Everyone Looked Up

Chapter Forty-Nine

Everyone Looked Up

The first video reached BattleNet before the first League statement did, which was not especially surprising. The League required confirmation, internal communication, someone willing to attach their name to an official sentence, and usually at least one lawyer whose apparent purpose was to replace useful nouns with less useful ones. BattleNet required a trainer with a phone, a working data connection, and enough remaining judgment to press UPLOAD.

At 9:17 p.m., someone standing outside a convenience store in western Oreburgh pointed a camera toward three black shapes rising above a warehouse roof. The footage lasted twenty-eight seconds and shook badly enough that the first few frames showed more pavement than sky, but once the camera steadied the shapes were unmistakable.

The title was:

anyone know why there are unown coming out of the fucking ground???

The uploader had sixteen followers.

Eleven minutes later, the video had been viewed more than fifty thousand times.

BattleNet — Sinnoh Regional

Thread: anyone know why there are unown coming out of the fucking ground???Started by:pickaxe_problem · Oreburgh City · 9:17 PM

pickaxe_problem

im near west quarry road and three unown just came out of one of the old vent areas

not trainer pokemon. nobody nearby owns them. they just floated straight up

one looked at me

video attached

granite_girl

Those are absolutely Unown.

↳ pickaxe_problem

thank you granite girl i had identified that part

Route209Main

Why are there wild Unown in Oreburgh?

↳ FossilDad44

There are ruins with Unown all over Sinnoh. Maybe there’s a population nearby nobody documented.

↳ SolaceonScholar

There is no publicly documented natural Unown population under Oreburgh.

↳ FossilDad44

“Publicly documented” doing a lot of work there.

granite_girl

wait there are more

↳ pickaxe_problem

yeah

↳ pickaxe_problem

A LOT more

The next video showed twenty-seven.

Then someone on the southern side of the city filmed a different group rising from between two industrial buildings. A trainer near the quarry recorded thirteen emerging from an old shaft that local records said had been sealed for thirty years. Another clip caught five Unown appearing above a drainage cut where nobody could identify any open passage at all.

By 9:24, the original thread had grown beyond anyone’s ability to follow chronologically. New replies appeared faster than the page could refresh, half of them repeating questions already answered three screens earlier and the other half confidently proposing explanations that contradicted one another.

At 9:26, the moderators gave up on containment and pinned an emergency megathread.

BattleNet — LIVE EVENT MEGATHREAD

Unown Activity — Oreburgh City

MODERATOR NOTICE

Reports of unusual Unown activity are currently being verified across Oreburgh. If you are in the area, do not approach unknown wild Pokémon, do not enter restricted mine infrastructure, and follow local emergency instructions.

DO NOT POST:

• exact locations of restricted access tunnels
• mine infrastructure maps
• suspected research sites
• private addresses
• instructions for entering closed shafts

Posts attempting to coordinate unauthorized exploration will be removed and accounts may be suspended.

CoalBadgeMain

I work nights near the processing plant. They’re coming up from multiple places. Not one tunnel.

↳ PiplupEnjoyer

HOW MANY

↳ CoalBadgeMain

No fucking idea.

OreburghLocal82

I can see at least eighty from my apartment.

↳ PiplupEnjoyer

EIGHTY???

↳ OreburghLocal82

Update I was extremely wrong.

AncientPower

Everyone please stop trying to estimate populations from phone footage. Perspective at night is terrible and the same Pokémon may appear across multiple videos.

↳ OreburghLocal82

There are hundreds over my building.

↳ AncientPower

Okay that is admittedly concerning.

At 9:31, the first livestream began.

The trainer who started it had apparently intended to broadcast a late-night walk to the Pokémon Center after training outside the city. His camera was already running when people began stopping in the street and looking upward. For the first minute there was nothing particularly useful in the footage beyond confused voices, traffic slowing, and the streamer repeatedly asking what everyone was staring at.

Then the camera tilted toward the sky.

The comments accelerated so quickly that the software stopped rendering all of them.

Oreburgh’s sky was full of eyes.

There were already hundreds, and more were still rising.

The streamer stopped talking.

