#jamal bashir

When the light clears, Dawn and Ingo find themselves blinking away light spots in the middle of a large city on a cloudy day. Towering buildings of stone, metal, and glass loom around them and bustling crowds of people and vehicle traffic are everywhere. Between the sounds of countless humans chatting and shouting blending into a noisy thrum, indistinct music can be heard playing from the many surrounding shopfronts, vendor carts, and cars. In the distance they can hear the piercing call of sirens, sharp whistles, and dull rumblings of heavy machinery at work. Lights and screens of advertisements play continuously, screaming for attention despite it being the middle of the day. Punctuating all of this chaos are the scents of wet pavement, hot food, and old trash mixing into a smell that was unmistakably of a developed city. (Not Times Square)

But all of that is suddenly lost to the sound of screeching tires as an incoming car brakes to a stop mere inches away from a startled Ingo. It’s followed by a cacophony of screeches as the cars following it are forced to suddenly stop too. Dawn looks around and realizes they’re on a street in the middle of an intersection. The first car blares its horn loudly and repeatedly at the two, the driver even sticking her head out the window to scream at them to get out of the road (“I’m drivin’ ‘ere!!”). More horns blast as people behind the first add into the noise by throwing in their displeasure. The explosion of sound only causes bystanders to stop and stare at the scene unfolding before them, a fair number pulling out flat rectangles that resemble smartphones of some sort and aiming them in their direction.

Ingo freezes. His mind is instantly overwhelmed by both sensory overload and a visceral memory of experiencing almost the exact same situation long, long ago.

Dawn is quicker on the uptake and grabs the dazed Ingo by the arm, pulling him out of the asphalt road and onto a sidewalk, ignoring the angry shouting behind them. Onlooking pedestrians back away at their approach but otherwise they just give them the stink eye. She mumbles shy apologies and hurriedly pushes past the small crowd, dragging Ingo along the sidewalk, who thankfully seems aware enough to keep his balance and follow after her.

After a lot of shoving her way through throngs of people, Dawn finally comes across a small park with trees and a fountain. Ducking into it, she and Ingo collapse onto a bench, taking a moment to regain their bearings. As Dawn catches her breath, she notices that Ingo is… somewhere else, slightly disconnected from reality as far as she can tell. She gently shakes his shoulder to get his attention and asks what’s up.

In a daze, Ingo says he recognizes this.

This place feels eerily familiar to Ingo. The crowded nature of the city, the traffic of motorized carriages, even the rude attitude of the people… he’s lived this life before. It was what he was used to until… until Hisui…

Dawn looks around in confusion. Here? Here, here??

Ingo snaps out of it and shakes his head. No, not this place in specific. It’s too… strange. There’s not enough Pokémon.

Wait…

They’ve seen neither hide nor hair of a single Pokémon since they got here. Checking around her, Dawn finds a lot of bird things that look like tinier Pidoves but literally nothing else. It seems that Arceus wasn’t kidding about this world’s lack of Pokémon.

Pulling out her Arc-phone, Dawn checks the device’s functions. Fortunately, it seems it’s granted her access to this world’s internet. With a little poking around, she finds a map site that shows them being in a place called ‘New York City’. Ingo shakes his head, those words meaning nothing to him. Zooming in and out of the map doesn’t offer much more context, just the names of more unfamiliar places and unrecognizable geography. All they can say for sure is that this city is stupidly huge and finding Ingo’s brother in this won’t be easy.

Deciding they need a better place to start, Dawn asks Ingo if he remembers anything about his brother. Arceus said he’s his twin? That had to be the ‘man with a face like his’. Right?

Ingo gets that distant look again as more bits are shaken loose from his damaged memory. He remembers a few scraps: the color white, a broad smile, the crackling of electricity, something about fuzzy yellow things, someone always at his side in the good times and bad. And a lonely sadness.

But those are just thoughts and feelings, nothing substantial worth mentioning to Dawn. And unfortunately, none of them came with a key piece of information: a name.

But Ingo does remember the word ‘train’ being strongly associated with his brother. More specifically the word: ‘subway’.

Now that they’re in a place with internet, Dawn realizes that finding things out should be a lot easier. On a hunch, she finds a search engine and looks up the word. The results are quick with pictures and articles aplenty.

There’s a choked noise from Ingo and Dawn turns to find him staring wide eyed at her screen, a shaking hand raised as if trying to reach for her phone. Dawn wordlessly hands the device over to let Ingo look at it and he easily thumbs through the webpages. His eyes keep drinking in the images, unable to get enough.

“This… This is it!” Ingo breathes out as long withheld memories finally break free. “This is exactly it!! THIS is a train! A machine on rails! The greatest form of transportation ever invented! I used to drive these all the time! How could I have ever forgotten this?!”

“Ingo??” Dawn gently squeezes his arm in worry, “You’re crying.”

