the-fakes-au

[the-fakes-au]

Ingo awakes to find that N had apparently come and gone again in the night, seeing as there is a duffle bag with a change of clothes inside with a note taped to it set out for him on a nearby stump.

Ingo,

You'll need these to avoid being recognized, most Unovans are not happy with you right now.

N

Opening the bag carefully, Ingo finds a simple pair of light brown khaki pants, and a baggy grey hoodie. As he changes, he thinks to himself that his anger from the previous night may have been a bit rash. For all he knows, Emmet may have quietly left of his own accord, and the alien woman is doing her best to cover for him. The thing about Elesa being driven off because of the twins can still be chalked up to false rumors. 

There are still some things that bother Ingo though... The worsening conditions in the subway, how bad could they possibly be? Are they another reason most people are so upset with him and his brother, along with the Elesa thing? The Beheeyem blocking the way to Nimbasa, N's description of them matched that of alpha pokemon, but the alpha gene had vanished from the pokemon genome long before Elgyem and Beheeyem had first shown up in Unova.

More importantly, not knowing the slightest thing about Emmet's whereabouts is starting to weigh on Ingo's heart. 

Having finished changing, Ingo places the clothes he had been wearing neatly into the duffle bag, even gently putting his hat on top of his carefully folded coat, as the hood on the hoodie is much better at hiding his very recognizable sideburns.

Chandelure following along behind him, Ingo heads out, planning to make use of a short cut the he and Emmet had discovered as children, as it leads directly from the other side of Skyarrow Bridge to Route 4, bypassing Castelia City entirely.

"Turn back, Mister! The mayor said to stay away from those huge Beheeyem!" 

The child's concern is not unfounded.

Ingo cannot deny, those Beheeyem certainly alphas. What’s more, there are far too many of them for him to take on alone.

With no other options he heads into to Castelia City to search for any kind of lead.

[the-fakes-au]

No matter how many times a region is saved from some grand threat, somehow it always ends up in jeopardy again. Unovans should know this better than anyone else, after all Team Plasma had to be beaten down twice before they stopped their attempts at conquest, and even then they didn't completely fade away, still clinging to small pockets of activity here and there. It is for this reason that Ingo is surprised and annoyed to hear that the general populace of Unova had failed to realize that he and his brother had been replaced. He would have liked to believe that they'd have had their guard up more.

"Only a few conspiracy theorists have voiced any kind of suspicion of any such thing," N explains, "and even then, most of them think it's just you who's been replaced, and that it's a robot." N pauses, looks around, then whispers, "It's not a robot."

Chandelure lets lets out a shrill, shrieking chime of impatience.

"I was just getting to that part, calm down!" N cries in exasperation. Ingo raises an eyebrow. It is a bit odd to watch the former leader of a terrorist organization get nagged at by a cranky ghost pokemon. 

"Anyway, according to Chandelure, about six months after your disappearance Emmet was facing the possibility of having to shut down the battle subway due to your absence. He was sitting in your old shared apartment trying to figure out a solution, when an alien woman appeared in a flash of light." 

Ingo looks over at Chandelure questioningly. She bobs up and down in an imitation of a confirming nod. Ingo choses to believe her, she has no reason to lie about this.

"She offered to shapeshift into your appearance and pretend to be you so that the subway could remain open, in exchange for him providing lodging for her and her offspring. He excepted, and in the months that followed he began training her to take over for you. At first, this arrangement was fine. The alien and her child helped Emmet move to a bigger apartment, and he told everyone that you had been teleported to to the wilderness of the Paldea region without your trainer id and had only just then gotten back." 

N pauses and takes a deep breath as a dower expression comes over his face. "But then Chandelure realized something... concerning. She couldn't get a read on the alien woman's soul, nor that of her offspring, and Emmet just seemed just seemed to get more and more tired the more time he spent around them. The conditions in the subway where getting worse and there where suddenly a lot more sightings of Elgyem and Beheeyem within Nimbasa's city limits. The aliens must have realized that Chandelure was beginning to distrust them, because one day without warning, they stuffed her into the PC storage system. She was trapped in there for years until an Elgyem used a pc in Striaton City to let her out."

"The Elgyem then teleported away, she wandered outside, and that's where I found her." 

Having said his piece, N gets up and stretches. "That's all I know for now. I'm gonna go see if I can find that Elgyem." N notices the look on Ingo's face, "Dragons, that look could scare Kyurem! I know what you're thinking, but after you left a bunch of massive red-eyed Beheeyem showed up and blocked all the roads leading into Nimbasa. You'll to think of something else for now." and with that N leaves. Chandelure reads her trainer's soul and realizes that he's too enraged and worried for sleep to come to him naturally, so she uses hypnosis on him. 

Ingo has never wanted to punch a woman more in his life.

[the-fakes-au]

As Ingo finishes putting together a make-shift shelter in the forest, he thinks back on something he overheard someone in Nimbasa say:

“Ugh, it’s Ingo. You know those two subway clowns are the reason Elesa left.”

He hadn’t stuck around to hear more, because at the time he’d just been to their old apartment to find someone else living there and, with no further context to the statement, Ingo can’t help but worry that the fakes may have somehow damaged the twins’ relationship with the gym leader, or worse, that she found them out and they’d threatened her into leaving. 

He reminds himself that he hasn't seen the fakes do anything questionable, and shouldn’t assume the worst of... people (?) he knows nothing about. For all he knows the “Elesa left because of them” thing is just a rumor. Even gliscor’s reaction to Ingo’s doppelganger could have been seen as the pokemon not wanting to attack someone who hadn't done anything wrong. 

Before Ingo can go to sleep for the night, a familiar face approaches...

...It’s a now older N. 

He says he knows about the situation with the fake twins, and says he has useful information.

Ingo, remembering that this guy was once the leader of team Plasma, asks why he should trust the green haired man. N replies:

“Not a lot of people know this, but I can talk to pokemon. It’s okay if you don’t believe me now, because I know you’ll believe my source.”

Suddenly Ingo’s chandelure appears, chiming excitedly, happy to see her trainer. This is N’s source.

Ingo agrees to hear N out.

[the-fakes-au]

SubMas:The Fakes AU

Upon returning from Hisui with his memories restored, Ingo enters Gear Station to find there is another Ingo in his place. At first, he thinks it’s just a Zoroark or something along those lines. That possibility is disproven when Ingo’s Gliscor, a pokemon that has faced down many Zoroarks, refuses to get close enough to it’s trainer’s doppelganger to attack.

Looking closer, Ingo notices that this other him has several minor odd things about it’s appearance that add up to it looking more than a bit inhuman.

Ingo calls the fake out on this, and demands to know what’s going on. The fake brushes this off in an apathetic manner.

At this point Emmet arrives. Ingo attempts to warn his brother about the imposter, but upon looking closely...

...he sees Emmet has also been replaced.

Ingo leaves Gear Station, confused and worried. Where’s the real Emmet? Why do the depot agents not see what’s happened? Where are their pokemon?

Why do the people of Unova seem so irritated with him? 

Ingo heads to Pinwheel Forest to camp out and get his bearings.