For almost forty seconds, tens of thousands of viewers watched in unusual silence while black shapes climbed above the city and dissolved into the darkness. Their bodies became difficult to distinguish against the night almost immediately.

Their eyes did not.

The viewer count passed one hundred thousand, then two hundred thousand, while the person holding the camera seemed to forget he was supposed to be entertaining anyone. Someone clipped the moment he finally whispered:

“Oh my god. There are thousands.”

That clip spread faster than the original broadcast.

BattleNet — Live Chat Archive

ShinxAppeal

IS THIS REAL

HearthomeAce

Multiple angles. It’s real.

NoctowlHours

Those are ALL Unown???

RockSmashUnion

Oreburgh resident here. Yes.

GengarRights

WHY ARE THEY JUST STARING

↳ SolaceonScholar

We do not know that they are staring at people. Unown have a single prominent eye and orientation is difficult to interpret at this scale.

↳ GengarRights

thank you professor they are now staring scientifically

LostTowerLurker

Anyone else notice they aren’t making noise?

↳ NoctowlHours

I hate that you said that.

↳ LostTowerLurker

Unown normally vocalize.

↳ SolaceonScholar

Yes.

↳ GengarRights

THANK YOU I HATE IT MORE NOW

The first image clear enough to communicate the scale came from the roof of an Oreburgh apartment building. Someone had climbed the emergency stairwell with a proper camera instead of a phone and managed to hold still long enough for one clean exposure.

The photograph crossed Sinnoh in minutes.

Oreburgh glowed beneath the swarm. Street lamps and mine lights turned the city gold at the edges, cars had stopped at awkward angles in the roads, and people crowded sidewalks and rooftops despite repeated warnings to remain indoors.

Above all of it, the night was crowded with white points.

Thousands of them.

Not stars.

Eyes.

Before the hour ended, the photograph had become the most shared image on BattleNet.

People immediately began drawing lines between the Unown.

That was inevitable.

Within minutes, users claimed to see letters, words, ancient symbols, warnings, constellations, and at least three different prophecies. One person confidently traced DEATH through twelve arbitrarily selected Unown until another user demonstrated that the same photograph could produce BEANS with roughly equal geometric integrity.

The moderators pinned a second notice.

MODERATOR NOTICE

Randomly connecting Unown in photographs does not constitute linguistic analysis. Please stop reporting speculative hidden messages as confirmed information.

This had very little effect.

UnknownUnknown

I HAVE ENHANCED THE MAIN SKY PHOTO AND THEY CLEARLY SPELL WATCH—

Post removed by moderator.

UnknownUnknown

cowards

By 9:39, BattleNet had identified Gray.

Not officially.

The internet rarely waited for official anything.

A shaky video recorded near the restricted mine district showed several people emerging onto the road after the Unown had begun gathering overhead. The uploader had been interested almost entirely in the sky and had barely noticed the figures in the foreground.

BattleNet noticed them immediately.

A tall man in dirty field clothing stood beside a Bastiodon.

Next to him was a blonde woman holding one arm close to her body.

Several meters behind them stood Oreburgh Gym Leader Roark.

The person who uploaded the video had not mentioned any of them.

Within four minutes, somebody had paused the footage, sharpened it badly, circled three faces, and opened a new thread.

BattleNet — Sinnoh Discussion

Thread: IS THAT PROFESSOR LINDEN WITH CYNTHIA AND ROARK????

StaraviaCamera

Pause at 0:13.

Attached image.

That is Professor Linden.

↳ cranidosfan92

Could be literally any dark-haired guy with a Bastiodon.

↳ StaraviaCamera

Professor Linden famously has a Bastiodon.

↳ cranidosfan92

Lots of people have Bastiodon.

↳ FossilDad44

No they absolutely do not.

↳ cranidosfan92

fair

SinnohLeagueWatcher

Forget Linden. That is Cynthia.

↳ Route210Fog

No way.

↳ SinnohLeagueWatcher

Same coat from the SSM event three months ago, same hair, same face. She also appears to be injured.

SteelixEnjoyer

And the redhead is Roark.

↳ OreburghLocal82

Roark has been around emergency operations all night. That part isn’t surprising. It’s his city.