Ingo blinks at her before pressing the tips of his fingers against his cheek. They come away wet.

“Ah, so it seems,” he acknowledges, wiping his face with the back of a sleeve. He chuckles reassuringly, “Never fear, Miss Dawn. These are happy tears. You’ve rerouted an important part of me back to my station. I should be thanking you right now.”

Without another word, Dawn holds out her arms in a clear offer for a hug. He embraces her in gratitude.

“So your brother worked on trains too?” she asks when they part.

“Yes… we did it together,” Ingo says wistfully, “Like everything else we did. He would battle Pokémon alongside me in a moving subway car. It was what we were renowned for.”

Dawn shoots to her feet, her fist punching her palm as she grins at him, “Then that settles it! First, step! We find a subway. If your brother is as obsessed with these things as you are, then he can’t be too far off from one!”

“That sounds like a good place to start,” Ingo nods sharply. With a dramatic sweep of his arm, he points towards the road, “Next stop: a subway station! All aboard!!”

His moment of triumph is interrupted by a surrounding flock of not-Pidoves erupting into flight, startled by the sudden boom of his voice. Parkgoers and pedestrians are equally startled by the fleeing birds, eliciting a few shrieks of terror. Some people turn to glare at him and Ingo has the good grace to duck his head down, tipping his hat brim over his eyes in embarrassment.

Dawn just about loses it from laughing so hard.

His shout also catches the attention of a colorful group of people who immediately start excitedly pointing at them and chattering amongst themselves. Dawn pays them no mind until one breaks off to approach them.

She looks a few years older than Dawn with brightly colored hair in pink and purple and wearing a slightly off-beat outfit compared to most of the city-dwellers around her. She smiles at them, raising a hand in nervous excitement.

“Hello! I’m really sorry to bother you two, but I just wanted to say that I love your cosplay! It looks amazing! So on point!”

Dawn and Ingo exchange glances.

“Oh, uh, thank you!” Dawn says, thinking fast. She has no idea what this stranger is talking about but she seems to be nice enough. Dawn hopes that’s the end of it, but the girl pulls out a smartphone and looks a lot more nervous.

“Um! May I please take a picture of you guys?” she asks with an embarrassed flush in her face, yet looking hopeful, “It’s just that you did such a great job on your costumes!”

Ingo looks like he wants to say something but Dawn cuts in with a polite but rueful smile, “Ah, I’m sorry, no, we’re kinda in the middle of something. Maybe some other time?”

There’s a look of faint disappointment, but it doesn’t last as she grins in reassurance, “Oh! Of course! I totally understand. I’m really sorry for interrupting you! Have a great day!”

And just like that, the stranger waves goodbye as she makes her exit and jogs back to her friends. A few of them tease her but she takes it in good stride, tossing a few comebacks at them. They depart trading playful insults.

Dawn sighs in relief.

Ingo looks puzzled.

“What is ‘cosplay’?” he asks.

“It’s a dress up thing, where you wear what a movie or tv show character wears. It’s just for fun,” Dawn explains.

“Hrm,” Ingo rubs his chin in mild concern, “I wonder what they think we are cosplaying as.”

Dawn shrugs, “I guess they have something where characters wear clothes like ours?”

Ingo makes a noise of uncertainty but doesn’t press the matter.

They have to walk a few blocks, but they find the nearest subway station easily. Going down the stairs, they are met with a scene that makes Ingo stop and stare as familiarity washes over him once more, the feeling rocking him even more powerfully this time.

Ticketing machines, turnstiles, worker booths, the smell of stale air and the faint rumbling of fast-moving steel.

It’s like he’s come home.

Dawn is just as fascinated by Ingo’s reaction, “Is this what your subway station looked like?”

“Stations,” Ingo absently corrects her, his eyes sweeping across the station interior, picking out every familiar detail, “And yes, some of them were not dissimilar to this.”

But as he takes a closer look, the reality of this place seeps in. There’s litter strewn everywhere, the lights are too dim to be effective, several machines are labeled with out-of-order signs, and that odor… Ingo makes a faint sound of disgust and covers his nose with his coat sleeve.

“Except my stations were far more sanitary than this! Ugh, did someone urinate in here?!”

Dawn crinkles her nose too. “So they’re not supposed to smell like pee?”

“Not in a properly run system, no!” Ingo growls in a rare show of irritation. “If my brother holds a job here, he has some explaining to do!”

“I get the feeling this is something out of his control,” Dawn comments. Then a lit board shifts her attention, “Oh hey! A map!”

She hurries over to the display, but as she gets close she realizes they may have underestimated things.

“Ingo? I think we have a problem,” Dawn calls over her shoulder.

He’s not sure what she means until he gets a clear look at the map for himself: a sprawling mess of lines and stations crisscrossing the map in a dizzying display. Even he has to admit that this is going to be a daunting task.

“That is… a lot of stations,” Ingo mutters in awe.

