oohh... OOH i have a fun question for you. i reread your lore comic w surfer and NaN about bill and time travel and it messing up pokémon from the future. it makes me wonder - would the same happen to the canonical time travel pokémon itself? this Is somewhat fueled by my celebi-tism but im Also eyeing the hgss time travel event WITH celebi ...... i figured you'd appreciate the food for thought 👀
sorry it took so long to answer this! i wanted to draw art to go along with it, but i got busy with other projects and didn't have the spoons. (i might come back and edit in the art i planned later tho, but no promises)
so for now i'm just gonna answer with plain text. hope that's ok!
anyways! yes! celebi! i've mentioned it before, but the gambler actually has a shiny one named aelita!
gambler's been mucking around in the same timeframe because they love to gamble (obviously) and was very pissed off to find out that gambling gets outlawed in johto years later.
but even though they've traveled to the future, for some strange reason, aelita refuses to take gambler to see the past.
aelita knows that it would be a one-way trip, and would strand gambler in the past.
you see, there's a strange quirk with celebi in particular when it comes to trading between gens 1-2.
while Every Other Johto Pokemon has a corresponding glitchmon that it'll be converted into, celebi doesn't.
i haven't played with gen 2 glitches myself, so i still don't know the full details of what exactly happens when you trade a celebi to gen 1, but from my understanding, if you trade a celebi to gen 1, it will permanently be converted into a kanto pokemon, and will stay that way even if traded back to gen 2. this one video i found of it shows that celebi will be converted into a female nidoran, but i need to confirm whether or not that happens every time celebi is traded to gen 1.
but essentially, what this means is that even though every other johto pokemon can be traded back and forth from kanto safely (with some help from ACE on the kanto side), celebi is the one and only exception to this! if you trade a celebi to kanto, you can never get your celebi back to normal!
i think, whether consciously or subconsciously, any gen 2 celebi would be aware of that fact and avoid traveling to the past. a small meta nod to how celebi only takes you to the past in HGSS, but not GSC!