StaraviaCamera

Okay but why are the regional Professor, the CHAMPION, and Oreburgh’s Gym Leader all standing outside a restricted mine access while several thousand Unown leave the ground?

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on NovelPhoenix. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

↳ GengarRights

science

↳ StaraviaCamera

THANKS

Someone found an older photograph of Gray and Roark together at the ranch. Someone else reposted Gray’s television interview. Another user remembered Cynthia had publicly referred to Gray as a friend and produced the clip as though that somehow explained thousands of Unown over Oreburgh.

Then BattleNet remembered the fossil paper.

That was where the discussion became genuinely unmanageable.

The protected fossil population had already attracted months of speculation, and the combination of Gray, Cynthia, Roark, a restricted underground access point, and a completely unprecedented mass Unown emergence caused separate theories to start merging together almost immediately.

AncientPower

Linden + Roark + Cynthia were all involved in the protected living-fossil research.

↳ FossilDad44

Oh no.

↳ PiplupEnjoyer

what oh no

↳ FossilDad44

That discovery was subterranean.

MODERATOR

Reminder: speculation about the protected fossil site’s location is prohibited.

PiplupEnjoyer

Nobody said location.

↳ FossilDad44

I am now very specifically not saying location.

GengarRights

Professor Linden discovers impossible underground fossil ecosystemmonths later thousands of ancient alphabet pokemon emerge from oreburghregional champion standing nearby looking like she got hit by a truckseems normal

↳ SolaceonScholar

Unown are not fossil Pokémon.

↳ GengarRights

THIS IS YOUR CONTRIBUTION?

At 9:43, somebody noticed Gray’s helmet lying on the ground behind a League vehicle in one of the longer videos.

The visor was visibly cracked.

That created an entirely separate branch of speculation.

Some users decided Gray had been attacked by the Unown. Others thought Cynthia had been attacked first and Gray had somehow intervened. A third group concluded the researchers had accidentally released the swarm from an underground ruin and were now being evacuated from the consequences.

Within approximately nine minutes, BattleNet had developed six mutually incompatible explanations for the same event.

One involved Gray excavating an ancient Unown temple.

Another had Cynthia fighting what one user repeatedly called “an Unown queen,” despite several replies asking what that was supposed to mean.

Someone else proposed that Roark had drilled through a buried psychic ruin beneath his Gym.

That theory became popular enough that Oreburgh Gym staff issued an official statement confirming that no, the Gym had not drilled into an ancient psychic ruin.

Naturally, this convinced a small but determined group of users that the Gym had absolutely drilled into an ancient psychic ruin.

definitely_a_normal_miner

You people understand Oreburgh has thousands of mine tunnels, yes? Roark does not personally drill all of them.

↳ GengarRights

sounds like something Roark would say

↳ definitely_a_normal_miner

I am not Roark.

↳ GengarRights

exactly what Roark would say

At 9:51, the first Unown disappeared.

BattleNet watched it happen live.

The main stream had passed four hundred thousand viewers when one white eye vanished above the eastern part of the city. The streamer noticed quickly enough that his camera jerked toward the empty patch of sky.

“So one just—did one just disappear?”

Another vanished.

Then three more.

The chat became unreadable.

Someone with better equipment isolated one disappearance and slowed it frame by frame. There was no visible Poké Ball recall effect, no beam, no trainer below, and no obvious movement immediately before the Unown ceased occupying that point in the sky.

Teleportation became the leading explanation.

That created a different problem.

If thousands of Unown were teleporting away individually, nobody had any idea where they were going.

Within minutes, the regional forums for Jubilife, Hearthome, Canalave, Eterna, and Solaceon had all opened sighting threads. Most early reports were false, exaggerated, or the result of frightened people suddenly discovering that many ordinary nighttime shapes looked vaguely like Unown if photographed badly enough.

A drifting Drifloon in Floaroma became “an Unown swarm” for seven minutes.

Someone in Jubilife photographed a decorative sign shaped vaguely like an Unown and generated three pages of argument before the business owner joined the thread to explain that it had been hanging there for twelve years.

