problem. There is, in fact, a whole Pokemon world out there.
And this World has seen better days.
Not the End of the World… Right?
Hoenn is
gone, first of all. Flooded, deeper than anything that could ever be called natural. The only land to be seen, constantly-erupting volcanoes, eternally spewing magma as though to drown the sea, and smoke as though to choke the sky. And the sky is full of storms, and storms, and
storms.
But the rest of the world faces its own disasters. Take the Galar region! Bereft of civilization, Galar has been overtaken by gigantic, feral Pokemon, feasting on ever-blooming Dynamax Energy, eternally fighting over territory and status. The small and feeble humanity which clings to what is left must run and hide and scrounge in order to survive.
And there are smaller, less everpresent disasters that nonetheless pop up with a frequency unknown even five years ago. Sandstorms and monsoons, earthquakes and fires, even meteorites – the planet is plagued with plagues, with seemingly no end in sight.
Yet there is still civilization, even among the disasters. There is still brotherhood, and companionship, and life. There is still knowledge, emotion, and willpower. But these things only remain in the small clusters of people and Pokemon that linger on this world. In between these specks of sapience, there is only "The Grey."
The Grey, or sometimes "The Doldrums", are the in-between areas. The Routes, the Tunnels, the Oceans, the places where personhood is not. Literally stripped of color, these are locations of apathy and depression, where even the breeze does not move, and living beings simply … stop. Stop eating, stop drinking, stop sleeping. Stop living.
The Grey is a place without decay. Only with death. The slow, cancerous, creeping death of an entire world.
The Pokemon world is dying, and the latest sign was the disappearance of Pokemon.
Not all the Pokemon, no. But the majority. Entire herds of Tauros, hives of Combee, packs of Growlithe gone. Trainers' teams reduced to a single Pokemon, or more often, none at all. In an instant, a heartbeat,
all at the same time.
That is not even mentioning those Pokemon killed by disaster, or fallen to the Grey. Or the destruction of the PC System, and the suspicious death of Bill, the only person who could potentially repair it. Or the general sense of hopelessness and confusion that seems to saturate the very air. Trade has all but collapsed. Pokemon Training is a dying art, and a dying industry. There's less food, less water. Less Pokemon. Less people.
The Teams, for good and for ill, have been all that is keeping the Pokemon world afloat. Team Flare's turf is a paradise, and a hellscape, depending on what angle it's viewed from. The Elite Four and the Pokemon League allow Team Rocket an iron grip over the Kanto and Johto regions, in exchange for them being considered the other hand, so to speak. Team Plasma's Neo Communities claim to be a place where Pokemon and people live in peace, as equals, but llurking beneath that surface are terrifying truths. A dozen other major and minor Teams hold back the apathy -
- and Team Skull is one of them, through the Aether Foundation.
Welcome to the great, wide World of Pokemon. But remember: the Pokemon World is not the only World you need to be concerned about.
Other Worlds than These
You may have heard it said, somewhere, that there are many worlds, but they share the same sky – one sky, one destiny. This is true, of course. But there are worlds, and there are Worlds, and there is a universe of difference between the two.
A World is not the same thing as a planet. A planet is a very, very tiny part of a universe, which is a very, very tiny part of a multiverse, which touches on and intersects alternate timelines and parallel dimensions and other assorted nonsense of the sort. But a World, capital W, is a set of
all these things, taken as a whole.
Assume a certain set of physical, metaphysical, magical, and narrative laws. A World is every single real, extant possibility that has arisen from that specific set of laws. The Mario World, is different from the Zelda World, is different from the Metroid World, is different from the Kirby World, is different from the Fire Emblem World, is different from…
… well. The Pokemon World.
But that they are different from you does not mean your World and the others are not neighbors, after a fashion. And Guzma is nothing if not neighborly.
Welcome to Warp Zone
The Worlds are separate things, spread out over distances that are more than merely infinite. And yet, through some quirk or another, there is the occasional overlap.
The Warps.
A Warp is any link between Worlds which may be used to travel between one and another. Some are physical places; you travel to a certain spot, and there's a gateway of some sort, there. For example, there is a painting the size of a small building in Jubilife City, and jumping into that painting will transport you to the BeanBean Kingdom, a part of Mushroom World. Other Warps are bound to a certain place, but also have a certain requirement: by visiting the remains of Bellsprout Tower and falling asleep, you will be transported in your dreams to Ivalice, a World of magic and monsters in a different way than Pokemon's own. Still other Warps are tied more to circumstances, not areas – coincidences of time, not of space. For instance…
...well, put it this way: a
lot of strange things wash up on Alola's shores.
The discovery, or occasionally, the creation of a Warp is the kind of event which upends an entire World. Though the encroachment of one World's metaphysics on another's prevents true trade and alliance from occurring, access to another reality's tools, weaponry, ideas, magic, and other assorted shenanigans can serve to make a person the most powerful
thing for Worlds around. Ergo, a publicly known and easily accessible Warp is the kind of thing which creates neutral ground: such entrances and exits are simply
too valuable to be fought over.
But if one could
claim a Warp, and keep it secret from the general public… well, that'd be something else entirely, wouldn't it?
File Select Screen
And this is where things stand. A broken story, a broken World, a broken system, a broken boy. To put it simply, utter devastation.
Thankfully, that's just how Guzma has always liked it.
You're the toughest of the toughies, and the best of the trainees! You're the bomb, the bang, the boom, the Electrode that knocks down the mountain! It's gonna
take a World to keep you down, and if the world chooses to be your enemy, you will fight as you always have!
...eh, little weirdly worded. Workshop it 'fore you lay down the beats.
Point is, you're the best of the best of the best there ever was, and you're not gonna let anyone or anything stand in your way. You're Guzma, destruction in human form, and you're gonna take over everything!
Now, how exactly are you gonna do that?
