Okay, so this is probably going to be a super niche post, but I absolutely love the idea of Kate becoming this like, local cryptid after the events of the Shadows of Almia Pokemon game. Because, like, the shit that Kate goes through in this game goes down in a few weeks, max, at least after she graduates.
Kate, who transfers into a prestigious Ranger school from another country at nearly the end of the school term, graduates and immediately saves the school from mysterious monsters. Within the span of two days, she’s not only put out an entire forest fire by herself, but also discovered machines that tortures and controls Pokemon, and figured out how to destroy them, and her face is plastered over every newspaper.
Rumors start coming out about this upstart kid who can use and work with any Pokemon she sees. Apparently, she liberates a huge port city from the machines controlling a city’s worth of Pokemon, and sends the masterminds packing. People are talking about the newbie who can find a single, small, plain key lost in an ocean. All she had to do was look, just look, at the new version of the Pokemon-torture machine and knew exactly how to destroy it.
Someone doesn’t believe it - but no, his friend says, I saw Kate, she can stop entire earthquakes. The new Rangers just graduating remember her as the substitute teacher who taught for about four minutes before she took down criminals right in front of them and then left. Remember, Kate’s own graduating class thought it was a big deal that their sub saved a single Mantyke, and now Kate’s the specialist who knows more about the criminal syndicate Dim Sun threatening the country than anyone else.
People keep talking. A tourist comes back from Boyleland and swears she saw Kate walk into the heart of an active volcano. Of course, that can’t be true, because only hours later Kate jumped off a wrecked cargo ship she’d helped steer and crash right into a harbor, full of grateful Pokemon, just to save it, and that one’s gotta be true because barely a fucking week after she graduates, she’s promoted to the tenth top Ranger in the entire world - Almia only has four, and she’s one of them.
Explorers in the Chroma Highlands say Kate swept away an impenetrable darkness that sapped the life of anyone who entered it and navigated arcane ruins to take down a monster made of a hundred and eight malicious spirits. Scientists in the Hia Valley say she found her way into an ancient, frozen castle surrounded by an impassable moat of glaciers and whirlpools. Kate impressed the legendary guardian there, and liberated a gem from a myth so old that there’s a thousand variations on it and none of them complete, half the size of her body, and carried it out herself.
If it wasn’t for the fact that she’s in the papers every single day for whatever new, impossible mission Kate’s completed, everyone in Almia would just know her as the helpful young Ranger who cleared the logs in the Vien Forest or delivered a forgotten pen to a reporter. Except even that doesn’t make sense, because an angler in Pueltown says on Tuesday Kate dived to the bottom of the ocean floor to find a rare Lumineon, and a Hia researcher says on Tuesday Kate was up north tracking down an Abomasnow for him, but a perfumer in Boyleland insists she was in the caves to get him a Muk on Tuesday, and Kate’s own father mentions offhandedly that Kate was in Chicole Village Tuesday running an errand for him.
Kate’s father, who runs a farm down by the shore, fully admits the farm is filling up faster and faster with Pokemon who met Kate once and decided, fully and willingly, to leave their homes just on the off chance Kate might take them with her. No Pokeballs involved. It’s not unheard of for Rangers to gain two or three Partner Pokemon over the course of their career, but Kate’s father says she has ten, and more arriving every day. Some of them Kate never even takes with her once, but they wait anyway.
The day after she flies back from Almia Castle, she walks right back into the heart of the volcano, through a door the Elder has kept locked his whole life, and beats the primeval guardian and walks out with another legendary gem.
And if none of that were enough, she’s spent every one of those missions taking down the criminal syndicate that’s threatening the whole country.
Kate isn’t the only newbie Ranger fast-tracked to Top Ranger, but Keith isn’t a household name within a few weeks like Kate. Still, a few people in Fiore and Almia remember him as the kid who stopped a rampaging Gyarados, so when a gossipy Union Operator mentions that they’ve sent Kate to go save Keith from the Haruba Desert, people take notice.
Four hours later, two Dim Sun grunts wash ashore, exhausted and shaking, and willingly go into custody. They’re both rambling about a young Ranger who rode right into their oil rig on a fucking Wailord.
It’s not just that they’re rare as hell. Rangers physically cannot capture Wailords. They’re the size of a five story building. They’re just impossible to capture with a Styler. Even Pokeballs have trouble with that, and Kate’s never used one.
Top Ranger Kate, people start saying, doesn’t even need a Styler. She makes friends with legendaries. She walks through fire, leaps down cliffs, and rides monsters into battle. She walks over quicksand and through tornadoes. She ventures deeper into prehistoric temples than anyone has been before. You can ask her for anything - any quest, any Pokemon, any favor, and she’ll be right back within an hour or two having gone above and beyond.
When she comes back from the Haruba Desert with a shamed, battered, and bruised Keith in tow, no one thinks twice about it.
The day before Altru’s memorial party, people are talking just as much about the young Ranger as they are about the huge event. It takes a while for the story to come out fully, of course. Top Rangers Wendy and Sven are seen aflight circling Altru Tower, glowing with unearthly light. The Ranger Union is attacked - every floor taken over by Dim Sun forces, explosions rocking its foundations. Kate swept through like a hurricane, single handedly taking every single villain down herself, and then swept right out again towards Altru Tower. A shy Operator quietly remembers how Kate looked - “a dashing figure”, she’d said, and a young new Area Ranger redefines ‘hero’ to ‘Kate’.
Everyone in Almia could see the flashing lights and the growing darkness atop Altru Tower, the tallest building in the country by a long shot, and everyone remembers the way Pokemon grew more and more tortured and insane as the night went on before the sky filled with light and they all woke up. But it’s the scientists that stream out of the Tower the next day, the shivering Dim Sun grunts in handcuffs, and even Blake (Wyatt?) Hall himself who explain what happened inside. Kate, floor by floor by floor, without rest, battling her way through villain after villain after villain, with a Styler that glowed with divine primary lights. Professor Isaac, in an interview, abashedly pushes away any praise for his hacking and programming skills - “All I did was take apart what I put together,” he mutters - and instead recalls Kate shattering through locked doors and traps and cages. Keith waves away his own accomplishments much the same, when an interviewer asks about his own efforts climbing the tower. “I never even got the chance to help,” says Keith, “I don’t think I captured a single Pokemon. She’d stand in front, flick her wrist, and everything fell.”
All Keith managed, he continues, was getting the yellow gem lost again, and then getting flung halfway across the country, making it back in just the nick of time to pull Kate from the encroaching, swallowing darkness that covered her and ate up Wheeler and Blake. It was Kate herself who walked up to the lord of nightmares and darkness and took him down, as light swirled around her, and saved all of Almia.
They send Kate home on a Doduo - probably because she might have fallen off of a Staraptor, exhausted as she was, but all that means is that people line up along the roads to watch her ride home. Some cheer, but most just stare. She’s been a Ranger for two weeks. She looks her age, young and sooty and a little bruised and eyes drooping, but the Pokemon that follow in her wake, that call her a friend, are huge, intimidating, powerful. Her Partner rides the Doduo with her, small but smug, and you can practically see the music humming from it.
And then she wakes up the next day and goes back to work.
After that, reports of Kate popping up all over the country stop being so unbelievable. She’s riding a Wailord across the ocean? Sure. She’s tracked down and hatched a fucking Manaphy egg? Yeah, okay. She’s somehow captured Darkrai again and used him against Dim Sun remnants? Why the fuck not? It’s Kate.
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