One trainer outside Celestic reported an actual Unown floating above an old stone marker. By the time local authorities arrived, it was gone.

Nobody knew whether it had come from Oreburgh.

By then, nobody was entirely sure whether that distinction meant anything anymore.

Far to the southeast, Steven Stone watched the Oreburgh footage twice before realizing his tea had gone cold.

He was sitting alone in a quiet room in Mossdeep, one leg crossed over the other and a tablet balanced against his knee while the city outside settled deeper into evening. The first video had caught his attention because Unown almost never behaved at that scale. The second held him for an entirely different reason.

Geology.

Even through compression artifacts, bad lighting, and the nervous movement of whoever held the camera, Steven recognized enough of the terrain surrounding one of the mine entrances to become interested. These were not shallow surface cuts or recent exploratory workings. The visible structures belonged to older extraction routes, deeper infrastructure, the accumulated architecture of a city that had spent generations opening the earth beneath itself.

Oreburgh had always been built in unusually intimate contact with stone.

Tonight, apparently, the stone had answered.

Steven paused the video on a frame showing Gray Linden standing beside Bastiodon beneath the crowded sky.

He knew the name.

Anyone working seriously in fossil research knew it by now. Linden’s paper documenting the living fossil-associated populations in Sinnoh had caused arguments across Hoenn museums and university departments for weeks, particularly among researchers who disliked having their assumptions overturned by field evidence.

Steven had enjoyed most of those arguments.

He replayed the footage of thousands of Unown suspended above Oreburgh, their white eyes scattered across the night in numbers that made individual Pokémon almost meaningless. Then he reopened the public version of Linden’s fossil paper and began reading through sections he had already seen before.

Not because he expected the paper to contain an answer to what was happening over Oreburgh.

It obviously did not.

But Steven had learned a long time ago that interesting people had a habit of finding interesting rocks, and Gray Linden was rapidly becoming difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

Across the room, Metagross stood motionless beside the window, its body reflecting faint bands of light from the city outside. Steven glanced toward it and lifted the cold teacup slightly.

“I suspect Sinnoh is having a complicated evening.”

Metagross’s eyes brightened with a faint red glow.

Steven looked back at the frozen image of Oreburgh on the tablet. “Yes. More complicated than usual.”

In Johto, Lance Blackthorn was halfway through a League operations report when an aide interrupted him.

He disliked being interrupted during reports, mostly because interruptions usually meant someone had decided their problem was more urgent than whatever was already in front of him. He disliked being shown viral videos even more. Most of them were incomplete, badly framed, stripped of context, and already surrounded by speculation before anyone with actual authority had confirmed what had happened.

Then he saw the sky over Oreburgh.

Lance watched the entire recording without speaking.

Thousands of Unown hung above a populated city in numbers large enough to make the individual shapes blur into a single impossible event. He watched for attacks and saw none. He watched for signs of organized evacuation and saw confusion instead. Then the footage reached the point where individual Unown began disappearing from the formation, one after another, without visible recall beams or any obvious trainer involvement.

When the video ended, Lance looked up from the screen. “Official confirmation from Sinnoh?”

The aide hesitated. “Very little so far. They’ve acknowledged unusual Unown activity over Oreburgh, but that’s about it.”

“Cynthia?”

“Possibly in the city.”

Lance’s expression tightened. “Possibly?”

“There are videos. Nothing official.”

“Is she injured?”

“Unknown.”

That changed his expression more than the Unown had.

Lance set the report aside and looked back toward the frozen frame on the screen. “Contact Sinnoh through League channels. No demands, no assumptions. Ask whether they need regional assistance, Psychic specialists, or additional airspace monitoring.”

The aide nodded and turned toward the door.

Lance stopped him before he could leave. “And tell whoever drafts the message not to mention the internet speculation.”

The aide paused. “Which speculation?”

Lance looked at the screen again, where several thousand Unown remained suspended over Oreburgh beneath a caption confidently claiming something no official source had confirmed.

“Any of it.”

The aide gave him a look that suggested this might not be operationally possible.

Lance knew.

In Kanto, Professor Samuel Oak watched the first coherent compilation of the Oreburgh incident from his kitchen table.