Dawn doesn’t recognize the characters used on this map. She pulls out her Arc-phone and thumbs over to her translator app. Holding the phone up to the display, the screen instantly offers an overlay of letters she can read.

She turns to look at Ingo expectantly, “Any ideas? You’re the subway master.”

Ingo squints at the translated map, the corners of his mouth pulling down in visible concern, “It’s hard to know where to start, even for me.” His frown deepens as something else occurs to him, “Not that it matters. Neither of us has the local currency to purchase tickets.”

Dawn realizes he has a point there and thinks about it, “Ok, plan B! We walk to each station!”

Ingo side eyes her, “That will also be a significant undertaking.”

“Well I don’t have any better ideas.”

Dawn is about to suggest using one of their Pokémon when she suddenly remembers that might cause more problems. She sighs and shrugs.

They stand there, stumped.

This is when the group of fans pop up again. One of them notices Ingo and Dawn and excitedly points the pair out again. This time they can see that the two ‘cosplayers’ seem to be having some trouble and offer to help. Akari tells them they want to ride the subway but they don’t have any money on them, laughing it off as the result of a long story. One of the fans is feeling charitable and gives them both twenty dollars. A friend makes a small objection to the amount so Akari gets the idea to offer them those pictures they wanted earlier as thanks. The group excitedly agrees and they head back up to start their impromptu photoshoot.

On Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok and Tumblr, images and video of two cosplayers start making the rounds through the Pokémon fandom circles.

In the photos, an Akari cosplayer is grinning widely with her fingers up in a v-sign. Her outfit is remarkable in how worn it looks, like it had been repeatedly rolled in mud, grass and stone. Her makeup is on point too, looking scratched and smudged with dirt.

She is accompanied by an Ingo cosplayer, who is dressed in a similar state, though his outfit is far more realistically tattered and frayed, as if it had become that way through natural wear and tear. Even his face seems naturally lined and aged. What really stands out is how he’d styled his trademark knife-sideburns/locks, which seem to offer a definitive answer as to what they really were. This cosplayer, however, looks genuinely baffled, wearing an uncomfortable smile that borders on a grimace. All of this is perfectly in-character of course and he absolutely sells it.

Most of the pictures features a group of friends posing with the two, either just smiling in excitement at the camera, doing silly poses, or are seen in a few candid shots of them marveling over the costumes.

However the most notable result of this meeting was a short Tiktok they’d shot together.

The Tiktok video only features the Akari cosplayer. There is a brief blip of the Ingo cosplayer in the beginning, the camera turning to him sitting off to the side, shyly begging off from whatever came next before the camera refocuses on the Tiktoker and Akari. The rest of the video shows Akari being shown how to do the steps of a Tiktok dance, followed by a few clips of some goofy failed trial runs, before concluding with Akari and the Tiktoker successfully pulling off the dance together. They excitedly high-five and congratulate each other, punctuated by a loud ‘BRAVO!’ booming in the background, before the video ends.

The Pokémon Legends Arceus fans are particularly tickled by the new images and happily share them amongst themselves. It doesn’t take long for them to land on the Tumblr dashboard of one Jamal Bashir.

By the time any of this reaches Jamal, he is still waking up from a nap and sleepily flipping through his phone before he has to get back to work on a project. When the first pictures flash by, he chuckles and taps the like button before adding the posts to his queue. He figures that’s the end of it until he comes across a reposting of the TikTok video. The video is short and sweet and he gives that a like and queued reposting too. On a whim, he rewatches it to admire the realism of the outfits. But as he spots the Ingo cosplayer again, something catches his attention.

There’s something familiar about his face.

Intrigued, Jamal goes back to the photo posts and studies the man a little more closely. His side hair and goatee are spot on and natural-looking in a way that is difficult to replicate without actual facial hair. Jamal has only seen one other person who managed to pull it off so well and that person is…

When the realization hits him, Jamal just about falls out of bed.

He frantically checks and rechecks the photos, scanning over them and picking out details that only add to his theory. He even pulls up a few of his photos to be sure, because if this isn’t anything less than what he thinks it is, his friend is going to kill him. And he can’t do that to the guy after everything he’s been through.

But he’s almost positive.

Only one last thing to do.

With his heart pounding in his throat, Jamal sends a frantic text to a contact only labeled with a train emoji.

DUDE HOLY SHIT YOU SEEN THIS?!?!?!?!??

He attaches links to the videos and images, practically flooding their chat history with embedded media.

I THINK ITS HAPPENING GET UR ASS READY

The next hour is agonizing.

Jamal has probably worn a track into his floor from all his anxious pacing as he tries to figure out what’s taking so long. He’d figure the guy checked his phone on occasion while working, but has to remind himself of who he’s dealing with. He absolutely would not check until he was on a break. Just as Jamal is about to march off to go find him, his phone dings with a new message.

The reply is concise in its desperation.