The link had been sent to him six times before he finally opened it: once by a colleague, twice by former students, once by someone at the Indigo League, and twice by grandchildren who apparently believed advanced age prevented a person from discovering current events without assistance. Oak ignored the accompanying commentary and went straight to the footage.

The Pokémon were more useful than the reactions.

He paused the broadest overhead shot and leaned closer to the screen. Thousands of Unown filled the sky above Oreburgh, yet there was no obvious leader and no visible aggression toward the city below. Their movements did not appear random either. They oriented together, shifted in large groups, and then eventually dispersed through what looked like individual teleportation.

Oak replayed the sequence in which several clusters reoriented almost simultaneously.

“Interesting.”

A Tauros outside the kitchen window snorted loudly enough to suggest disagreement.

Oak ignored it.

He searched for the official Sinnoh League statement next. It was sparse, cautious, and almost aggressively unhelpful.

Appropriately sparse, then.

From there, he searched Gray Linden.

The name was familiar. Young for a regional Professor, with a background in archaeology, mythology, and fossil research. Recently responsible for a paper that had apparently caused half the paleontology departments on the continent to rediscover professional jealousy. Oak also found several interviews, including one where Linden demonstrated a habit of phrasing things in ways that likely made communications departments nervous.

He watched a clip from the Jubilife appearance in which Gray explained that categories became assumptions when people forgot they were tools rather than truths.

Oak smiled faintly. “All right.”

Then he returned to the Unown footage.

He did not attempt to guess what had happened underground.

He had survived academia far too long for that.

Instead, he opened a notebook and began listing questions while the video replayed in the background. Why Oreburgh? Why now? Why gather aboveground at all? Why show no obvious hostility toward the city? Why disperse through individual teleportation after assembling in such numbers?

Then one detail made him stop writing.

Across several angles, a significant number of the Unown had oriented downward before they began disappearing.

Oak replayed the sequence twice.

Then he wrote:

Observation behavior?

He underlined the question once.

Not twice.

Twice would have implied confidence.

In Veilstone, Cyrus Akagi watched the footage without sound.

The office around him was immaculate in the deliberate way that made disorder feel almost offensive. Nothing sat on the desk without purpose, nothing decorated the walls merely because someone found it pleasant, and even the lighting had been chosen to leave no corner brighter than necessary. The muted BattleNet footage played on a monitor normally reserved for logistical reports.

Thousands of white eyes filled the sky above Oreburgh.

Cyrus watched the Unown gather.

He watched them turn.

He watched them hold position with a degree of collective stillness that made the scale of the formation more disturbing rather than less.

Then he watched them disappear.

A Galactic administrator stood several meters behind him and, correctly, said nothing.

Cyrus replayed the footage.

Once.

Then again.

Not the entire recording. Only the transition that interested him: Unown entering the sky, orienting in groups, holding formation, and then dispersing through individual disappearances.

His face revealed almost nothing.

“What do we know about Professor Linden’s current work?” he asked.

The administrator answered carefully. “Publicly? Subterranean ecological research connected to the recently published fossil-population discovery. Exact locations are protected.”

“Champion Cynthia?”

“Confirmed involved in that research.”

“Roark?”

“Coauthor.”

Cyrus paused the image.

Gray Linden stood beneath the Unown-filled sky beside Bastiodon. Cynthia was visible nearby, with Roark several meters behind them.

Three people connected to the same protected underground research project, all physically present in Oreburgh at the moment thousands of Unown emerged above the city.

Coincidence remained possible.

Cyrus did not build plans around the assumption that coincidence was the most useful explanation.

“Obtain everything public,” he said. “No intrusion into League systems.”

The administrator hesitated.

The restriction surprised him.

Cyrus noticed.

“Illegal access announces interest. Public information does not.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Archive every video before deletion, reposting, or compression alters the original files. Prioritize footage that shows changes in formation rather than crowd reactions.”

The administrator nodded. “And the Unown?”

Cyrus looked back at the frozen sky.

“Do not pursue them.”

Another pause.

Another surprise.

Cyrus kept his gaze on the monitor. “Anything capable of appearing in the thousands over a populated city and then vanishing independently does not become easier to understand because someone chases the first one they see.”

The administrator accepted that and left.

Cyrus resumed the footage.

One by one, the remaining Unown disappeared until Oreburgh’s sky was empty again.

He watched the final frame for several seconds after there was nothing left to see.

The empty sky interested him nearly as much as the full one.

BattleNet, meanwhile, had stopped pretending to be rational.

By the time the fourth Oreburgh megathread opened, the site had moved past useful speculation and into the particular state of collective internet exhaustion where thousands of people knew something extraordinary had happened, nobody had enough information to explain it, and the resulting uncertainty was being converted into jokes, arguments, frame-by-frame analysis, and several increasingly elaborate theories involving ancient ruins.

BattleNet — Oreburgh Event Megathread, Part IV

MODERATOR

Previous thread reached system limit. Continue verified discussion here.

Please stop posting edited images claiming the Unown spelled messages.

GengarRights

PART FOUR BABY

↳ SolaceonScholar

This is not an achievement.

↳ GengarRights

history disagrees

StoneTablet

Has anyone identified Professor Linden’s Bastiodon from older footage? I want to verify the Oreburgh video rather than just accepting the facial match.

↳ FossilDad44

Same damage on the facial plate is visible in his old BattleNet battle upload. Same shape, same side. It’s him.

↳ cranidosfan92

You can identify a Bastiodon by face damage???

↳ FossilDad44

Fossil people are normal.

↳ cranidosfan92

no you aren't

↳ FossilDad44

Fair.

Eventually, someone found one of Gray’s old competitive records.

That should have been irrelevant to the Unown event.

It was not.

BattleNet immediately abandoned the current emergency long enough to investigate why the regional Professor apparently had an entire previous life that a large portion of the userbase had somehow missed.

SilverConferenceArchive

For everyone asking whether Linden can actually battle: yes.

He won the Silver Conference years ago and made a deep Elite challenge afterward. There are archived matches.

↳ PiplupEnjoyer

WHY DOES THE PROFESSOR HAVE LORE

↳ GengarRights

professor linden character sheet getting unreasonable

↳ AncientPower

He was a competitive trainer before academia. This is not secret information.

↳ PiplupEnjoyer

I DIDN'T KNOW

↳ GengarRights

apparently neither did several thousand unown

Someone then reposted the old BattleNet username definitely_not_a_gymleader.

That caused an entirely separate argument over whether Roark had been secretly reading the live megathread while actively coordinating an emergency in Oreburgh.

Roark had not.

At that exact moment, he was sitting in an operations center with both hands wrapped around a cup of coffee that had been reheated twice and remained untouched. Someone on his staff, apparently deciding that his evening lacked sufficient irritation, walked over and showed him the post.

Roark read it.

Then he looked at the staff member. “Why would you show me this?”

The staffer shrugged. “I thought you’d think it was funny.”

“I have been awake for twenty hours.”

“So?”

Roark looked back down at the phone just as a new reply appeared.

GengarRights

if definitely_not_a_gymleader doesn't post tonight we can finally confirm it is roark

Roark closed his eyes for a moment, then held out one hand. “Give me your phone.”

The staff member immediately pulled it against their chest. “No.”

Roark looked at them.

They looked back.

“Coward,” he said.

Then he returned to the actual crisis.

At 10:14 p.m., the Sinnoh League released its first formal public statement.

It confirmed an “unusual large-scale gathering and dispersal of wild Unown above Oreburgh City,” reported no deaths and no confirmed serious injuries from surface activity, and advised residents not to enter restricted mine infrastructure. The League was, according to the statement, “working with local authorities and regional researchers to determine the cause.”

That final phrase was enough.

BattleNet noticed Gray again.

Regional researchers.

Professor Linden.

Standing beneath the swarm beside Bastiodon with a cracked helmet somewhere nearby.

BattleNet considered subtle phrasing an invitation.

StaraviaCamera

“regional researchers” lmao just say Professor Linden broke archaeology again

↳ SolaceonScholar

We do not know that he caused anything.

↳ GengarRights

counterpoint: look at him

↳ AncientPower

That is not evidence.

↳ GengarRights

you have never met a professor

At 10:31, someone uploaded the clearest footage yet of Gray, Cynthia, and Roark standing beneath the final phase of the swarm.

Gray looked exhausted even through the poor lighting. A bandage covered one temple, and Bastiodon stood pressed close beside him with the same rigid attention visible in every other clip taken after they emerged. Cynthia held one arm carefully, while Roark appeared from the mine district a short time later and stopped near them.

The camera caught all three looking upward.

Then it caught Gray saying something to Cynthia.

That was enough to begin an audio-analysis effort conducted with far more enthusiasm than competence.

Within minutes, users had proposed eighteen different interpretations of the exchange. Six were obscene. Three involved archaeology. One confidently claimed Gray had whispered, They know, while another insisted Cynthia had answered, It has begun.

Eventually someone with access to better audio-cleaning software isolated the exchange well enough to make out the actual words.

Cynthia: “They’re watching.”

Gray: “Yeah.”

Cynthia: “Watching what?”

Gray: “I have absolutely no fucking idea.”

BattleNet adored this.

GengarRights

OH THANK GOD HE HAS NO IDEA EITHER

↳ PiplupEnjoyer

WHY IS THAT COMFORTING

↳ GengarRights

because if the mythology professor looked at that and went “ah yes expected” i would leave sinnoh

AncientPower

This may genuinely be the most scientifically responsible thing anyone has said tonight.

↳ SolaceonScholar

Agreed.

StaraviaCamera

Someone make “I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING IDEA” the subreddit banner.

MODERATOR

No.

By midnight, compilations of the Oreburgh event had crossed every major regional border.

Kanto trainers began arguing over whether large-scale Unown movement had any precedent in records from the Ruins of Alph. Johto historians became increasingly irritated by Kanto trainers discussing the Ruins of Alph as though Johto itself were a secondary source. Hoenn fossil researchers started wondering aloud whether subterranean migration could explain any portion of the emergence, while several Kalos users insisted similar formations appeared in old photographs and then failed to provide a single photograph when asked.

Paldea, several time zones removed from the original panic, collectively went to sleep much later than intended.

The wider world watched Oreburgh.

Oreburgh watched the sky.

By then, however, the sky was empty.

That absence somehow made the footage more compelling rather than less. Every recording ended the same way: thousands of Pokémon arrived, they gathered over the city, they looked downward, and then they vanished one after another without leaving any explanation behind.

There was no conclusion.

Only the uncomfortable knowledge that they had gone somewhere else.

At 1:08 a.m., a new BattleNet thread appeared.

Initially, almost nobody noticed it.

There were no capital letters in the title, no dramatic claims, no blurry video of the sky. The account that posted it was fourteen years old and belonged to a hobbyist who mostly documented minor Sinnoh ruins, weather damage, and seasonal Unown activity.

BattleNet — Ruins & Historical Sites

Thread: Unown sighting after Oreburgh eventPosted by:oldstones67

oldstones67

I live outside Celestic and maintain a permitted observational camera near a minor ruin site.

There are normally between six and twelve Unown present depending on season.

At 12:41 tonight, forty-three appeared within approximately four minutes.

I did not observe them arriving physically.

They are not aggressive.

They are currently gathered around the eastern wall.

I am not approaching.

Attaching still image.

The photograph showed a dark stone chamber lit by a fixed observational lamp. Old carvings ran across one wall, softened by age and weathering, while dozens of Unown hovered in the room.

Every one of them faced the same direction.

Three minutes later, someone replied.

SolaceonScholar

Is there anything behind that wall?

↳ oldstones67

Not that we know of.

TabletRubbing

Are they arranging themselves into symbols or spelling anything?

Several minutes passed before the original poster answered.

↳ oldstones67

No.

They are just looking at it.

The thread remained small.

For now.

Elsewhere in Sinnoh, another Unown appeared above a ruined tower. Three materialized near an old lake shrine. A ranger reported seven hovering in a forest clearing where no Unown population had previously been documented.

Most people slept through those events.

Somebody always watched, though.

And by morning, BattleNet would have more questions than it had users capable of answering them.